Wool For Brains

This has taken me way too long to finish, I had a week off for a dodgy shoulder but the real thing that has held it up has been that I didn’t want to knit any more of the edging. I worked out the numbers based on my thicker yarn and to get the large size I needed 27 repeats rather than 31. I’ve worked this out several times and I know that it’s right (28 actually but seeing as the pattern has an odd number I rounded down). I’ve knitted and knitted and every five repeats I’ve stopped and checked the calculations again. It is really, really long and my inner knitter has deep misgivings about the whole thing. I checked the gauge on the pattern and 31 repeats gives an edging that is just under 2.5m long which is about what I have. I remain unconvinced about the whole thing.

The other slight hiccup was the yarn. I have three skeins and when I first looked at them I decided after close inspection that there were two the same and one very distinctly lighter. My plan was to use one of the darker skeins for the edging and then alternate the lighter skein with the remnants and the new ball in the body of the shawl. This would have worked just fine if the two skeins that I decided were the same had been as close in colour in reality as they were in my mind. When the first one ran out after half a mile of edging it turned out that the second was distinctly darker. How I laughed as I ripped out a foot of edging to alternate rows with the new, darker ball.

I’m hoping that it is now plain sailing with mindless short rows of garter stitch until I reach the ends of the needles. There is the possibility that I might run out of yarn before I get that far but I’ll deal with that if it happens. At the moment my inner knitter says I’ll be fine and she’s usually right so I’m not starting to worry just yet.

I do have other knitting although plain black socks are not the most photogenic project in the world. It struck me recently that if I intended making David another pair of socks to wear to band then I’d better get on with it. In another month or two we’ll have hit the season of flat grey light and early nights. Then won’t the time to be knitting black. I’m not convinced that there is ever a right time to be knitting black but there are certainly times that are less bad than others.

Next time there should hopefully be a long thin piece of lace to show, providing I manage to find somewhere to block it of course.

I really dislike having work done in the house. It doesn’t matter how much of an improvement there will be after everyone has packed up and gone, it’s the process that bugs me. I’m tied in while people come and go, the dog wants to drive them all away or have a sneaky sniff in their pockets, there’s usually dust and noise and it’s all just pants really. Previous home improvements have included having the fence removed and then the fence team vanishing for two weeks, having the shower ripped out and then finding that the specialist manufacturer of odd sized shower doors had stopped making them. There was the excitement of the replacement double glazed windows that were the wrong colour and the new oven that was white instead of stainless. I could go on but that’s enough to show that my experience of having work done on the house has not been totally positive. It occurred to me that even if the builders were busy putting in a dedicated wool room with voice activated tea production, a moth annihilator and an automatic wool desiccator I’d still whine about it. I am trying to be positive, to focus on the outcome rather than the process and to believe that this time things will go well. I am also trying to give myself something to think about if it all goes wrong. Not that it will of course, I’m being positive remember.

These are not colours I would have put together, it’s the pink that I’m not enamored of. To be truthful I don’t much like the green either. Happily these aren’t for me and the recipient likes them so all is well. These are Opal, wool with cotton for summer socks, and I bought the ball because there was a choice of two colours in cotton rich and the other was even less appealing. These will forever be holiday socks and you have to like them for that.

Guess what – I don’t like the colours of these either, all Finding Nemo with added pink. The selling point with this one was that it was cheap, when it’s £3.50 a ball it can be whatever colour it likes. I did plan on overdyeing it but when I was packing for my holiday it was close to hand. We will get to see what it looks like after a dye bath because I bought two balls (it was cheap remember).

I can’t rely on socks to keep me in a positive frame of mind this week so I’ve turned to weaving. This is a selection from the big black sack of yarn that periodically I feel ashamed about. I’m hoping that the feel good factor from using up stash yarn will see me through the week. I’ll weave until I’ve run through this pile of yarn or until I’ve had enough, the idea is that they’ll all be about 80″ long and 6″ wide and I’ll make them into one piece bags (like this one). If I was organised enough I’d wind the warps and bag them up with the wefts but I’m capable of changing my mind at any time about what goes together.

If that’s not enough to keep my mind off the noise then I have a fallback. Yet again I’m not sold on the colour but as it’s foster knitting and not mine that doesn’t matter. This is lace in superwash sock yarn again and I think I’m forming an opinion. More about that another time..

There’s still no hot knitting but the moderately boring stuff is moving along nicely. I will admit that these have some good points. They look ok from a distance, they fit well enough and their owner thinks they are fantastic. I’m just glad they are finished. It is a lovely pattern (Musica) but should I make these again I’d use thicker yarn. You can see his arm through the cuff, it’s a loose fabric and just not right. That put me off them right from the start and as a result I didn’t take as much care as I should have done with the floats and the pattern. There are mistakes front and back and all in all the quality is poor. When you are ten you don’t notice these things. I am not ten and I do.

I need not have worried about running out of the lime yarn, there was enough and to spare. I have a satsuma sized ball left over which is good because I have a plan for that already. I had bought the the main colour because it was bright and zingy, well it looked bright in the ball but after I’d worked the cuff it wasn’t looking zingy enough. I did think about making inch wide stripes but couldn’t face the joins so a spiral it was. They are another pair until wash day or a replacement for an eight year old pair (I had a recount, the oldest ones are eight not six as I’d first thought) Not even hand knit socks last forever.

I gave this a fair chance, I knitted on long after I knew that it was destined to be a flop in the hope that it would magically redeem itself. The pattern was just right for tv knitting, minimal beading, minimal lace but the yarn was all wrong. Schaeffer Anne is a lovely sock yarn, high twist, superwash and shiny but it’s not speaking to me as a lace yarn. Actually it was speaking to me, it was saying “I’m all wrong for this, I’m making a bouncy springy fabric that is never going to hold a block and I need to go back into the yarn drawer.” I did eventually see the light and slipped it off the needle and back into the ball. I now have 40g of silver lined red 6/0 beads to add to the bead box.

What am I knitting? It looks like it will be socks, socks and socks for a while because there’s less chance of messing up with those.

Sorry – blog has been broken this week, fixed now, more details (and knitting) next time

This is what you get when you check in to a £280 a night hotel. That’s not quite right, that should read “this is what you get when your husband checks into a £280 a night hotel”. There was one more, a cocoa covered truffle but that evaporated before the camera saw it. While I was walking the dog I was considering a blog post comparing my life to a box of chocolates but decided that the comparison was way off the mark. There are lovely choccies (cocoa truffle), average choccies (orange cream) and those that I will throw in the bin if I can’t find a taker (turkish delight). Over the last couple of weeks my life has been heavy on the turkish delight but where the comparison falls down is that some people do like sticky pink sickly sweet jelly, it’s just not to my taste. I don’t think there’s anyone who would like dog poop on their sandals, a blocked toilet and the dreaded “engine fault” light appearing on their new car all in the same afternoon.

My turkish delight moments are behind me now (or so I dearly hope), my knitting is picking up but I’ve still not hit form. I’ve only had three ripped projects this week so it’s better than last week anyway. Spinning is off, weaving is off so it’s knitting or bust at the moment. You might expect then that there would be rather more of it to show but there’s nothing in the knitting bag that I have a lot of love for so progress is slow. I don’t have anything that can’t be put down but I have a few things that I don’t want to pick up.

The toes still don’t match but at least now they aren’t two inches out. They fit and when they are on feet you can’t tell that one is two rows longer in the foot than the other. I’d love to tell you what the yarn was, something from a Ravelry destash that was cheaper than I can buy undyed, but the ball band went the way of all good things. These are husband socks because some of the six year old pairs really need to be retired now.

These are still not finished, I really dislike knitting them and they are probably the poorest quality knitting I’ve produced in years. This is all because the sock yarn I used doesn’t want to be knitted to the tension needed for the pattern. If I was to knit them again I’d probably use dk weight, I’d also lose the notes on the cuff because they are longer than I’d want to wear. There are mistakes front and back but if I’d taken the needles out to fix it I would have ripped them all the way back. The pattern is lovely, it’s a well balanced treble clef, but I’m not convinced that sock yarn is the best choice for it. Daniel loves them and that’s what matters.

These are not finished but have passed the point where I might have ripped them. I can’t decide whether I like them or not, I wanted something bright and cheerful and this had the added benefit of using up scraps. It shouldn’t be possible to make the snarled mess that I did working both socks at once from two centre pull balls but if they’d been any longer I might have had to cut the working yarn just to be able to sort the tangle out. I knew when I started that I’d rat it all up but I convinced myself that this time would be different, this time I’d keep everything separate and not make a mess. (Why did I set myself up for a mess? Well I wasn’t sure that I’d have enough lime to reach the toes so by working from a centre pull ball at least I’d run out in the same place on both)

I’m undecided on this too, I might like it when it’s done but at the moment it’s not guaranteed a future in the knitting bag. This is the start of the Maia shoulderette in Schaeffer Anne sock yarn. It’s a blood red colour rather than the pinky red my camera is showing me and there are beads on it, not that you can see them. My issue with it is that (again) I’m not convinced that this is the right yarn for the job. I haven’t knitted lace with sock yarn before and it feels all wrong somehow. It’s too slick and springy and I’m not feeling the love. I like the pattern though so that’s something. I suspect this might have a test block in its future, it’s always a dangerous place for a project to be because it’s vulnerable when it’s off the needles. It has to convince me that it is worth the effort and at the moment it is not trying hard enough.

Hopefully by next time I will have knuckled down and knitted some fingers as I’m running out of excuses for not doing it. “I don’t want to” is the real truth but that’s not good enough is it?

No doubt you were expecting to see a procession of new wips now that I’ve allowed myself to start some. I know that’s what I was hoping for but we don’t always get what we wish for. I’ve started and ripped so many things this week that by Saturday I was seriously wondering if I’d only dreamed that I could knit because clearly I was rubbish at it. Three projects have been ripped without photos, two were a clear mismatch of yarn and pattern and the other was just a “what was I thinking?”.

This little thing will probably be back in the yarn drawer by the time you read this. This is the start of a Pimpelliese, started from both ends with the plan to graft it in the middle and make best use of the 600 yards of yarn. The yarn is not the silk I showed before, that was mulberry brick and this is all sorts of tussah odds and ends. It’s not as shiney and I don’t feel the same love for it as for the other, this is just yarn. It’s been ripped once already and I don’t think that this incarnation will last the day. There’s nothing actually wrong with it except for that first repeat where I charted what the pattern said except that it didn’t say that at all and I created three stitches that had to be lost somewhere. The advantage of working both ends together is that they match so now it’s a feature.

I don’t like this either. This is the first of a pair of Musica handwarmers and the fact that it’s been blocked whilst still on the needles tells you a lot about my feelings for it. The only reason I haven’t ripped it is that Daniel has seen it, it’s for him and if I ripped it I’d have to leave home. The basic thing wrong with it is the tension. I cannot knit sock yarn to 7 stitches per inch even on 3.25mm needles. The black yarn is very slightly thinner than the white, they’re both slippery superwash so there’s no fluff to fill in the gaps where the stitches should be. This was the main piece of evidence to support my theory that I haven’t a clue about knitting, I have ladders, uneven tension, short floats and I can’t believe that I knitted it. Daniel will have to be coached to say “No, mum bought these in a shop and she says the quality is pants”. The terrible thing is that I have to make the right hand next. If I was making another pair I’d use smaller needles to get a fabric that looked right and then add the necessary extra stitches to the pattern. I thought about that whilst on the ribbing but of course I didn’t listen to me.

Fortunately when all else fails there is still a sock. What can go wrong with a sock? Don’t answer that, I already know. I am just surprised that I can still find new and inventive ways to mess up my knitting. I was knitting away on this last night (because of course I didn’t have anything else on the needles that was worth knitting) and thought I’d better check the length. I was pleased to find that I’d checked just in time, I was exactly at the point where the yarn changed to black and the toe shaping started. I hadn’t realised that I was that far down the foot, another row and I’d have been tinking back. This morning I’ve finished the toe, cut the yarn and noticed that the foot looked rather short, exactly one pattern repeat short in fact.

Hello. my name is Caroline and I used to be a knitter.

After I’d trawled out the various bits and pieces of work in progress I decided to work hard on reducing the numbers. Every knitter has their own views on what constitutes an acceptable level of work in progress, it varies from one person to another but the number that they feel happy with is the right number for them. For me, at least this week, that heap is too big. It’s not just about the numbers either, I know that the reason that some of those things are not finished is because they are stuck. I need to decide whether the sock needs a toe and as that is not knitting it’s not happening. The blanket needs some sort of edging and I can’t decide what. The baby jacket ran out of interesting yarn way too early and the sundress is just no fun. If I cast on for something else then they will linger longer so I’ve put the silk out of sight for now. I decided to chip away at it, one win a day and by focussing on what I have already started I might take my mind off the silk.

Day one of the new wiploss programme (Tuesday) was a clear success by anyone’s standards. I measured the length of fabric, cut it into three and sewed it back together again. The reason it had been sitting about was that I couldn’t decide how to finish the edges, satin binding, candy cane binding, something with prairie points? In the end I did none of those and just hemmed the ends, leaving the sides as they were. I’ve pressed it, sewed the ends in from stitching the seams and it’s as done as a baby blanket needs to be. Final measurements were 36″ by 31″ wide, it’s a scrap sock yarn warp with superwash laceweight weft. It’s a clasped weft which means that it’s doubled and the doubled laceweight is just about the same weight as sock yarn. I used the 12.5 dpi reed, I started off with the 10 but it didn’t look right. It’s just as well that it came out narrower than I’d planned because otherwise it would have been huge.

Day two – there was measureable progress in that I filled a third bobbin with green polworth. The rest will fit on the very last bobbin and then I’ll have a massive plying session. I had this set aside for a Tour de Fleece project but I’m not much of a joiner and I’d filled the first bobbin on the Friday before the start. I watch the cycling every day and I spin most days but that’s as far as it goes

Day three – one sock down, one to go. This has been sitting on hold for a week because I needed to make the decision of whether to start the toe and that seemed to be too taxing in an evening. I spent five minutes during the day doing the measuring and then that got me past the stage that I was stuck on. The second sock is always easier because all I have to do is make it match the first, no thinking about “is the cuff long enough?”, “what heel should I make?”, “is it time for the toe yet?” just match and knit.

Day four (Friday) – The last bobbin of Polworth is done. I’ve gone right off green which is a bit of a shame because I have 8oz of it to ply now and by the time I’ve finished that I imagine that knitting it would be out of the question. I don’t really feel like plying it but it’s filling four bobbins and I don’t feel like winding it off for storage either.

That seems to be the right place to stop because if I continue I think I’ll be looking at a fail for day five. If I give myself the weekend off then there’s a chance that something might be finished by Monday but there’s no realistic chance of a win for tomorrow.

Don’t worry, although the big grey blob is not quite finished I have something else that is so you will be spared the sight of the pile of fluff that was crammed in the bag shown last time. One bag of white fluff looks very much like another from a distance so although I’ve been entertained for days by the contents it’s probably not so attractive from over there.

These  are really finished rather than nearly finished. In hindsight the beads were a waste of effort, the colour is so close to the yarn that they barely show. I suppose it would have helped if I’d known what the yarn was going to do and positioned them on the dark brown stripe rather than the bead coloured stripe. They were leftovers and have moved out of the bead box so that is worth something to me. I’m sure that I had a reason for the contrast heel but by the time I reached the toe of the first sock I’d forgotten what the plan was. It’s possible that I intended to have a contrast toe and eke out two pairs of socks from the ball but I didn’t write it down so I will never know. As it is there was 44g of yarn left so with the addition of a few contrast stripes here and there I could get another pair from the leftovers. There again I could just balance it on top of the scraps bag and start knitting with a new ball of something else. Guess which is more likely?

This is Flapworm (saviour of the universe), a mild mannered reporter who has a secret lair (the Wormalair) underneath a petrol station. You won’t have heard of him because his exploits are in a comic strip which exists only in the original. I’m getting a bit worried because we’re on part three of the continuing adventures of Flapworm and he’s now got a named sidekick, Wormgal. I have deep misgivings about what I will be knitting next week but if it’s a choice between a knitted petrol station or a female superworm then I’m going for the worm. He has two other helpers that are as yet to feature in the plot and seeing as we’ve run out of drawing paper they will be remaining featureless for a little longer.

I think I’m safe to say that the next post will see the departure of the big grey blob, it has to be dry by tonight because I’d like somewhere to sleep and after that how long can it take me to sew two ends in? (Don’t answer that, I know from experience that it can take weeks)

I have a standard unit of comparison for spending decisions. Actually, that’s not quite true because I have several. There’s the unit of sock yarn, the bfl equivalent and the big unit, the fraction of a new floor loom. Would you rather have an ice cream sundae or half a ball of sock yarn? Me, I’d prefer the non-dairy option. An ipad will set you back half a floor loom (there’s no contest there either). In general wool always wins, I think about the wool I could buy with the money I’m just about to spend and then I put my purse away.

This week I found something that was a better buy than wool. Shocking isn’t it? For my birthday I asked for a professional oven clean. This cost about the same as two kilos of shetland fibre and on this occasion there was no contest. It looks like I have a new oven, the black crunchy bits have gone from the door hinges and you could eat your dinner off the bottom plate (try it and I’ll bite you). The shelves are shiny and he fixed the light as well. I got the idea from Carie who can’t clean her own oven at the moment because of her bump. I can clean my oven but I always choose to do something else with my time. Clean the oven or spin? Clean the oven or knit? It’s not hard to see which way that goes. The top tip I gleaned for cleaning your oven is to start by taking the oven door off, it’s easier to clean the oven when you can actually reach it.

I’ve been waiting for the postman to bring the yarn I needed for the weft for this and I had a moment of panic last night when I read the email from the vendor telling me that the yarn was out of stock. Fortunately Google is my friend and I managed to find something similar, closer to home and 50p cheaper (that converts to 25g of wool). I had hoped that this would be finished by now but it looks like I will be twiddling my thumbs until the weekend. I still have to choose the two colours I want the weft to be, the front runners are white, blue or grey and any two from the three will work. I might agonise endlessly over the perfect choice or there again I might just roll a die, one medium, one light, job done.

The absence of weaving doesn’t mean that I am twiddling my thumbs, I’m knitting. The sometimes-never socks had a burst of activity. The Kerry blob is not allowed on my knee at the same time as the dog, not allowed near food and certainly not allowed to sit outside near the barbeque. This is because the blob is not mine and I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to it. Socks are another thing altogether, it doesn’t matter if they smell like roast lamb and dog combined or if they get hit with the salad dressing. This meant that the sock was the only choice for a few hours sitting in the sun over the weekend while the grey blob stayed indoors where it was safe.

The blob is now in the final phase of knitting. I worked out exactly how I would turn the corners and how many stitches it would take to do that and then calculated how many stitches I needed on a side to be an integer number of repeats with appropriate corner fiddling. I’ve been caught before with devising with something so obvious that I don’t need to write it down then when it all goes horribly wrong I’ve no idea what I was thinking when I came up with the numbers. This time I wrote everything down, with sketches of the corner and which rows doubled back without attaching to the shawl body. It was a brilliant piece of work and I was really proud of it right up to the moment when I tried to knit it and found that it was backwards.

I’m not doing any more maths on this. Specifially what I’m not going to do is time how long it takes to knit a repeat because then I’d be able to work out how long it’s going to take me to knit the edging. I think that’s something that I really don’t want to know. There is no other choice but to get it finished.

Things are progressing but in some cases it’s not at a rate you could easily measure. The big grey blob is bigger and just as grey. I decided that I was not going to think about the edging until I hit 200 stitches on a side and I’m now not that far away from that. I want to finish the border on a number of stitches that the edging fits nicely into. This means that I have to choose an edging sometime soon and then spend five minutes with a calculator and write down how I intend to ease the edging around the corners. It’s easier just to keep on knitting and work the details out later but I’m coming up on the stage where there isn’t any more later, it has to be now unless I want to knit a blanket in laceweight yarn.

The big grey blob is still my main knit but it won’t go in my handbag any more so I need a small project for out and about. These will be growing slowly because the only knitting time they’ll be getting is in odd minutes of waiting time snatched here and there. These are Confetti 100 cotton superwash (49% wool, 35% cotton, 16% nylon) all the way from Canada via a swap on Ravelry, hopefully they will make cool socks for summer. The beads are another tidy up, I had just 128 for each sock so that’s the end of those. They aren’t ideal but they are used up so that’s something.

From slow knitting to slow spinning. This is going to take a while because the spindle is living on the breakfast bar and I spin while I’m waiting for the pasta to finish or the kettle to boil. Like the sock it’s all done in odd minutes here and there so it will take a long time to work my way through the bag of angora. It will be uneven yarn when it is done because I don’t have a reference length that I’m aiming at but it will be yarn rather than fibre and used up is better than being in a bag. This might end up being a cabled four ply or there again it might not, when it’s done I’ll see what the majority of it looks like.

This was very much faster in the spinning. This is 116g of merino from Riverpoet (via a swap on Ravelry) that spun itself into 400 yards of two ply. I like it, it’s colours that I don’t dye and I even like the scary gold parts. I can’t decide whether to use it as warp or knit it and I might just stick it on Etsy while I think about it some more.

I like this one too, 96g and 746 yards of two ply icelandic, alpaca, bamboo, glitz, wool and cashmere from batts from a swap on Ravelry. I did originally think that I’d knit this into something lacey but I’m now thinking that it would be lovely as weft, the irregularity in the spinning will look better woven than knitted and it’s a good colour that will go with just about everything.

In case you are thinking that everything in my stash comes from swaps on Ravelry and that I’ve adopted the barter system for everything well, you’re nearly right. I did buy the angora though.

The big grey blob is bigger now, I’ve 500 stitches in a round and it’s reached the stage where it is a lovely tv knit. There’s one pattern round in every four and providing I can count to six it’s an easy pattern round at that. It looks just the same as it did last time but bigger so we’ll skip the photo.

The sock dyeing experiment came out well, I think I’d award it a tick in the box for “exceeded expectations”. That’s a good mark seeing as my expectations are usually sky high. Both socks came out the same, there was enough in the ball to reach the toes and the colour changed gradually all the way along. I worked the heel using the other end of the ball so as to avoid any colour change along the top of the foot. These are now Daniel’s seeing as they fit him and he likes them.

The end of term report for these would be “adequate, let down by poor preparation”. They are fit for their purpose as teatowels, they’ll dry plates well enough, but they aren’t what I’d planned. I failed the first test, dyeing the warp, because I intended these to be jewel tones rather than pastels. I was ill but I’d promised Dan he could help me dye and the warp was already wound so we did it anyway. The result was that I tipped some dye into jam jars (not enough as it turned out) and he did all the work. He petitioned for the orange and yellow, the yellow worked well enough but the orange was very definitely a mistake.

The thing I did right was to hang the soaked warp to dry before dyeing it thereby avoiding puddles of liquid. Apart from messing up the depth of shade the whole warp painting thing went very well. We covered the breakfast bar with plastic and used a small paint brush to make sure that the dye penetrated all of the warp. I never really thought about how long each teatowel would be and how many colour changes I wanted, shorter colour runs would have been better. You can see how scary the orange looked at this point, even Dan agreed that it was not really a good choice.

The scary orange was only in one spot, the other two patches you can see fell in the loom waste (I may have been ill but I managed to make that come out right). Now that I’ve done it once I’d certainly make a painted warp again, it was much less messing about than I’d thought, but next time I’ll stick to silk or wool where I know what I’m doing with the dyeing. Although I don’t like the finished product the process was fun and it made me use the boat shuttle for the first time and find a way of winding the bobbins for it. It’s never a total loss if you learn something along the way.