Wool For Brains

If you had me bookmarked (yeah, right, as if) you might find that it no longer works. If you were the one person subscribed through Bloglines you might find that you’ve lost the RSS feed. In all cases www.woolforbrains.net should find me now, all sign of brassedoff.net being removed from the equation. Woolforbrains used to be hidden as part of brassedoff.net but now it stands on its own four feet. That’s about as much detail as you’ll get from me, if you have a burning need to know more, why and how I suggest that you go and ask the oracle over at brassedoff.net. I said that no-one would notice but he said that I ought to let you know that he’d done stuff to it. As you are reading the post that says things have changed then you must have found your way here somehow but if it was a difficult and stressful experience then I apologise as it is all my fault. I’ve been whinging about being www.brassedoff.net/woolforbrains.whatever since the blog was set up and I recently escalated the whinge to a full blown complaint. You can’t fault the service provider, once I managed to string together a coherent arguement (always a problem when you haven’t a clue what you are talking about and have to use “thingy” and “whatsit” as descriptors) he was on it like a shot, moving rapidly through “it can’t be done” to “I think I read about it once, you need to use apachetechspeak” to “I did that thing for you, you maybe ought to post about it”

There is not only no photo but I can’t even resort to an artist’s impression. I’m guessing that it would probably need googly eyes, foam tape and glow in the dark paint.

My husband must love me very much because when our neighbour called with the very big box that he’d taken in whilst we were away he never turned a hair. This was on the Saturday before Christmas when the last thing a husband wants to see is a huge box with two fleeces in it. (That’s the fleece off a sheep’s back, not the synthetic polar fleece beloved of walkers). One of the fleeces is very small, it’s a shetland and so small it doesn’t count at all. Really. The other is a big beast though, I don’t know how much it weighs and I won’t be able to find out until after Christmas as it’s currently corralled in the garage until everyone else returns to school or work. As a result there are no photos so I offer instead an artist’s impression of the donor. My son drew a house and family and as there was a lot of grass left over I asked for a few sheep (a reasonable request I thought). He drew the two smiling happy sheep (Fluffy and Daisy) and then a rather surprised looking third one – mummy’s had the wool off that one to make a jumper. He doesn’t have a name written in but it’s “Unwooly”. Rather a functional name but descriptive none the less.

Cassie asked me some time ago whether my anti-fleece position was because I ruined a good one or bought a bad one and when I thought about it I decided that it was the latter. It’s a difficult position as a townie – where does a newbie spinner get a decent fleece when she really doesn’t know what she is buying and she has to buy it unseen? In the end I decided that if you can’t trust the British Wool Board to sell you a decent fleece, well who can you trust? It’s not as if they don’t have a few to choose from. I chose a Blue Faced Leicester cross hog . For those of you  (Mark) that are wondering how you go about crossing a sheep and a pig and why you don’t see the result at the butcher’s  (leg of shig? Peep chops?) a hog or hogget is a not quite lamb, a hog fleece is the first shearing of a sheep, just about when it’s blowing out the single candle on its birthday cake.  Mine is really lovely, I haven’t weighed it but I hope that there’s enough for a sweater. It’s very soft and long (but not in any other way like Andrex). I’m not loving the Shetland as much. I may not even love it at all. So far I’ve had a poke at it and put it away whereas with the other I immediately snagged a bit and washed it. . This was on the Saturday before Christmas so it wasn’t as if I didn’t have other things to do. I shall make a decision on the Shetland later when I’ve worked out why it is that I don’t love it. Its future may well be on ebay.

If I was a hardened blogger then there would be a photo of the tree before we started opening presents and another photo of the table before we sat down to dinner. As I didn’t think about either of these until well after the event, there isn’t. There are some things that you just can’t recreate for the camera which was missing (believed in the car) anyway. Christmas Day was fun, everything went well (even though the roasted parsnips were a little too roasted and the bacon and prune rolls went through “well done” and into “burnt”. I’ve had a decade with an oven that wasn’t ever really hot enough and I still haven’t adjusted to having one that is a touch hotter than you think.) I’ve obviously been really good as the day didn’t start until 8am. Those of you who have ever had small children will realise how wonderful this is. The call of “Has he been yet?” is much more of a delight at 8am than 4am.

You’ve seen most of my spinning presents, the new wheel, some Fleece Artist merino/silk, some orange/red merino and the yarn for Rogue. You didn’t see this because it came close to Christmas. This is 8oz of camel/silk and 8oz of corridale pencil roving in “Seafoam” (both from Crown Mountain Farm). I think the pencil roving would look good spun fine (assuming that I can do that) as the colour variation is very subtle and wouldn’t distract from a lace pattern. The camel silk is alluring because I have a fair idea of what it will be like as a yarn. Up until recently my favorite yarn ever was a merino,silk and camel mix. The silk gave it a lovely sheen and the camel added a peach fuzz halo. Santa also brought me a skein of Colinette Isis and a pair of wooden knitting needles, just in case I ran short of things to do over Christmas. Honesty compels me to say that I did not knit this, I was too busy picking Hama beads off the floor. If you pick the peg sheet up to iron the design and tip it up, all the beads cascade off. Who knew? I know now and so does my son, who was really upset to see mummy turn his pirate flag into a heap of beads (a heap of beads in the skein of wool I was winding as it happens). I had to remake the flag.

The Gpigs weren’t forgotten either. They went on holiday when we did, to stay with Markfromthecomments and Amanda but settled back into their old regime very quickly. Santa brought them a new tube to run through and chew and a big pile of celery and lettuce. They also had the carrot peelings and the outer leaves off the sprouts and by the end of Christmas Day they were in the same position as everyone else – they’d eaten too much and were ready for a nap.

Boxing Day is one of my favourite holidays. It has all the fun of Christmas but without the meal preparation. We are now foraging in the fridge until I get sick of turkey or we run out of things to eat. As I currently have a huge walk in fridge with a single floor level shelf (it’s so large that many people may in fact mistake it for a garage) the turkey-aversion will set in first. It should see us for a few days before I chop it up and stick it in the freezer. As there are no meals to prepare I should get to spend some time on my new wheel in between playing “Torpedo battleships”, a fishing game and watching Iz dance.

The last minute Christmas preparations were a bit of a blur. Center Parcs for the last before the last weekend – great idea. Dusseldorf mid week – brilliant idea. Christmas Day on Monday – which idiot thought of that then? The plane landed just after four on Friday and I was in the supermarket by seven. I am very grateful that we got home at all because the south of the country had been fog bound for two days but we had a trouble free flight and a dream drive home. It could have been dire because in our haste to catch the shuttle bus from the airport car park (the LARGE airport car park) on Wednesday we neglected to note where we’d left the car. Oops. Luckily the bus stop that looked vaguely familiar did in fact turn out to be the same one we caught the bus from and the car did not need to be hunted down. The other thing that went west in the dash for the bus was the camera. The one we took with us was the big scary camera, the one that we left in the car (after carefully charging it) was the compact one suitable for use by small children and me. Oops again. I suppose that was no great loss as by Thursday lunchtime the card would have been full of photos of penguins anyway. Our vote for the best thing in Dusseldorf went to the penguins at the Aquazoo, the only one of us that thought the Christmas market was the best thing was he who had to go to work and didn’t get to see the penguins. There may be photos on the husband’s blog in due course, but not many because he had to go to work and so he missed all the photo opportunities (he can’t blog at the moment as he’s a bit tied up with K’nex, Bop It and models with propellers on the back). Did I mention that he had to go to work whilst we were gadding about and generally having a good time? (except for when we left the toy-of-the-moment on a tram, that was Not Good). If you want an idea of what it might have looked like go see Polly’s blog, (you want the Christmas Eve entry, I’d link to it if I knew how) as she went to the Christmas market at Munich. Dusseldorf did not have tigers.

The return to Sainsbury’s on Friday night was an interesting experience, let’s just say that they had just about run out of milk and I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. Turkeys came in two sizes, small and bring your own fork lift. Ditto the gammon. If we go to the Christmas market another year it would need to be earlier in December because I was suffering serious turkey anxiety by the time the plane landed. I was so far gone to seriously consider a goose.

Germany may well be the home of sockenwolle but I didn’t bring any home with me. There was much more choice of tiaras and huge Steiff animals in the area where we were staying. Full length furs were seriously in evidence and I could probably have taken the award for worst dressed resident if the hotel had one. There was a goodly number of hats and scarves as the night air was decidedly nippy (despite the gluwein) and I noticed that the standard child hat is different in that it has earflaps and tassels. I gave a lot of thought to the knitting to take with me and left the mitten at home in case I lost my luggage. I took a scarf in progress and a ball of sock wool and needles. If I lost the lot I wouldn’t have minded whereas losing the mitten would have been a calamity. The sock wool is untouched and has been returned to stash.

This is the first mitten, thumbless at the moment. Once I managed to work out how to tension the yarns things progressed better and I think that I am now about as fast as I am with both yarns in one hand. I still don’t have the tension even with both hands but I have another mitten to do so I might have improved by then. If not, well there are other things I can knit in two colours so as to get a bit more practice. The half a scarf is the recycled shetland yarn from the green shawl which took the ripping very well. It was supposed to be overdyed in long colour runs of navy and teal but I had my first ever dye washout. It is some consolation that I know what I did wrong, it was a very big skein of yarn and I didn’t allow for it needing more cooking time. Any cook will tell you that a big turkey needs more oven time than a small one because otherwise it doesn’t heat through. It’s obvious really, anyone with a grain of sense would realise that a skein of four balls of yarn is going to take longer than a small skein. It’s just a pity that common sense didn’t set in until after I’d watched the dye run down the sink. I’d decided on the pattern as it would show off the stripes well and I’m stubborn enough to knit it anyway even though I have no stripes. This is one ball of yarn and the stitches are still live. I’m knitting another ball (same pattern) and then I’ll weigh the two balls that are left and put the biggest ball with the shortest scarf. I know that it would just have been easier to weigh the four balls to start with but that would imply that I set out with some sort of a plan.

He who knows about these things assures me that the RSS feed is now working so there you go Carolyn. I did have it explained to me but I was having a mild turkey panic attack at the time so the explanation went right over my head.

At some point I shall hit top gear on Christmas preparations after which there will be little that’s blogworthy. I doubt you’ll be interested in bread sauce or my inventive solutions to hiding Christmas presents. There’s usually some entertainment in the making of the cranberry sauce that involves buying two lots of cranberries and a great deal of pan scrubbing. This year I learned from my past mistakes and set the kitchen timer. The result was that the cranberries did not boil dry but the Gpigs moved faster than I’ve ever seen. They still startle very easily (you would think that living in the same house as a six year old would cure that) and the timer going off caused an explosion of guinea pigs. They’re very fast over short distances and they corner better than I expected them to. I suppose that it’s the short legs that do it.

There may be the occasional post between now and 2007 but I’m not promising. I’m going to be too busy chanting the list of things to do/buy/wrap/give to do much knitting or spinning and then there will need to be a period of recovery and playing with toys. Normal service will be resumed when the schools go back at the beginning of January. Do check the husband’s blog as he may be posting too. He has some photos of our weekend at Center Parcs where we chatted to The Man and he’ll probably be posting from Germany, home of sockenwolle. Did I mention that we’re all off to Germany for three days? Losing three days from the week before Christmas – I must be two skeins short of a sweater.
If I don’t have the opportunity to say it again, may your holidays be filled with fun, good company, tasty food and the right sort of batteries.

Do we see a theme here? When the husband brought this wine home I laughed so much that I could hardly drink it. I laughed all the next week whenever I saw the bottle waiting for the recycling. We’ve had several bottles of Woolpunda since and it’s still funny. I’ve looked for other labels with things that I could spin but the closest I could find was a label with a fox on it. You can get it at Morrisons and it’s reduced at the moment to £3.99 a bottle. The beer is also sold there.

I have to go back to feeding the washer now, I fail to see how a weekend away for three people can generate so much laundry.

It’s not a good photo, my camera and I disagree all the time on things that are red. I’ve started to wonder whether it’s my eyes or my entire colour perception. You can just about see that it’s sparkly, not a solid colour and has holes in it. I would have retaken the photo now I’ve seen how rubbish it is except that it’s dark outside and by the time that it’s light I shall be stuffing clothes and knitting in a bag and wondering why I didn’t start to pack sooner for a weekend away. I love the colour changes in this yarn, changing but not too stripey. Sadly there is a further unwanted colour change to come. The twinkle that I keep pulling off the washed clothes is silver, not red, and I rather think the red twinkly will be silver twinkly after the first wash. I did briefly think of washing the first skein on a wool cycle but what would be the point? The second bobbin I’m spinning is nearly full and I’m going to knit this irrespective of the colour of the twinkle so I might as well just get started. Yes, if I’d sampled then I’d have known what was going to happen but I rarely sample for socks any more. This just goes to prove that there are times when I should.

The pattern is Cassie’s Fools Rush, except that this particular fool was in such a hurry to rush that she found herself ready to start but without the pattern to hand. Did I wait until I could get the pattern or did I just set off? Yup, right first time. I thought I could remember the cuff and I nearly got it right. I remembered that it was a five stitch, four row repeat (ex-accountant, good with numbers you see) and trundled off carefully counting the four rows in between the pattern rows. It wasn’t until the cuff started to look a bit long that I was struck by the stunning realisation that one pattern row plus four rows of ribbing does not a four row repeat make. Yes, I could have pulled the entire first cuff back and started over but it’s much simpler to write it down and make the second sock match. It does look better if you do it right but I’ve had enough of ripping recently not to want to do it unless I really have to.

If I was starting again I wouldn’t spin the twinkle. I am sick and tired of picking it out of the just washed clothes, pulling it off all my other knitting, picking it out of the yarn I just dyed, finding it stuck to my son’s bedclothes. I’ve had previous experience of fibre that’s travelled, the baby suri alpaca being the worst, but that found a surface and stuck there. The angelina fibre doesn’t cling in the same way and that’s why it’s so easy to track through the house. Being red and glittery even one strand stands out a mile and screams from the carpet/underpants/pancake. It’s beautiful but too high maintenance for me.  If I was starting again I’d get the pattern repeat right in the cuff too. All these learning experiences and I haven’t even reached the heel yet.

I’ve never made a mitten but it looks very like a sock so I feel on familiar ground. There’s a cuff and a toe but the afterthought heel is a bit of an odd shape. This project is giving me brain ache. It’s not the pattern, it’s having to watch my hands every second. I’ve made at least 4 fair isle sweaters, back in the olden days when I still made sweaters, and I knitted them the only way I knew, both yarns in one hand, pick one up, drop it, pick the other up. I now know that there are other ways of holding the yarn for two colour knitting. As it happens there’s a Knitty article about it this month and I can say that I’ve tried all of these methods, even the one with the widget at the end of my finger. Although I’ve not been knitting many sweaters recently I do like to make fancy sock cuffs from time to time and so I’ve had several recent experiments with two colour knitting. The two methods where you have both yarns in the same hand are not for me, I throw rather than pick and the different angle of throwing with the second yarn gave me a pain in the back of the hand that lasted for three days. No knitting for three days – imagine. That sock was ripped without a thought of making another to match. That leaves me with the tried and tested knit, drop, knit method or the two handed method. I’ve tried using one colour in each hand before and I always go back to knit, drop, knit because it’s so much faster. I’ve given myself the little talk about practise making perfect and no-one is good at things to start with (it’s one of my really good set pieces of mummyspeak because I’ve had a lot of practise at it…) and I’m determined that this is the project where I make the investment of time to get the other hand knitting.

I have one hand that has been knitting since I was seven and the other hand that is just learning to make a stitch. I am watching a beginner knit, she’s painful and slow, takes an age to make a stitch, her tension’s all to pot, stitches dropping left, right and centre but it’s my hand that’s messing about. You want to leap in there and do it yourself and that is just what the helpful experienced hand is doing. The right hand dithers about and the left hand swoops in and makes the stitch for it, in the wrong colour of course. I have to watch my hands all the time, encouraging the right and telling the left to mind its own business. I’m now past the stage where I’d get a six stitch run and then my right hand would lose the plot again. It took me 30 rows before I found a way of holding the yarns that didn’t mean me having to do a cat’s cradle every time I started on a new needle. Although this is only a small project it’s going to take a while because I do four rows and I’ve had enough. I know that I’d be better starting out on a circular needle and with a small repeating pattern but that’s not what I want to knit right now.
This is Eunny’s Anemoi mittens pattern. I just love downloaded patterns, you see it, press a few buttons, dig out the yarn whilst the printer is in action and then you are away. If you click the photo it will be bigger, all the better to see my mistakes.

The yarn is the leftovers from the felted bootees (which btw were oddly shaped around the heel and have been consigned to oblivion) and a ball of black something with no ball band. It’s possibly Jaeger Matchmaker merino 4 ply but there are other things it might be too. It came out of the sock drawer and it’s been cast on before but I’m clueless as to what I bought it for or started in it. The cast on is not the tubular cast on called for in the pattern, I’d done two and pulled them out when they were inches short of going around my wrist and by the time I’d come to the third attempt I was all for quick and simple (just in case I had to take it out again). You can see the humility stitch at the bottom of the left hand edge of the back (and it would have to be the on-show back wouldn’t it?). I imagine it’s an example of the helpful left hand swooping in when it saw the right hand struggling and the right hand was struggling a lot there at the start.

Before anyone points it out, I do know that the second not-sock needs the funny heel on the other side. It would be a good idea to have the plainer bit of the pattern on the instep palm too so the two match. Fortunately the pattern is written out twice in full and marked “left” and “right”. I could still foul it up but only if I tried really hard. It fits, I would have been better making the left hand first, taking a photo of your right hand is a pain if you’re right handed. If it’s a grim day and you need to use the flash then it’s next to impossible. I really needed an extra hand (but then I’d have needed a third mitten wouldn’t I?)

I do have a pair of sparkly socks, they are a stripey pair with the heels and toes in Opal Royale. I am obviously a shallow individual who is easily entertained because I’ve found myself wiggling my toes in the sunlight so that the glitter catches the sun. Once upon a time I bought some red Angelina fibre to make some glittery red alpaca. I can’t remember now what I intended doing with the yarn but it’s a bit of a moot point because I never made it. As it turned out I couldn’t manage to incorporate the sparkles into the single other than in horrible chunks of tinsel so I packed it all away and forgot about it. I recently dyed some BFL in red and orange for reasons that were good at the time but elude me now and I came across that fibre and the sparkle whilst digging out some fibre for a scarf. The sparkle is red and the fibre is red (in places) so that is a good enough reason to spin it together for socks. It will stripe but not in a regular way and I will be able to wiggle my toes in the light when I need a bit of entertainment. I don’t usually spin at night as I can’t see well enough but this was better spun under artificial lights because it was easier to see the amount of sparkle going into the single.

I can’t see what the problem was that I had with this before. I can see what my problem is with it now, especially with a bit of sunlight. It’s a fibre control issue – it’s tracked all through the house. I’m picking the Angelina fibre out of the mittens and the Cherry Tree Hill socks and I can see it every time I look down. It’s now reached the top of the stairs and I’m expecting to find it in bed by the end of the second skein. The saving grace is that with it being Christmas the carpet is a bit glittery anyway so it is slightly camoflagued. I will have to tell you before the husband does that his breakfast pancake on Sunday contained a trace of red sparkle. I would have liked to have delivered the line about a high fibre diet being good for you but I was too busy laughing to think of it.

I should of course be spinning the rest of the turquoise and purple for the second mitten, I don’t really have a good excuse for not doing that except that I wanted to do this more. It’s the sparkle, it affects your decision making skills. Forget “sensible” and “the right thing to do”, it’s just so pretty (but not in pancakes)

I’ve demonstrated that I’m capable of knitting on things that should be left alone (or ripped out) if the alternative is not to knit at all. I had to rip the edging on the green shawl because I started knitting it before I had worked out the lining up of the patterns. I had nothing else to knit. I persisted in knitting the sleeve of Rogue when anyone with an ounce of sense would have know that the tension was wrong. I had nothing else to knit. To prevent further acts of stupidity I’ve cast on for a sock. This is Cherry Tree Hill supersock in the Cabin Fever colourway. When I stopped to think about it I was surprised to find that I haven’t bought sock yarn in over 10 months and I think this skein has been waiting for the needles for a few months longer than that. There is now no sock yarn that I can buy that is appealing as the yarn I make myself, I think the spinning releases particularly potent wool fumes that blind you to all its faults and make it more attractive than store bought yarn.

Casting on this saves me from the horror of going to my son’s swimming class without a piece of knitting. It’s not the fear that I might have to talk to someone, it’s that I might have half an hour of being solidly talked at by a particular Swimming Mom. Having a handful of pointy sticks means that I can escape her attentions, if I had to do the Penelope thing and pull it all out again after each lesson it would be worth it.

I pick the next sock on the basis of what I’ll do with the leftovers. This was chosen because I think it will go well with the Great Balls of Fire bits, the red from the little boy striped socks and the orange/red that I haven’t spun yet. This is a sign that my long range sock planning has kicked back in and so it’s fair to say that I’m back on socks again. I’m off lace – the green shawl has passed the centre where I needed to jiggle it a bit and is now sitting in a bag under sentence of ripping back to wool. Yes, all of it.

The wheel – I see no wheel. It spins, it plies, it’s back in the big box that it came in. It’s not Christmas yet (thankfully)

I thought that the blog deserved some colour. Too much porridge can’t be good for you, you need to vary your diet to include greens and oranges too. This photo was taken on Friday when everything was all very much at the start, especially the red socks (they may look like big balls of pouffy fluff to you but I can see the red socks hiding there). This is going to turn into two pairs of socks and a pair of mittens. Maybe tomorrow I’ll show you the photo of What I Did Over The Weekend (where all the small things got slightly bigger) or I could fish toys out from under the bed for another installment of “Daft things I have knitted for my son”. This Christmas lark is starting to impact on my knitting time – can you tell?

The good news is that, as you can see, I didn’t have to put the wheel away when the tree went up, I thought that there wouldn’t be room for it but I was wrong. The husband positively encouraged me to leave it up, this may be because at the time he was feeling guilty that he had nothing to give me for Christmas (we weren’t anticipating the new wheel being here in time) or because he knows I’ll mope and whinge. This is the wheel’s usual home, next to the large north facing window so there is plenty of natural light. You can see that the Gpigs have ample opportunity to mutter to me about the lack of greens in their diet (according to them it should be all celery, all of the time and they start complaining about it as soon as they hear the fridge door open. They don’t possess a massive intellect but they have worked out where I keep the vegetables). I have an idea that they throw sawdust in my fibre on purpose because of my failure to produce celery on demand.

The above photo shows a very minimalist tree with lights and a single bauble. By the time the tree was manhandled from the loft on Thursday night and the lights sorted out there wasn’t time to decorate it so it had to wait until after school on Friday afternoon. I’m all for the use of child labour wherever possible and every year there is less for me to do because he can reach a little higher. I’m looking forward to the year when he can put the star on the top and I can sit and have a mince pie and a glass of sherry whilst he gets on with it. Of all the things I started on Friday, the tree at least is finished.