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 had thought that last week would have been all weaving all of the time but the wheels fell off the cart when the endless cone of grey yarn that I’ve been using for weft since last summer came to an end. After that I needed to think about what I was doing, the third scarf made itself and then my plans for the next were scuppered by there being not enough of one of the yarns. I could have sorted it out easily enough but my lack of enthusiasm for doing so told me that I’d had enough. (Left to right, bag, bag, scarf, all have handspun warp, scarf has handspun for warp and weft)

The reason that I expected it to be a weaving week is that this is the view from my usual knitting spot.  They did a fantastic job putting the scaffolding up without interfering with access to the door or garage and we can still park as usual. It totally blocks out satellite tv reception but we can all live without the box for a week. I spent a few days attempting to not look out of the window but it was surprising how quickly I got used to it and then it was back to knitting as usual. (Check for positive language and lack of moaning – PASS)

This is the start of Amalia, it’s another crescent shaped shawl that starts with the edging and is shaped with short rows. The yarn is thicker than the pattern calls for and so I’ll need fewer repeats to get the same length of edging. I’m nearing the point where I should really work out just how many repeats that is before I overshoot, make it huge and run out of yarn before I finish.

I’ve been dyeing too, there’s a bit of a theme here caused by me having recently been on holiday although I have to confess that the sky was not that blue and the sand was not that golden. Front to back this is Dorset horn, Wensleydale, superwash merino lace and silk brick. The silk brick is staying home as it has a bleeding turquoise issue but the rest will be shop-bound when I manage to resurrect it. The shop went in holiday at the same time as we did but didn’t come back. I imagine it out there somewhere lazing on a beach, sipping cocktails and watching fantastic sunsets. It could at least send a postcard.

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..

My plan was that you wouldn’t notice that I was away because the blog was left home alone to update itself in my absence. This worked faultlessly but seeing as the router went into a terminal sulk hours after we left on holiday no-one could see the blog, updated or not. I couldn’t see it anyway because there are still areas of the country where you can’t get a mobile signal (not on any of three networks) and that’s where we were. (If you are marvelling at the accommodation I should add that it wasn’t all ours, it has been divided into four.) Some of us learned how to read a tide table and had a demonstration on why it is important to know which way the tide is running. Get it wrong and it’s worse than just getting your feet wet because there’s no beach left at high tide and no way of getting up the cliffs. This is why there are tide tables posted here, there and everywhere except this is not effective if you don’t know how to read one. We met one lady who got it exactly wrong and thought that the height (larger figure in metres = high tide) was the amount of beach you could see.

This was the state of my holiday knitting at the end of the week, I’d planned to put beads on the lace except they hadn’t come by the time that I left. That means that I now have 40g of turquoise beads to add to the 40g of red beads that I put aside the other week. The socks still aren’t finished, they only need the toes grafting but I haven’t got to that yet. I could blame the mountain of laundry that I’ve been working on since getting home but that is clearly not an explanation as I managed to find time to block the lace.

This is Merope in some sort of cashmere/silk from the back of the drawer. I overdyed it but I think that it originally came in robin’s egg blue with big patches of undyed yarn (yes, it was cheap, that was why I bought it). It’s the same yarn as I used for the little flippy thing and I had no idea how much of it I had left. I made the small size (27″ by 58″) because I was worried about running out of yarn but I suspect that I had enough to make the larger size. I made life hard for myself by leaving the second chart at home, giving myself a choice between putting it aside or working from the written instructions. It took me a day to ponder it but the written instuctions saw me through to the end. I didn’t like it though and grumbled my way through each line but I can do it if I have to

I haven’t sewn the ends in, I know that I’ll not wear it so it has a future as a gift or a swap item. I’ve learned from experience that if I leave the yarn tails hanging it means that I can be certain that it’s not been worn and then there can be no confusion at some future date. (Modelling services again provided by Helga the hanger, it beats trying to get the junior photographer to photograph the things that I want him to)

I just have one more holiday photo to show, there’s no sense of scale on this so I could pretend it’s a fossil of huge proportions but it’s really small enough to cover with the tip of my index finger. It’s still a fossil though, even if it is tiny.

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?

There are only so many ways to photograph a shawl, really one photo is enough but as I’ve spent so many hours on it I’ve taken more than that. I did think that it would block bigger than this but it was a good job that it didn’t or I wouldn’t have been able to pin it out on the bed. People wanting to knit a blanket shouldn’t start out with laceweight yarn.

This started as the Kerry Blue shawl from Martha Waterman’s Traditional Knitted Lace Shawls but the last border and edging came out of Heirloom Knitting. I planned ahead and made sure that I ended the body of the shawl on the right number of stitches for the edging to fit exactly into. If I had to fudge it on the approach to a corner then it meant that I’d made a mistake. As an error detection method this is pretty poor because it means that you don’t find the mistake until yards later, I found two and left them both.

The start of the edging is grafted to the finish and I sufferred terribly over those fifteen stitches. I pulled the needles out halfway through and had to start over, one attempt appeared to be fine until I reached the end, smoothed it out and found I’d twisted the edging before joining it. I finally got to the end, adjusted the tension, turned it over and found that I’d been working reverse stockinette rather than garter. I’d had enough by then so I duplicate stitched some purl bumps where they should have been and called it done. Invisible it is not. I wouldn’t mind so much if I didn’t zealously follow the directions, it wouldn’t be so bad if I just winged it and got it wrong.

I’m just waiting for a suitable box to turn up and then I will be waving bye bye to the blob. I shall miss it in the evenings but there will be something else to take its place.

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.

I did set off with the intention of making Abrazo from The Twist Collective but I had a streaming cold and I was too feverish to work out what “knit” meant in the chart. Did it mean knit on the public side and purl on the other or knit all rows? I had a half hearted look on Ravelry at some finished items and gave the whole thing up as a bad job. I needed some nice simple knitting so I cast on a multitude of stitches with a provisional cast on and short rowed back and forth so I got the general shape of Abrazo without the lace edging. By the time I’d finished the plain bit I’d recovered enough to pick a wide edging from Heirloom Knitting and knit it onto the provisional cast on.

It didn’t come out as I’d expected, I thought it would be deeper but I still like it. It’s about 11″ wide at the widest point and two yards long. The reason I chose such a wide edging was that I knew that the plain section was very narrow indeed. If I’d made the stockinette part wider then I could have used a narrower edging. I could have got away with starting with fewer stitches, this one has twenty repeats of a twenty eight row pattern and I could probably have got away with four repeats less and still have had it long enough to wrap around the neck in interesting ways.

I know that we all like a modelled shot but so far this morning I’ve taken photos of dusty mirrors, my ear, the ceiling and about four square inches of lace. Hilda the hanger has saved the day. It’s a bit skimpy if worn across the shoulders in the normal way for shawls but if you look at it as a lacy scarf then there’s a whole slew of ways that you can throw it on and have it look good.

The yarn is from the bottom layers of the stash, it’s silk and cashmere and I bought it cheap because the original dyer had a bad day. It was originally baby blue with big undyed sections, not that you can tell this now. I don’t know how much yardage I’ve used because it’s a one off yarn and I didn’t keep the details, if I make another I’ll knit it in something standard that I can weigh.

I think I will knit another, but I would make a few changes.  Next time I’ll probably aim for something that’s deeper in the middle, it’s going to be easy to mess with the shaping because it is governed by the rate at which the short rows consume the edging. If it’s going to be deeper in the middle then I could use a narrower edging, this is wide because I needed to add inches to the little skinny strip that I’d made. Overall I like it, it’s a wearable piece rather than being acres of knitting that is difficult to wear.

My next project – acres of knitting that is difficult to wear. The wearing of it is not my problem because this is more foster knitting. This is the start of a Kerry Blue shawl, I have more or less unlimited yardage so it could well be the start of a Kerry Blue blanket. I made life difficult for myself by trying to start a circular cast on on dpns. I’ve done it often enough to know that the needles fall out on the second row and I’ll need to start at least five times before I get a survivor. Why I am so pig headed as to not start on two circular needles I do not know.

The blog is occasionally not here at the moment, the new box that is hosting it is very very fast and very very quiet but not very very reliable. I now know where the reset button is so you are reliant on me until the resident techie has sorted it out.