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 don’t think I have a jam jar big enough for 200g of fibre so it’s altogether a different process but the end result is the same. Yes, a 3kwh panel is overkill for running a steamer and that’s not what we got it for but you should know that I can convert just about anything to a textile use. It does have other uses during the day running the kettle, coffee machine, toaster, microwave, fridge, freezer, vacuum, iron and washer. Not all at once of course because it’s only rated at 3.3kwh and the kettle eats power like you wouldn’t believe. There’s something wrong when the steamer cost me more than the panels but that’s because the panels aren’t mine, I didn’t pay to put them up and I don’t have to worry about maintaining them. There’s a grant for microgeneration and the people that own the panels are claiming the grants and getting their money back from that. We’re just providing the roof space for their panels and using what comes down the wire before it goes off to the national grid.

So far it’s a win with the glass roof (at least when it’s not raining which it seems to be doing a lot of the time now) but the jury is still out on the steamer. It clearly works because the dye didn’t fall off in the rinse. My first run had liquid all over the newspaper I’d thoughtfully put it on. I’ve not worked out why it is that the condensate didn’t all run back into the base, I’m guessing that it was because it couldn’t drip back through the centre because it was full of plastic bag rather than vegetable. My second attempt left plenty of clear space around the plastic and that worked much better. I’m not sure yet whether I’d have been better spending an extra £4 for a hotplate because I know what I’m doing with a pan and there’s less chance of leakage.

Since the panels went up we’ve had a day of black cloud and rain and two days of sun and white cloud. On the days with sunny intervals the roof generated enough to power the house for the day. Should we get a day with no cloud (possible but becoming more unlikely given the time of year) then we should be a net daily exporter of power. At the moment I’m spending a lot of my time peeking in the meter cupboard seeing whether the house is running on sunshine or the bought stuff but the novelty should wear off soon. We’re moving towards the season of grey wet miserable days so I suspect that soon the roof will have all on keeping up with the ironing and the kettle but there will be sun again next summer, and the one after that.

Carolyn asked whether the dog had vanished with the shop. He spends most of his day being asleep in various places as befits a sofa dog but in the evenings he comes alive for a spot of wool mangling, spider chasing or playing with squeaky toys. There is a rubber chicken somewhere off to the bottom left of the photo but really that was just an excuse to jump all over Dan and make him squeak. He’s only small but he’s sturdy and 8kg of charging fluffball still packs a punch when he lands in your midriff.

My stay at home haul was much bigger and more exciting than anything I would have bought in person. This involved no travel at all because it came to me in the post in a really big sack the week before Woolfest. It looks like a wall of wool but appearances can be deceptive, the majority of it is silk. There’s camel, cashmere and orlon, a tussah brick, a mulberry brick, silk noil, throwster’s waste, cotton, angora, some mohair and alpaca but no wool (not other than mixed with silk or cashmere). It was a surprise parcel in that I didn’t know what was in it (”mostly exotics”) but as I was only paying the postage it seemed worth the gamble. Some days you just get lucky.

It was all natural colours but I’ve been working on that. The samples I spun as they were, there was under 20g of each so that didn’t take long. The top skein is flax/silk, I can’t think of any use for such a blend and I’m no wiser now that I’ve spun it. The dark one was cashmere/merino/silk, then tussah and 50/50 merino tussah. The dayglo orange is a silk cap (like a hankie but formed into a different shape), the bits at the bottom are silk noil and will make lumps in batts, the sea of green at the top is a tussah silk brick. There was some cotton and flax too, the bulk of the flax has been rehomed but I kept the cotton because I’ve not spun that before. I still haven’t spun it because I can’t think of a use for the yarn and I have more exciting things lined up to spin.

I got the pile under control by making it into smaller piles. All the silk (and there was a lot of silk) went into the newly created silk bag, the protein-but-not-silk went into a bag for dyeing but the odd stuff is still roaming the front bedroom looking for a permanent home. My plan for sorting it out was derailed by having the drive band on the carder break off, I still haven’t got that replaced. That was the same weekend I decided to take out the slack on the stretched stretchy drive band on the spinning wheel. That didn’t go well, I’ve joined one before with no trouble but this one would not fuse. After four failed attempts I was worried that it would be too short to do anything with if I failed again and I went for the desperate measure of sewing it together. It’s not ideal but the first join lasted for seven bobbins of single and three bobbins of plied yarn which in my book is better than not having a working wheel at all.

(You would be correct in deducing that I have no knitting – I’m in week two of recovery from a knitting related injury and I’m hopeful that normal service will resume shortly)

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.

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..

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.

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

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?

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.

I also finished up the baby jacket. This is Phazelia’s mitered baby jacket again with the same level bottom mods as last time. With this one I knitted the body before the sleeves thereby committing myself to knitting the sleeves in the round. The one good point about that is that when you reach the bottom of the sleeve you need to work each side seperately when knitting flat and if it’s in the round you don’t. Should I knit another I’d knit it flat because I dislike purling on dpns even more than sewing a seam. I think I’m done with these now, two was enough.

I did slack off on Sunday and play with some silk with the able assistance of my son. We made three pieces of silk paper (aka silk fusion), two of which I let dry flat for another day’s play. This is basically papier mache using silk fibre and glue (I do have photos of the process if anyone is interested). I haven’t tried it yet but it’s supposed to soften again when wet so it can be shaped at a later date. The third piece, in teacher’s favourite colour, is now a pen pot for her desk. The jam jar gives it some stability because otherwise there is no weight to it at all. There will be some more of this coming along because I have 200g of throwster’s waste to get rid of somehow and I’m not planning on spinning it.

The last piece of knitting in the pile (socks don’t count) was the toddler sundress. This is now in time out because although I’ve thrown lots of knitting time at it it is still many inches short. It’s not done but I am. If it hadn’t been in stripes I would have ripped it by now just to see it gone but I’ve plodded on (and on and on). It will lose 20% of the length in the first wash so although it looks a good length already it isn’t really. It is now going in a bag under the stairs for a month while I try to forget what it is I dislike about it.

I am now going to cast on for something fun. I’ve been a good girl and worked hard on the work in progress this week but I’m over it now.