Yes, my book did come but the fibre that I ordered to spin the yarn to knit the patterns in the book (in the house that Jack built) didn’t. I’m currently filling my time by attempting to see the difference between five near-identical colours on a chart and muttering about how long things take to ship. Moving swiftly along…

I was asked to knit something short sleeved and lacy with a scoop neck that was close fitting and had a zip. I didn’t think zips and lace would look good together because I couldn’t see how the hard line of the zip would work with the openness of the fabric so I was planning on using buttons. The yarn came out of the cupboard, I bought it for for weaving and I’ve used a surprising amount of it already. I made three bags using it as weft, the leftover piece made a phone slip cover which apparently the blog has never seen and there’s a length of doubleweave fabric upstairs in a bag somewhere. It’s JC Rennie 2/11nm supersoft lambswool and although you can buy it in balls for handknitting I’ve been buying it oiled on cones. I think it’s intended use is for machine knitters, that’s certainly the section I buy it from when I have a periodic falling down on Ebay. This one is “Fauna” which is still in their colour range. What’s left on the cone is now officially a leftover, there’s less than 200g left now and that is just not quite enough to knit another of these.

The pattern is a free one, the Horseshoes Cardigan that was originally published in Magknits. It ended up being slightly too close fitting because I made a cardinal error with the swatch in that I measured it after washing and blocking but without then leaving it overnight for it to relax to its final size. It’s the usual story, I was in a hurry to cast on and get to the knitting and you would think I would have learned by now to take the time to get gauge right. It worked out well in the end because it meant that I had a good excuse for adding a wide seed stitch border and that stopped the zip from running alongside the lace. I’m having to imagine the zip at the moment because the local shop that sells buttons, ribbons and zips only sells dress zips. I never thought that open ended zips were any more specialised than their closed bottomed cousins but it appears that I’m wrong.

If I were knitting it again I’d change the neckline and make it less scoopy. I’d convert the short row shaping back to cast offs (because I’d rather have a step than short rows in lace) and I’d plan on adding an edging to stabilise that long neck edge. I’d already added icord to the edge of the fronts to make a dip where I could hide the stitches for the zip, I continued it all the way around the neck once I’d seen how much it was wanting to roll. The previous scoop neck tops I’ve made had a crab stitch crochet edging and now I know why.

I have been tidying up this week although very slowly. On the left is the result of me starting to tidy the freezer. I found a bag with three teacakes in it that had been lingering long enough to be stale on thawing. I could have thrown them away but it was more entertaining to play with them a bit and turn them into a bread and butter pudding. I haven’t made one in decades, it was delicious and I suspect that there are more leftover teacakes in the freezer that will be meeting the same fate. On the right is the result of me finding a bag with the remains of the Blueberry Fool yarn that I made in April 2011. I could have just taken the bag upstairs and put it in a box but it was so tempting that I had to play with it first. There were several small balls left over from making a run of shadow weave scarves last summer, not enough on their own to make a single colour scarf so they had to be helped along with something else. I don’t usually make the pattern blocks this big, these have eighteen ends to a repeat and I generally go with ten or twelve. I prefer the larger ones which is something worth remembering for the future. There are now only two small balls of the handspun left and they can join the Fauna in the leftovers pile.

The navy yarn arrived and proved to be the perfect colour. I managed to get it measured out, tied on and beamed just in time for everything to stop for half term. I’m sure that the actual weaving will go fast enough once I get to it but that might not be until next week. Until then I get to admire it every time I walk past the loom and imagine what it will look like as cloth. I have a suspicion that there will be navy stripes.

This was the fibre the last time I showed it. I don’t have a photo of the resulting yarn but it looked just the same as all the other skeins of this that I’ve spun, it makes two skeins that start off dark at one end and slowly change to white at the other. When I spun this for the first time I wondered what it would look like woven but I’ve kept selling the yarn without finding out. I needed something to do at the weekend while sitting around at a craft fair so I warped the rigid heddle loom with one skein and used the other as weft. Another time I’ll take a second warp with me because I’d finished the scarf with three hours still left in the day. Fortunately this was not a major cause for panic as I’d taken a ball of sock yarn and a set of needles with me just in case. It’s not just Scouts who are well prepared.

The scarf runs light to dark across the width and light to dark along the length and I quite like it. It’s only “quite like it” rather than “love it beyond reason” because half way through I started wondering what it would have looked like paired with burnt orange or red in a log cabin pattern. The colour change in the yarn would need to take place in half the length but that’s not difficult to achieve. It is lovely and soft, snuggly and woolly and I’m glad that I took the time to find out what the yarn would look like. The photo on the right shows both ends side by side with the white edge of each running down the centre. You can see the effect of changing the colour of the weft, the left side has the light end of the yarn and the right side has the darker end.

I finished my socks but failed to take a photo before they went into service. They’re not my favourite colours but they are keeping my feet warm and stopping my shoes rubbing on my heels so therefore they are perfect. The next ball out of the sock yarn drawer was the emergency reserve that went with me to the craft fair and is very much more upmarket.  It’s Maple Creek Farms Annapolis (75% merino, 20% nylon, 5% metallic) in “Boot Camp” which is a mixture of dark greens and browns with lots of glittery flecks that are showing nicely in the photo. Even though these would be a perfect match for these trousers they aren’t for me. These are for bigger feet than mine although exactly which pair of feet I haven’t decided yet. Both residents with 72 stitch feet have recent offences of putting handknitted socks into the wash as singles rather than pairs and it’s that sort of transgression that determines who goes to the back of the handknit queue (that and having feet that are growing by the week)

This was a collaborative project seeing as it is half term and we had a spot of free time in between homework, more homework and Minecraft. Dan chose the design, I drew it on the pumpkins and we carved one each. I did the debraining which is a first because in previous years I’ve not been able to grip the ice cream scoop well enough to cut into the flesh. I was proud of myself for that – I know that it’s not a mighty achievement in the grand scale of things but it felt good to me. Mine is the one with the eyebrows, the small one had much thinner skin and eyebrows were a high risk move. Halloween proved to be a wash out, it started to rain heavily just after 6pm and that was an end to the trick or treaters. I’m not complaining as there are are an awful lot of people who will be spending Halloween flooded with no gas, electric or phone service and trees on their houses. I am thankful that all I’m left with is a few unopened bags of treats.

I was expecting to have a nicely hemmed tiny teatowel today but that isn’t happening. When I anticipated that I would get it finished in a week I hadn’t allowed for two Olympic torch processions or foreseen two days lost to a streaming cold. The cold was particularly trying, it was impossible to get under the loom to tie up the treadles because whenever I looked down I thought my face would fall off. I was fit enough to face the world on Friday and to go and stand in the rain to see the torch pass by. Having negotiated for junior to have the day off school he was going even if I had to lay down under a hedge when I got there. It rained, then the sun came out just in time to dry everything off before the torchbearer appeared. I did not have to lay under the hedge but I was in bed before 9pm.

I couldn’t set the loom up to weave due to the likelihood of my face dropping off into the treadles so there was more time for knitting. This is a shop sample, it shows what you could make with the three colour Shetland blend that I’ve been carding. I started with just over 600 yards of yarn which is my default spinning for three ply sock yarn made into a two ply. There was enough left for another few rows but the edging was so mind numbingly boring that I couldn’t bring myself to knit another row. I told myself that the leftovers would come in for something and cast off. It started and ended as a Zetor but I changed to leaves in the middle. It came out just as I thought it would, the colours merge one into another without a hard line and I’m pleased with the result. I know, it’s not often I say that but just for once I got exactly what I wanted. Maybe the transition between the white and grey could have been softer but that would be nit picking of the highest order.

This is Shetland too aklthough I can’t say that it was what I wanted because what I set out to spin was a laceweight silk. I sat down with a bag of silk brick that I’d bought some time ago but it was hard to draft, I had to wrench it apart. That makes for an uneven yarn and a pain in my thumb, both of which were good reasons to pack it away. The reason I bought it rather than dyeing it for myself is that the last one I dyed had spots that were hard and wouldn’t easily pull apart. I thought I’d buy one from another dyer and see how far I was off the mark in terms of the condition of the silk. It appears that my dyeing is no worse than other people’s, there was nothing to chose between them in terms of hard spots. This gave me over 200g of lovely unspinneable silk, I could make silk paper with it but I don’t have that much need for it (although the end of term is coming..new school, new teachers who don’t have silk paper pen holders already)

I found some black Shetland which was genuine black rather than the usual dark brown and carded that with the naughty silk. I spun it worsted with no attempt to take out the silk chunks, this is going to be a weft yarn and the lumps will add interest to plain weave. I now have just over 210 yards of interesting yarn and 30g less silk. More importantly the rest of the silk just escaped from the “useless” category. I have enough of the Shetland to make another skein the same and by then I’ll have woven it to see if it looks like I imagine. If it turns out to be a thing of beauty then I can buy black merino and make as much as I like.

Next time I’ll have hemmed the teatowel and have had time to decide why it is that it’s failed to meet expectations.

Thank you for your comments on the not-a-pirate-at-all monkey, we’re still making them as the sale isn’t until next week. This week’s monkeys have been black and bright as a result of my impulse purchase of a seven-pack of socks. These don’t need clothes because they are drop dead gorgeous, it’s the plain Janes that need a little something to help them along. I think this one might be Kiki but I haven’t set the bio-writer to work yet so it could be something else entirely. There was much less work in this than in the pirate as the total knitting content consisted of one bulky nappy with a tail hole, one little bottle of banana milk and a frilly bonnet with ear slits. I did think about a bib but I thought that the neck fastening on that would conflict with that on the bonnet so the bib didn’t make it off the drawing board. I liked making the bonnet, I could make them all day because it was interesting (changes of direction, short rows) and it finished fast. I tried to make the bottle banana shaped and it sort of worked but I can’t say that it came out the way I imagined it looking. I didn’t lose sleep over that, nor did I feel the need to rip it and start over so perhaps I am softening up as I get older.

It has not all been monkeys, last week I carded a three colour mixture of shetland for me rather than for the shop. I spun it over the weekend and started knitting it slightly before it was what non-knitters might consider to be totally dry. It’s already at the stage of being too big for straight needles although I’m pretending it isn’t because I don’t want to look for a circular needle. At the moment it’s a Zetor but I’ve knitted that twice before and I’ve had enough of the pattern already. I’ve finished with the white section of the yarn, it’s now as grey as it gets and at some point it will change gradually to sheep black. The yarn is mildly entertaining but it’s not zingy enough to offset the mind numbing pattern which will now repeat until I think I’m ready for the border. It might morph into leaves or diamonds (diamonds are big at the moment) or I could of course knit another row while I think about it some more.

I seem to have cast on for a pair of socks. You don’t have to think of something positive to say about these because I know that they are without a doubt the ugliest pair I’ve knitted in a long time, it’s the combination of pink and green that I’m finding particularly unlovely. The flash isn’t doing them any favours but the best lighting conditions for these is probably total darkness. I won’t be looking out for any more Opal Neon, this ball has put me off it. The leftovers will be hitting the dye before they go in the scrap bag, I can’t see me wanting to knit it again in its original colours. They will be hard wearing, prevent blisters and make another pair until washday.

The pile of monkeys on top of the loom is a clue that weaving is at a halt, I sleyed the warp that was left on the loom at 15 ends per inch per layer as opposed to the 12 epi I used for the first piano scarf. Since then it’s just sat there waiting for me to tie on and start. I thought a little incentive was in order so I’ve wound the warp that I’ll tie onto the end of the piano scarf once I’ve finished it (which obviously won’t be until after I’ve started it). I started off with a big pile of random balls of leftovers, there was a bag of blue, a bag of green and then I had a general rummage to see what else I could find that went with those. I’m happy to say that by the time I’d wound the warp there was very little left, by the time I’m done with weft stripes there might be nothing at all to go back in the bag. I still need to start by weaving in black and white but now I can see what’s coming along next. The idea is that I’m so taken with my plans for the blue/green that I overcome my reluctance to weave a second keyboard. Let’s see how that one works out for me.

I had this post all ready to go yesterday, it only needed one photo, but then my afternoon was derailed by emergency cake baking. It appears that the year 7 cake stall (run by the boys, the girls are selling bracelets) was in need of supplies so we made an orange cake and chocolate buns after which I needed a bit of a sit down. The junior baker’s skill set is developing and he does now realise that clearing up and washing the bowls is all part of the job rather than scampering off and leaving me with the eggshells. This is a step in the right direction but his counter-cleaning skills need a bit more work (egg+cloth=big mess).

I spent all of January working with odd balls of leftover yarn so you would expect that I have made big inroads into my target of using up 2012g of old yarn this year. I knitted a pair of mittens and a pink baby jacket from 135g of sock yarn leftovers. That’s better than it sounds because while I was knitting  I wasn’t knitting socks and the leftovers from a pair of socks adds 30g to the bag of scraps. Weaving really rips through yarn because it’s so much faster than knitting. In January I wove five scarves and a bag length and that used 840g.

It looks like it should have been a big win except this month I failed to meet my target of 180g. That’s because at the same time as I was dredging odd bits of wool out of the yarn bins I was sticking big cones back in. I’ve tried spinning boucle and decided that it isn’t worth it in terms of time even though it adds so much to woven fabric. The boucle I’ve used as an accent yarn in scarves really lifted the fabric so I can easily justify more (especially when it’s cheap). There doesn’t look to be much here but that’s because there are another seven balls of the navy packed away in a box, the total weight of all the boucle was 880g. Two purchases – 880g, one month’s work on stash reduction – 840g.

I think what we can learn from this is that firstly it’s true that weaving really does use yarn faster than knitting and secondly that I need to stop buying wool if I’m ever to get one of the yarn boxes emptied.

I’m still knitting the next two piece baby jacket even though I’ve demonstrated that knitting isn’t a terribly effective way of thinning the stash. The sleeves are done and now I’m knitting towards the neck with the back being on the right of the photo. It’s occurred to me (on a recurring basis) that if I’d made a smaller size I’d have been finished by now, as it is I have an inch to go before I reach the neck and start working the back on its own. When I cast on it seemed to be a good idea to choose a larger size because I had a lot of brown sock leftovers, now I’m not convinced that I’ll have enough yarn to finish it. This is not much of a problem because I had a tidy up at the weekend and found two more bags with sock scraps in, including one with three balls of brown. The next one will be pink and brown unless I’ve died of garter boredom before then. The next one will also be a smaller size, I should remember that a 25″chest at 7 stitches per inch is a decent chunk of knitting and not a couple of evening’s work.

I needed a break from odd balls and part skeins so I started knitting the Portland that I spun last week. It’s not been getting much of my knitting time so far even though I like the colour and the beads and everything about it. It’s just my guilt that’s making the baby sweater rise to the top of the knitting heap.

I know there are other weave structures out there but I’m a long way from being through with this one. I have an agreement with my inner weaver that I will stop when I reach twelve scarves in hand, run out of navy, run out of handspun or get bored with them. At the moment I think the most likely of those is running out of navy. It was a big cone when I started but it’s starting to look smaller.  It is possible for me to cheat although I suspect that my inner weaver knows all about the second cone of navy yarn in the bottom of the wardrobe. I think that I’ve just started on scarf number eight, number nine has the warp wound and number ten might not be happening depending on how the navy holds out. It’s been fun but it’s time to start thinking about something else.

I’ve still not been able to jump start my love of knitting. I did think that this would do the trick, I’ve knitted it before in the same yarn so it didn’t take a lot of thinking about. This is another Pretty Thing in the same three ply soft but splitty cashmere that I made it from last time. I went up a needle size this time and as before added another pattern repeat. This is an unblocked photo, it will be hanging around from now until Christmas so I might as well block it nearer the time. This will probably be a gift for teacher like the last one was, the advantage of changing school is that I can start repeating myself. I finished this a few nights ago and have had nothing to knit since, I’ve not as much as a sock on the go. I’m telling myself that this is normal for the time of year, that there’s nothing to worry about and that sooner or later I’ll be itching to pick up the needles.

I’m hoping that this will be the must-knit skein, when it’s dry of course. It’s currently dripping outside so by tomorrow it should be ready to go. Hopefully by then I will have finally decided what it’s going to be, probably with a quick graph on the back of an envelope that I throw in the recycling half way through. It’s the first installment of the Portland that I was combing in the last post, the skein weighed 112g and is approximately 440 yards. That’s good because it’s a weight that will work with sock yarn. I think this will be a hat with this the background to a darker yarn that’s magically going to appear when I poke around upstairs (no, I still haven’t tidied the yarn boxes out, I sprung the lid on the top one, poked my hand through the gap and snagged a bag of handspun. Job done, or not done depending on your point of view)

I’m trying hard to jump start my knitting. I thought the summer stoppage was over but then we had a week of hot sun and the green shoots of recovery curled up and died. This has got to work, I’ve previously knitted this very pattern in this yarn so there’s nothing to think about or deliberate over before I get to the fun part. This yarn wasn’t buried in the storage boxes, I still haven’t felt like poking about in there, it was in the drawer under the bed with the sock yarn. Open drawer, find pattern, knit – it could not get much simpler than that.

Despite having no knitting I’ve had plenty to do in the evenings because I’ve had plenty of fringes to twist. This also didn’t involve a trawl through the stash, I got lucky with a big cone of navy that was sitting about waiting to be put away. I’d had it out recently to add stripes into a blue cowl and I’d not put it back afterwards. The blue and gold yarn (from a fibre appropriately named “Macaw”) was hanging about because I’d got it out the other week to think about listing it for sale. The last threading on the loom was shadow weave so it was a simple matter to tie a new warp onto the old and weave a scarf. It was so much fun that I couldn’t stop with just one, not while the loom was threaded and there was yarn at hand. The next one started with a fuschia and jade braid that I spun recently, it was in a basket waiting for the lid to come off the yarn box so it could go into storage. When I spun it I thought it was going to be a triangle shawl but I was wrong, it works with navy so it’s going to be two scarves.

I ran out of yarn at this point (not the navy, that cone could go on for months) and it looked like I had a choice between giving up or braving the stash bins. Luckily I came up with a third option, which was to find some fibre that I’d not put away, spin that and then weave with it. I used this straight from the bobbin which was a fantastic time saver as I didn’t have to skein it, wait for it to dry and then ball it. The only downside is that the ends of the warp unwound themselves after they were cut, as the twist hadn’t been set the yarn was still a bit lively. You can see that the ends of the yarn dangling down look frayed and fluffy at the ends. As soon as I cut them the two singles unzipped themselves so the last half inch of each yarn end has the two singles sitting next to each other rather than being wrapped around each other. It was much better behaved as weft seeing as it didn’t have the same opportunity to unzip and fray. I do like the convenience of warping straight from the bobbin on the lazy kate so I’ll probably do this again despite the fluffy ends.

There’s another scarf on the loom and I’ve the warp wound for the fifth. That should keep me going for a few days and after that I really will have to sort out the stash. It’s like being sent to tidy your room, you know it won’t do itself, you know you can’t put it off forever and you know there’s the chance of finding something that you thought was lost. Once you get going it’s not so bad, it’s starting that’s the hard part. I’m trying to tell myself that I’ve already tidied two balls of wool and a heap of fibre into three scarves but I don’t sound terribly convincing, not even to me.

The shawl is blocking, again. I’ve now blocked it twice and cast it off three times. The first time around I used a suspended cast off, then I blocked it and was unimpressed with the non-pointy points. The second cast off used alternate yarn overs and was so loose that it looked a mess. The third time I just used bigger needles and decided that a scalloped edge would have to do. I know that knitted on edgings take forever but at least they are guarenteed to be stretchy. There might be a pretty shawl-in-a-bush photo later or there again it might just hit the post as soon as it’s dry, it all rather depends on the weather. I now have nothing on the needles, it’s been very warm and I’m back to not feeling the love for knitting.

This might be the last of these for a while, I’ve reached the end of the bag of yarn that I pulled out some weeks ago and to make any more I need to face sorting through the yarn bins again. I have to be in the right sort of mood for that otherwise it’s a toomuchwool experience rather than a fun rummage through past projects. I like this one because of the texture, I bought a ball of commercial boucle because it was so much easier than making it myself. Just because I can doesn’t mean I should and at £10 for 200g, dyed and delivered to my door it didn’t take a lot of thinking about. I have enough of the boucle left to make three or four more and then I have the remainder of the Wensleydale boucle I made. At some point I’ll weave some more of these, it’s not as if I have a lot of other use for boucle, but I don’t feel a burning urge to sit and sort through boxes of yarn when it’s so hot upstairs.

This was the week when I saw the end of the long warp I started before the summer holidays. It’s the gold I don’t like, it looked better when it was wet so I think I’d like it better overdyed with a bit of brown to tone it down. The pattern on the right was too big for this yarn, if it had been smaller with multiple repeats I might have liked it better. The one in the middle was plain boring but I liked the one on the left and I still liked it after I’d woven yards and yards of it. If you can’t see a pattern from there you might want to click on the photo to make it bigger.

I like it even better in different yarn, you can’t see the pattern as well but it’s so much prettier when it’s not gold and brown. I have a big cone of the navy and I know that there is plenty of yarn hiding in the bins upstairs that would work with it in terms of colour and thickness. This is another project that will mean facing up to a trawl through the stash and I just don’t want to. The house is hot and airless and the last thing I want to do is sit in a pile of wool. I’m running out of other options though, I have nothing to knit, nothing to weave on the small loom and I’ll soon have nothing on the big loom. Very soon it will be a choice between sorting through the stash or sitting twiddling my fingers. It’s just my luck to reach the end of everything all at the same time, just as we’ve hit some unseasonally warm weather. Until it cools off enough so that I can think about big piles of yarn without breaking into a sweat I might end up reading in the evenings rather than playing with wool.

No surprises here, another week, another cowl. They make themselves in some magical way probably involving a saucer of milk and some biscuit crumbs. I’ve not yet found the secret formula that makes the making up fairy as obliging as the weaving fairy, that never seems to get done with no effort on my part. This one was designed around the boucle yarn that I showed in the last post so it used some of the blue bits out of the scrap box. It was a trip down memory lane, I came across some very lovely yarn I made for a pair of mittens in November 2008 and the leftovers from the Leaf Lace shawl I made back in 2007. I feel as if these cowls are really eating into the scrap bag but the reality is that I saw the end of exactly one ball of yarn with this one. All the other balls just got a bit smaller and I’ve enough to make another similar cowl before I start hunting for more blue yarn.

The boucle behaved itself as warp but it looked better as weft. I thought I’d given it enough room in the warp to pop out by putting it alongside thin yarns but I’d played on the safe side by only having one strand here and there. It does pop but there isn’t enough of it for it to be noticeable. Where I used it in the weft for inches at a time it’s made more of a distinct feature. I like it and I think it was worth the effort of making it so I’ll spin the other half of the Wensleydale and make another skein the same or the same as anything ever gets when I’m making it

I whipped through my to do list last week (yes, including washing the bathroom floor) and I even got as far as the line that said “weave four feet”. It’s about time that this unfortunately coloured and boring length of cloth came off the big loom to make way for something more entertaining. In the summer the Warped Weavers group on Ravelry were concentrating on shadow weave and I warped this piece because I thought it would be teach me something. The brown yarn was a small cone that I bought on Ebay and I rightly thought that I could use it up, throw the cone and immediately look as if I had less yarn. The only suitable yarn I had that would make a contrast with it was the gold. I like them both individually but I came to dislike the combination after the first few feet. I have learned how shadowweave works, I’ve learned that I can manage to follow a ninety pick repeat and I’ve learned that ten yards is a long time to be looking at unfortunate colour choices. I’m not sure how much I have left to weave on this warp, I could work it out because I have it written down but I’m afraid to look just in case it’s much longer than I think. This week’s to do list includes “weave six feet”, I’m hoping that by then I might have an idea of how much warp is left.

As well as weaving and cleaning I’ve been knitting and ripping. I ripped the thick black socks that were meant as slippers, I grafted the toe on the first and thought hard about whether I’d actually wear it before turning it back into yarn. I started and ripped a hat because three stitches to the inch is not and never will be the same as three and a half stitches to the inch. The knitting that survived is a green bfl “La Cumparsita”. This is my last piece of foster knitting for this year, it’s getting cool enough for me to start thinking about things I want to knit rather than having to have them handed to me on a plate. It’s not far from being done, I have enough yarn to make it a little larger than the pattern so I’m continuing until I have roughly 400 stitches on the needle. There will still be a lot of yarn left but it will be going into someone else’s leftover box and not mine which is one of the other advantages of foster knitting.

It’s nearly October – sweater knitting weather is just around the corner. I’ve been wearing last year’s sweater already, it’s changed my mind on whether I want sweaters or cardigans in my wardrobe. My previous analysis was that I don’t want anything that goes over my head and I want something that I can open to control how warm I get. The reality was that I put a sweater on and it stays on all day, I don’t need to be opening buttons that aren’t there and I’m not pulling it on and off every five minutes. I think that this year’s cardigan may well be a sweater.

First off let’s look at the shawl that was ever so nearly finished on holiday. I stopped knitting while I was away when I started having doubts about whether I had enough yarn to finish the edging. When I got home and dug out the wonder scales they assured me that there would be enough yarn and I believed them. As it happens they were wrong, I ran out with about a dozen stitches left to cast off. The benefits of a being at home with the sock yarn stash was that I had no trouble finding a match in the scrap bag so I didn’t agonise over it, I just finished it.

This is Ophidian in Cherry Tree Hill Sockittome in the colour “River Run”. I’ve knitted this before in sock yarn and it would have helped if I’d written down what size needles I used last time. It’s not that I don’t mind reinventing the wheel but I have plenty of other things to think about and I could have saved myself a whole five minutes there. I suspect that I wouldn’t have liked the yarn as socks because I think those pretty colours would have pooled. The yarn came from my current favourite source, the Spin or Dye Swapping group on Ravelry and I bought the beads because I couldn’t find anything suitable in stash. I still like the pattern and I’ll no doubt use it again in the future. It was a fast knit, relatively thick wool on thick needles and had just the right combination of plain knitting, lace and beads. When I want to knit it again, this time I used the blue needles from the Boyes set. If someone had put them away properly someone would know what size that is by looking at the case but someone didn’t, did she?

The postman brought me two fleeces this week, one long and white and one short and grey. The short grey one (left) is a North Ronaldsay from the Isle of Auskerry, so far I’ve not got any further than having the trial wash of a small chunk. I’ll have a look at the results before deciding whether that’s the right method for washing the rest of the fleece. The supersized one is a Portland fleece, I had a bit of trouble unrolling it, anyone who has ever struggled with a roll of clingfilm knows what you get if you start unwrapping it while leaving one corner behind. I couldn’t find the end on one edge of the fleece and by the time I’d mastered it the whole thing was the size of a small car. I’m combing this and it looks to be totally sweater-worthy. It is (so far) the star fleece of the season.

I know I said that I was not buying anything that needed work but that was before I’d developed my two bag fleece washing system. Instead of agonising over scouring and fussing about lock formation I now just get on with it, it might not be perfect but it’s quick and effective. The trial wash tells me whether it needs one, two or three washes, maybe with an overnight cold soak in a bucket to start with and using two bags means that I make best use of the water. I wash the first bag, drain the sink and spin the water out of the bag while the sink is filling again. I wash the first bag, add more Fairy and hot water then wash the second bag. Spinning the bags each time they come out of the water means that they are easier to wash and rinse because I’m not putting the dirty water back into the clean water along with the fleece. The first bag has now had two washes, the second bag only one. I use the next sink of water to rinse the first bag, then add hot water and Fairy before washing the second bag. If I had three bags this would be the point to do the first wash of the third bag (confession – I do have three bags, I just don’t have the focus to keep track of them). In no time at all I’m spinning the water out of the bags for the last time and flopping them outside to dry. At that point either I bleach down the sinks and draining board, put everything back that I moved out of the way and I’m done for the day or I start again with another two chunks. Mostly I pack up after the first two bags before it starts feeling like work.

The blog has been a bit sluggish and unresponsive of late, it should be fixed now. This is due to it being hacked and choked with links to movie download sites. You couldn’t see them unless you had a screen the size of a tennis court and I couldn’t see them in normal edit mode. If you have a blog it might be worth taking a moment to see how many users you have with top level admin rights, no doubt you’ll just be expecting to see just the one. I had two, one that was doing all the posting and another that apparently wasn’t doing anything at all. One of us has been adding dozens of links to 106 of my posts which meant that the other of us has lost an evening’s knitting time and an afternoon’s fleece washing time taking them all out again. It did mean that I got to skip through 106 of my older posts, it was an interesting read (I used to post more but shorter posts and “really” and “just” ought to take a rest from my vocabulary) but I really did have better things to be doing.

I don’t feel as bad about it as I thought I would, I think I’d rather have hackers than moths because once you know what you are looking for the damage is easier to find and repair. It’s still been a waste of hours and hours of my time and I don’t intend repeating this again. Constant vigilence is the key, both for moths and hackers, and prevention is better than cure. That sounds as if I’m a little down and I guess I am but it’s all mended now and a bit of theraputic knitting will put me to rights.

As an aside, which is better, shorter posts more often or longer and less frequent?