Wool For Brains

There was a brief tussle over who had the blog rights to the photo of the illuminated, carved pumpkin. As you can see, it’s not me. I grew it and scooped it out but Mr WFB carved it and took the photo so I have the before shot and the husband has the after. This the first sock in the pair, it hit the toe on Friday during my two solid hours of knitting waiting for my car to be tested. The second sock is approaching the heel but it’s no longer my favorite, fickle knitter that I am, having been deposed by the newest sock.

The yak yarn, as you can see, is still grey. It’s also not entirely dry, you can’t see that but it explains why I’m knitting from a skein rather than a ball. Its continued greyness is a surprise to me as I thought it would be blue or teal but the husband thought the yarn was “lovely just the way it was” and “it would be a shame to dye it”. His socks, his call but it’s strange as his usual socks would put a parrot to shame. I have the yarn spun for both of the socks and some non-yak for the heels and toes. It is lovely to knit with and I keep thinking about what I’ll do with the 6oz of yak/merino that I have left.

The small son socks are finished, once I’d produced the first one he was repeatedly checking on progress as only a six year old can so I spent all my knitting time on the second sock until it was finished. He’s worn them but they have to have their photo now whilst they are still a pair. He was very pleased with them but I will be amazed if they last through more than one wash. It’s the balling up and throwing that tends to split up the pair (really, you don’t say). When he gets short of socks I can rely on finding at least five either behind or under the settee.

This was a longer post, the previous content of the demon denim sweatshirt has cursed it as this is now my fifth attempt at posting without blowing away the sidebar and turning the background purple.

I started the denim (demon) sweatshirt on the 22nd of December 2005. There’s nothing else in the knitting bag that’s been there for longer than two months. When it was new and I loved it I could knit a ball in an evening. Now the relationship has become stale and I find the dark blue yarn difficult to see and it hurts my hands (whine). It’s spent a lot of time in a bag in the bottom of the wardrobe whilst I denied its existance and throughout its life I’ve repeatedly put it aside for other things. I can see that there are a lot of good reasons why this isn’t finished yet. During the life of this sweater I’ve cast on and finished 19 pairs of socks, 11 scarves, 25 hats, 4 shawls, a bag, two pencil cases and a pair of gloves. This doesn’t include the shawl and two pairs of socks that were on the needles when I started the sweatshirt or the three pairs of socks and a shawl that are on the needles now. I can’t help but acknowledge that if I’d spent more of my time knitting the sweatshirt it would have been finished months ago.

I try to always have the right piece of knitting for the moment, something challenging, something brainless, toothpicks and fine yarn or broomsticks and garter stitch. The problem is that there never seems to be a right time for this sweatshirt. The time when I sit down to knit is the evening and I have real difficulty distinguishing a knit from a purl. There is so little to do now, maybe 20 rows of the front and the collar but I can’t find the motivation to knuckle down and finish it. I even thought about stuffing it in the bottom of the wardrobe for a while but it deserves better. I think the real reason is that I have a fear of finishing it. When it’s finished then fit becomes an issue, will the sleeves be too long, is the neck shaping right. does the collar sit right? It’s a whole different set of questions to the very simple “is it finished yet?” and a lot more challenging to address.

Socks and shawls are so much simpler.

This is a rare sight, a baby sock, a mummy sock and a daddy sock. They are all the first socks of each pair.

My baby had big feet even when he was a baby and at six and a half, he stopped being a baby a long time ago. This is only the second time I’ve knitted socks for him and it has really dragged. This is because I don’t like the colours and deep down I don’t want to make them. I know that he’ll not wear them for long and in the short period before he outgrows them he will lose one of the pair. It just seems such a waste of knitting time. After careful consideration he picked the colours out of the sock yarn drawer and would not be moved from his first choice. I’m about to start the toe and that will be in the red home dyed Opal. The heel is another hand dyed Opal and the light green is some expensive Rowan 4 ply that is very soft and totally unsuited to socks but he liked the colour. It’s not like they are going to have to wear well so what do I care.

The red sock is the previously-pink merino and silk hand spun in the Falling Leaves pattern from Knitty. I don’t usually knit toe up but I fancy doing a picot cast off so it seemed a good excuse for doing it that way. The green marker shows where I started the heel, it makes it easier to get the heel on the second sock in the same place. I like everything about it which is good because it turned out being for me when I’d planned it for my mother. One day I will learn that yarn with silk knits bigger and I should really check my tension even if it is “only socks”.

Although I love that sock, and it’s for me, it’s on the back burner because of the last sock, the daddy sock. This is the yarn from the Great Balls of Fire roving from Crown Mountain Farms and I love it even more than the red socks and that’s saying something. I have an idea that it’s knitting itself, there’s no other explanantion for how it’s growing so quickly. I am totally captivated by the colour changes and find myself just knitting a little further to see what happens next. I’ve spun half of what I need to finish the second sock and I really need to get on with that as the toe of the first one is not so far away. By the time I’ve sat around in the garage waiting for the car to be tested it may well be done.

(No posts over the weekend, wool to spin, pumpkins to be carved, demon sweatshirts to be wrangled – you know how it is)

The box from Crown Mountain Farms brought me 8 oz of 50:50 merino yak. This lead to some discussion of how one would attempt to shear a yak. The “I’m bigger than you are” approach that works on a sheep clearly won’t work on a yak. I’d assumed that it involved a crush pen and a lot of bellowing but I didn’t put the legwork in to find out exactly how it was done. It turns out that I’m entirely wrong, our friend Mark who has no wool content whatsoever but is big on trees and rocks turned up this. (Well down the page, you rope the yak’s legs together. I imagine I’m right about the bellowing though)
Some of this foggy fibre is promised for winter socks, the rest is going to hang around for the right project. At the weekend I bought some oatmeal BFL (note for Mark, that’s blue faced leicester, it’s a breed of sheep) to form the other ply. The grand plan is to have a two ply merino-yak/BFL for the body of the sock and BFL/BFL for the heels and toes. Whatever colour it ends up, it won’t be grey but as yet I haven’t decided whether to dye the fibre or the yarn. In an attempt to pass myself off as a proper spinner I have a sample.

This is yak/BFL, BFL/BFL and yak/yak (left to right) on 2.75mm needles. It’s lovely, all of it, but now I’ve spun a little I can see that the rest of the yak will be waiting for the right project for me. It’s soft and fluffy and I love it. It is very, very soft so it wouldn’t wear well for socks, not that it matters because this is all about making good on a promise rather than functional footwear. I promised yak socks, I’m going to deliver on yak socks.

The purple fan and feather socks are done. This pair is for me, in Opal Royale (pale blues, purples and glittery) and a Cherry Tree Hill millend. I bought a pound of the latter and so far it’s made two pairs of socks on its own and it has been a stripe in at least four more pairs. I carried two pattern repeats down to the toe on this pair. They are ok but I should have gone for a bit more contrast I think. The reason I didn’t like the Opal was that it was not really very interesting on its own but too busy to work as a solid. I bought it for the glitter but really that wasn’t enough. The CTH gave it a bit of interest but it could have done with even more.

The bag is the half baked item. Had I been a better blogger I would have measured it before I threw it in the washer but at least I thought of including a cd for scale. It went in the washer and the drier with my gardening jeans. It’s certainly smaller now but I think it needs to be felted a bit more, it’s kept a lot of its stitch definition and although it stands up on its own I think it would be improved by being thicker. At the moment you can see that it blocks perfectly over the pan from the bread machine. There are three different yarns in it so I hit lucky in that it felted evenly. All of the yarn had some mohair content and that’s given it a lovely fuzzy feel. At some point it will revisit the washer but who knows when? The handle felted enough on the single wash, it needs some agressive pulling into shape but it’s thick enough.

So, it’s official. I can spin superwash. I can’t get enough twist in it but there again I can’t with anything else I spin for sock yarn either. This is the Great Balls of Fire colourway from Crown Mountain Farms. The finished yarn is much less attention seeking than the roving, it is full of lovely autumnal colours and is pleasing to both the mother and the husband (neither of whom were sold on the roving). The skein weighs 62g and is around 250 yards. I have an imperial niddy noddy, metrication doesn’t yet get everywhere, so things are metric weight but imperial length. This will be starting as a sock just as soon as the yarn is dry (or given my track record, just a little before that). Trust me when I say that the yarn for the second sock will be spun sometime before I’ve finished knitting the first. I may have to stop at the toe for a while. but I will certainly be able to move straight on to the second sock. I know that I should spin it all at once but I have other things I want to spin. That’s the reason I only have four bobbins for my wheel, it really forces me to finish things.

The not so skinny Shetland is in need of more yardage and I have the extra fibre now so that could result in enough yarn for me to actually be able to knit something. The merino/yak is still in the planning stage so it can call to me all it wants for now, I am ignoring it. I am thinking about using another fibre as the second ply as it will give me more yardage from the fibre and should make it wear a bit better (although I’ll probably make the heels and toes from something else anyway). I may have to be a sensible spinner and do some proper sampling on that (as opposed to plying a couple of yards, winding it around my fingers and proclaiming it to be good enough).

(The photo is fuzzy because we have a shortage of daylight at the moment and I can’t hold still for long enough. The photo with the flash is worse, sharp but weird colours)

“My mummy is called Caroline and she loves playing with wool. My daddy is called David and”. This miniature essay came home from school at the start of term. I’m glad to see that he got the essentials down first before he ran out of time. The boys love to join forces and poke fun at Mummy’s wool fixation but the junior family member doesn’t grasp that mummy really does love wool. “Really, really”, not just “pretending, really”. When sitting in traffic we usually come round to the subject of why do I love wool so much (and let me tell you, it beats the alternative monologue of “are we nearly there?/how much longer?/will we EVER move?”).

When he’s older I’ll expound about the act of creativity and the boundless potential in a ball of wool (not really boundless because it’s limited by the colour and thickness, if you want boundless potential look at white roving instead). At the moment I stick with simple phrases that could apply as well to small boys as to wool, such as “wool doesn’t answer back” and “it does what I tell it” (well mostly). I don’t expect it to have good listening skills because after all, it’s only wool. This usually leads to the game of “Do you love wool more than….?” The one thing he cannot accept is that it is possible for me to love wool more than guinea pigs. There is nothing in his world that can be more loveable than guinea pigs so therefore I am either joking or seriously wrong but he’s not worked out which it is yet.

For the record:

Wool does not thump about its living quarters making a noise suitable for something twice its yardage.

Wool does not squeak for attention whenever I come into the room.

If you tire of looking at it you can put wool in a bag, throw it in the back of the wardrobe and pull it out again six months later. Don’t try this with a guinea pig.

Wool does not try to run up to your shoulder and squeak down your ear.

Wool does not require daily maintenance.

I accept that some wool may scratch but it doesn’t bite or try to chew the buttons off my shirt.

Wool does not make a mess all over the floor. Well actually it does but it’s a lot less messy than guinea pigs. The VM I’ve been picking out of my spinning this week has been hay off the floor.

If you don’t like the colour you can dye wool.

If your guinea pigs come out bigger than you’d thought you can’t felt them to size or block them.

His rebuttal is “You can’t cuddle wool”

How wrong he is.

I’m coming off the back of a sock run, I’ve had three pairs at a time on the needles for a while and I’m all socked out. This has happened before, it lasts a couple of weeks and then I have an urge for DPNs again. Something different then, something not socks, not lace (auditions are being held again for the vacant position of tv lace knit). I’m allowed something new, I have a need for a tv knit and the denim sweater does now have a front opening. I’m doing 8 rows a day on that (an inch post shrinking) and it should be to the neck shaping in a few days. (I haven’t written that part of the pattern either)Whilst sorting through the odd ball yarn mountain yesterday (is that ever a post for another day) I found some oddments of handspun that would go nicely with the yarn I’d had on the needles recently. A few weeks ago I’d started making a felted bag from Iris Schreier’s “Modular Knits”. It didn’t have a good start as a project, I was really low at the time and not really giving it much thought. It was knitted at too tight a gauge, which I could have lived with but I’d also made a howling mistake on the second row. I told myself that the wonky bit would felt out and kept on knitting. I got all the way to the bottom shaping before common sense got the better of me and I ripped it back. It didn’t help that I’d thrown it in a corner due to my inability to focus on the bottom shaping, picked it up, ripped it back and then mangled it again.

It was an interesting knit though and I’ve enough time away from it to knit it again. Same yarn (some of my early sock yarn that doesn’t meet my current standards) but bigger needles (at least I think they are bigger..) This time I looked for the errata before I started and found that the screwy bottom shaping was because there was a crucial “K8″ missing from the directions. This pleases me no end as I know now that the interesting corner effect wasn’t down to me. I am well aware that there isn’t enough of this yarn to finish it but the oddments I found in the leftovers heap and the odd ball of something else I found in the lace drawer should see it to the end. They’re all different compositions so that should make for an interesting felting experience but at the end of the day it’s only a bag and blocking should cure all ills. If I can’t be a good example then at least I can be a terrible warning. It’s knitted on a US 10 (6mmish) and that is a mind blowing experience after all the time I’ve spent on teeny needles for socks and lace. It just eats up the wool, especially as it’s doubled up. Needless to say I have no interest in having a bag, it’s just the process of making one that’s fun.

Come Monday everyone will be displaying their stash expansion and I can’t wait to see what everyone bought. I thought I’d show my acquisition too but earlier, as I’ve already run out of real people to show this to. They’ve all been forced encouraged to pat the silky softness and feel the fluff beyond their natural capacity for fibre appreciation. The postman brought me a box from Crown Mountain Farms today and he must have run all the way as it was here on the fourth working day after I placed the order (bear in mind it’s had to cross the atlantic). The husband should be glad that he wasn’t getting back from Germany a day later or he’d have found me in bed with this:

This is two 4oz bundles of grey 50:50 merino/yak and an 8oz bump of superwash in the “Great Balls of Fire” colourway. I have been prejudiced against superwash from the first days of my spinning when I tried some and it was wirey, crunchy and no fun. This is a different beast altogether, soft and easily drafted. I’ve predrafted some and it is totally different from the sample that made me decide to turn my back on superwash. I can’t wait to spin it. (Why did I buy something I thought I might not like – I want it for some gift socks) Although I do dye my own fibre I’m not so good on white with colour patches. I’ve tried it several times and what I get is always interesting but not what I set out to make.

The yak is unbelievably soft, it’s the colour of fog and it feels like fog looks like it should feel (only warmer). When he bought me my wheel I promised Mr WFB a pair of yak socks but of course I can’t actually spin yak. You’d think for such a big beastie it would have a longer staple. I suspect that I’d have a better chance of success with dust bunnies. I think I’ll be fine with this blend and it’s light enough to dye well (it does also come in white)

One bottle of Supercook red later and the girly pink sock yarn is reborn as a rich red. (I have a rotten time trying to photograph reds, use your imagination and substitute a maple leaf red for whatever you’re seeing on the left). The “don’t start anything blah, blah, demon sweater, blah, blah” rule doesn’t apply to socks. No rules apply to socks except “as many socks as needles” and it’s a bit hard to get around that one. Needless to say it is now a sock in progress although it is in its second reincarnation. It was first a Diamante but after two pattern repeats I realised that I didn’t much fancy lifted increases on teeny needles, I’m slow and awkward and it was no fun. I did attempt photos before I ripped it apart but it was dark and the silk reflects the flash like you wouldn’t believe. The new sock is falling leaves and is very appropriate for the season.

The colour variation in the yard is twisted by the pattern and I just altogether like it. The yarn could do with a little more twist but it’s even enough and I’m pleased with it.

The only teensy problem with this is that I intended them for my mum but they fit me perfectly. That means they will be too big for her. (Did I swatch? – not for socks, no) I could rip them and start over but I’m not going to.