Wool For Brains

Flushed with success on Rogue I’m planning the next big thing (a “big thing” defined as “having sleeves”). I did get the pattern for Celtic Dreams but I don’t fancy wrestling with the sleeves (which are picked up and knitted down) and the fit is going to be an issue. Much as I’d like to knit it I can’t see that I’ll want to wear it (a euphamism for “it won’t fit and I’ll look like a pig in a sack”). I’ll put that one aside until I am several dress sizes smaller than I am now. I’ve narrowed it down to three possibilities for me, one in 4 ply, one in bulky and one in whatever I care to make it in. Am I clueless or what? I have the patterns for all three, the 4 ply one I’ve had for years but just not got to. Hopefully by the time I’ve explained it to you I will have more of a clue about what I really want to knit next.

Ophelia by Lucy Neatby- it will fit me as it’s designed for people with hips, with an adjustable gusset. It’s a simple pattern repeat in variegated yarn so the entertainment value is fairly high but there again it will need to be for all that knitting because it’s a sweater in sock weight yarn. I’d rather have it as a cardigan but then I’m not sure what I’d then do about the neck. The yarn isn’t a problem, I could spin it or just dye it and I have then the option of dyeing the yarn for the sleeves with a shorter repeat than the yarn for the body. (Not that I’m a perfectionist or anything)

Carol Lapin’s swing jacket from Jamieson’s Shetland knitting book (third from bottom). At 3.5 stitches to the inch it will be a fast knit, it’s something that I might actually wear and I can see it in the red alpaca/brown wool that I made here. The sample I made didn’t knit to 3.5 stitches to the inch but it could do because the beauty of making your own yarn is that you pick the fibre, the colour and the weight. The neck and cuffs would look good being 3/4 red rather than half red, so they would be a contrast but still work well with the body. I still don’t like the brown I used in the sample because it didn’t magically become brown enough, I think I want something like 70% cocoa solids dark chocolate brown to give a better contrast with the red. This would be better waiting until I have a jumbo plying head for one of my wheels because I’m not going to get a deal of yardage of chunky yarn on a standard bobbin. The jumbo flyer for the Sonata isn’t on sale yet and I don’t want to buy the one for the Kiwi until I see what the Sonata one is like. When faced with a choice you can be sure I’d make the wrong one.

Any gauge tunic. Well it’s an excuse to buy a fancy shawl pin for that collar. I wear more cardigans than sweaters and there’s not much interest in it to see me through to the end. On its own it’s ok but it’s not such an attractive wardrobe addition as the other two. The plus side (apart from the excuse for a fancy shawl pin) is that it would work in the not-brown-enough alpaca/wool.

The verdict, after due discussion, is that it looks like it’s going to be Ophelia in the absence of the jumbo flyer for the Sonata.  

(So before I posted this I thought I’d just check whether the additional flyers for the Sonata had popped up, not that I’ve been checking every week since Christmas or anything, and guess what, they have. It’s the swing jacket then, with a bit of sampling to get 3.5 stitches per inch with a brown that’s more brown than the fibre I last used. Don’t hold your breath as I have to get the flyer, dye the alpaca, find an acceptably brown fibre and then produce a yarn that knits to the right tension. Yes, I could just buy the yarn but where’s the fun in that?)

 

I have an upgrade, is this a beast or what? This is my new Glimakra umbrella swift, the larger one capable of holding a 100″ skein. It does look brand new, there are no signs of wear on the clamp, no dust, no dints but it’s really only new-to-me. I don’t usually stick a pen in my skeins but I thought it might show the scale. For those of you in the UK I’d recommend an occasional browse through the pages of The Loom Exchange. It doesn’t matter if you don’t weave or spin yet because in the miscellaneous section there are sometimes swifts, ballwinders and yarn. If there’s still one advertised in the early part of the miscellaneous page don’t get your hopes up because it’s mine but there will be others. While you are there you could pop into the spinning section just to have a look at the pretty wheels…

The swift is displaying the 72″ skein of cashmere I dyed for socks for mum. (Standard disclaimer for anyone thinking of making socks from this deliciously soft fibre – they are not worth it if you ever intend to walk in them unless you really, really enjoy darning). This was going to be a really big ball and if I had any sense I’d have divided it up as I wound it. I obviously have no sense as I set out to get it all on the one cone despite never having achieved this before. The yarn that comes off the cone is thin because of the spinning oil in it, the yarn that’s been dyed and rinsed is fluffier and I’ve never yet managed to get a cone of yarn back on the cone after dyeing. At some point l get a grip on reality, break the yarn and start a second cone. As they say, practice makes perfect, or in my case practice makes good enough to get it back on the cone.

Do I have the capability of making a 100″ skein? – oh yes, but that’s a story for another day.

This project made a sweater for a starfish look reasonable. I did try and stretch this out a bit, stuffing it in the knitting bag and only pulling it out for after school knitting inspection but as I needed to make visible progress each day and it’s a chunky knit I couldn’t really make it hold out any longer. At the maximum there were only 66 stitches in a round and for most of it there are only half that number so it really did qualify as a quick knit. For anyone who plays Viva Pinata, this is a Taffly. It’s based on a housefly and is one of the first pinatas to visit a new garden, you just plant flowers and it shows up.

It was blindingly obvious to anyone over the age of seven that grey wool was not going to dye to a pale turquoise but the promise of making his fly from the leftovers from my sweater meant that I was left in peace to finish my project before I had to make a start on his. We poured navy dye on the leftovers from Rogue anyway, cooked it a bit and left it overnight to cool (during which time it absorbed an amazing amount of residual dye) and the next morning we went out and bought some Taffly coloured wool. I was overruled in the colour choices, I know that it’s a dark body and a pale pattern but the chief designer thought otherwise and who am I to argue. I ended up using double knitting wool held double because there wasn’t the colour choices in aran wool and I wanted a fast knit.

If you want to make one at home I started with eight stitches (like a toe up sock), knitted for two rows and then doubled the stitches, knitted for four rows, doubled again, knitted for eight rows and doubled again (like a pi shawl). I ended up with 64 stitches. There was a straight bit, a bit of pattern and then some decreases to make a thorax. (Did you really expect me to take notes?) I did a few rapid increases, a straight bit and rapid decreases for the head, ending up with 4 stitches. I worked this as an icord proboscis, like you do, then dropped one strand of yarn and opened up the tube by increasing in every stitch for a few rows then casting the lot off. The legs are icord again, I thought that there should be more than four but that was what I was instructed to do and he was right after all. The eyes are buttons and the wings made of Timtex (a really thick interfacing used for hat brims, fabric bowls and the like). If the wings survive the week I’ll be surprised. It’s stuffed with reject fleece, with a few beans in its abdomen (He came home from school one day this week and confided in me that abdomen means spider’s bum. Isn’t education wonderful?)

I’m hoping that there will be something else now to take his mind off which pinata I’m going to knit next. With this in mind I’ve been wholeheartedly helping with the recreation of the rainforest on the dining room table. We have a sloth, parrots and a flying butterfly. The Taffly can fly too..

The internet was in pieces all over the floor on Friday which would explain why the blog was inaccessible for most of the day. It was there but not joined up to the outside world  The internet is now all back together again with new improved bits that have pretty lights on (New! Improved!) so maybe it will now all work, all the time.
If you comment and find that it won’t show because it’s waiting for moderation this doesn’t mean that I don’t love you any more. I am deleting upwards of ten spam comments a day and it’s getting tedious. I’m tweaking things so that the spam gets caught in moderation and the posts from real people don’t. That’s the plan anyway although the reality may take a while to catch up. 

This is what you get with three strands of four ply on a US10.5 needle (6mm ish). It’s the Lizard Ridge pattern from Knitty, if you follow the second set of directions for the afghan but only do one and a half pattern repeats you get something of suitable dimensions for a child’s scarf. If I’d done two full pattern repeats the edge would have been straighter but I wanted those curves. I did mine in garter stitch to avoid a stockinette rolling edge and I picked up not one single wrap. It was next to impossible with what was the ultimate in splitty yarn so I didn’t even try. I did plan to just use yarn from the overflowing pink odd ball bag but I fell by the wayside with the green scarf. There was a huge ball of luminous green and nothing to knit against it so I turned to the other odd ball bag of school uniform green. The huge ball ran out before the end, it just goes to show how quickly you can get through a ball of yarn when you’re working it doubled.

Yet again this week I was scratching for ideas as to why nothing in the knitting bag was any closer to being done, although I’d spent a geological age spinning and plying the seafoam corriedale that was a daylight activity and I knit mostly at night whilst half watching terrible television. Something must have been eating into my knitting time, what could it have been? I was struggling to work out why I hadn’t been knitting this week whilst looking at a pile of scarves. It wasn’t until I came to pick them up and photograph them that it occurred to me that if I hadn’t knitted these I might have a sock that was much closer to the toe than the cuff.

If you pop back on Monday I’ll have a knitted housefly to show you. Is that inspirational or what?

I said that I’d give it my best shot and if I still couldn’t produce decent laceweight I was going to give up wait until I was a better spinner. This was to be my best attempt, fueled by my recent spinning class, the purchase of “Essentials of Yarn Design for Handspinners” (Mabel Ross) and some well prepared fibre. It seemed to take a long time to spin and ply the 4oz, my belief that plying takes no time at all is well and truly shattered because I spent a day plying this (in between doing laundry, unpacking shopping and vacuuming the floor). The time spent was worth it. I find the counting treadles and inchworm spinning tedious but it does get results. The verdict – it is lovely and I’m well pleased. The colour changes are subtle and add depth without making hard stripes.

This is half of the bump of Crown Mountain Farm, corriedale pencil roving in “Seafoam”. 888 yards, 2 ply, 26 wraps per inch with a tic tac for scale. You might just be able to see that the skein on the left looks stretched and lifeless compared to the one on the right (the top photo shows it better). That’s because the one on the right has been soaked and dried and the one on the left has come straight off the bobbin. When it’s been finished it will be as soft and pouffy as the one on the right.

What’s it going to be? Well I have a few ideas, I don’t fancy spinning the other 4oz right now so I’m either sticking with the 800+ yards that I have already or putting it away for another time when I can face the remaining fibre. I’ve been doing maths of the kind that seemed totally pointless when we did it at school – if it takes three men four hours to dig a trench six feet long how long would it take five men to dig a trench twice as long? I could not see that there would ever be a time in my life when I’d need to use this but now is that time. If it takes 1200 yards of yarn to make a stole 80″ by 22″ how long a stole would you get from 800 yards of yarn if you only made it 18″ wide? The answer is 65″ although it might be an inch or two more or less depending on where it needs to finish on a pattern repeat and how much of the 1200 yards the full sized stole would have used. The supplementary question is, “Is 18″ by 65″ a good size for a stole?” I know that 80″ would be too long for me but I’m not sure if 18″ by 65″ is a bit skinny. The other alternative is to make it 22″ by 54″. Thinner and longer or wider and shorter or wider and longer? (which involves more yarn)
Anyone any thoughts?

Guess what, it fits. You’ll have to take my word for that at the moment as the senior photographer was busy packing for his trip to Paris so the photos of me in it were taken by my son. The gratuitous one of my bum (”I’ve taken a photo of your bum mummy, tee hee”) has been deleted from the card thank you so very much and the rest were not so flattering for me or the sweater. The only one fit to share was the one of the neck and hood, I chopped my own head off in the edit as I was doing my best rabbit-in-the-headlights impression. The slightly wonky camera angle is all his own work. This is Rogue, on a US9 using a grey BFL that I bought on ebay.
I made a few pattern amendments, I added 4″ to the hips, decreasing the additional stitches away before the waist. I worked the decreases two stitches away from the side panels to match the increases on the cuffs that are worked two stitches away from the panel (cuff on the left, body on the right). I changed the facings to a simple six row stockinette with a turning row and I left off the pocket. The sleeves looked to be way too long but when it was all sewn up they are only marginally too long and I can live with that.
The only thing I would do differently if I were knitting it again is the final shaping on the hood. I’m not in love with the double decreases and I’d like to see what it looked like with a pair of single decreases. I would knit it again, despite knitting two and a half sleeves and one and a half bodies (due to my inability to change needles after the facing) it was still a fun knit. I loved the way that the body shaping is all done within the cables (except of course for the addition of the necessary WFB hip flare) and although you can see the panels narrowing you can’t see where the decreases fall. It is a really clever pattern and I enjoyed it. Working the hood made me rethink my plans for a sweater where the sleeves are picked up and knitted down to the cuffs because having all that weight under the work was Not Fun.

For those who said that my rowing would be cured by blocking, well you were right. I won’t worry about it ever again.

The outdoor photos are all terrible, I think we’ve all seen that I don’t take decent photos under good conditions and the conditions on Friday were very definately not good. It was raining and when it wasn’t raining it was misty. This is my son Daniel and his alpaca, Cocoa. She’s not really his, she belongs to Elaine at Mayfield alpacas but she’s very generously allowing us to have a bit of a share by running an adopt an alpaca scheme. Daniel had a fantastic time the other weekend trying to pick just one alpaca from those munching hay in the stables but he finally settled on this one. The deciding factor was that she shares her name with a character in one of his Xbox games (Coco Bandicoot) and he only found out that it was Cocoa like drinking chocolate sometime later.

This photo is for Mr WFB who will please note that alpacas are indeed taller than little boys. When you see them at a distance in the field they don’t look that big but they get bigger up close.

This one is either Enrique or Mary and was little and cute and for that reason I took his/her photo. What a sweetie.

Wednesday was the day of the goat. The big skein in the middle is cashmere, destined for socks for my mother. She knows that they will need darning every week because she already has a pair of 100% cashmere socks. If she’s prepared to keep mending them then I’m prepared to knit them. The yarn has featured here before, it was the cashmere used in the twisty cowly thing, purchased from ebay seller Colourmartuk. I have two cones of it, one of which has had a bit used for the cowl. I tried to dye the whole 150g at once in a standard sized turkey pan as I was a bit short on time. The result is that I have some of the native colour left in the skein. Now for me this is usually an utter horror – if I’m dyeing yarn then there shall be no white bits, not ever. Yes, I am picky. I can’t work out why it is that I’m not so bothered about this skein, I don’t feel an urge to overdye the natural bits, I can live with it. I’m so sure that I can live with it that I’ve reskeined it just so I can’t change my mind at a later date. The colour in the top photo is true, the reskeined one looks washed out with the light from the window.
The braid is merino/mohair (70:30) and is destined for socks for me. Yet again, I failed to dye roving that was mostly white with splodges of colour. It’s either because the roving is too wet and the dye is migrating before it strikes or there’s not enough vinegar in the dye. This time I think that it’s the latter because the blue stopped where I put it, only the green traveled. More practice is needed. (My son suggests that I just need to use more of the white dye) I have no idea what this will look like when spun, I’m guessing that it will be lime green with the odd blue splodge. I’m considering dyeing some BFL to match (ha, as if) and painting half of it in blue and green sections. That would force a stripe in the sock. The other half I’d splodge in a similar way to the mohair blend. The result would be two pairs of socks that are similar but different, one with stripes and one random. It would be interesting to see the difference.

There will be no post on Monday, the first day back to school usually involves major clearing up followed by a sit down with a coffee.

It’s another variation on a theme. This is the green and brown long draw sample coupled with some school uniform green acrylic from the odd balls that I inherited last summer. I didn’t think that there would be enough of the handspun on its own for a scarf but knitting it in stripes with something else still showed the colour change but made it go further. The lace pattern is something picked from “Heirloom Knitting”, it’s Old Spanish Lace or Madeira Cascade. I was thinking of using a scaled down version of this pattern for socks and I wanted to see what it looked like, it zig zags nicely but I wasn’t sure that I’d like the lace bits.What struck me after I’d started knitting the 220+ stitches was that a 20 row repeat was not a good one to pick when you’re worried about running out of yarn. Luckily two pattern repeats made for a scarf of suitable width, I may have had enough for the third repeat and there again I may have had only enough for the first 16 rows of the pattern. The edges curl a little and they don’t match, one is more pointy than the other. It might have stayed blocked better if it had been all wool but the odd ball bag had very little wool in it. I am picky enough that I’d make the next one of these with a provisional cast on along the centre, just so I get edges that match. I’m saying that now but if it comes to a 220 stitch provisional cast on I might just live with the wonky edges.

It’s the right sort of size but although it used up four small balls of green and the large ball of handspun the impact on the big bag of bits was zero. There’s another bag just for school uniform green and the handspun wasn’t in a bag to start with. The next longways variant I’m thinking of is something based on Lizard Ridge, it’s another way of making a striped odd ball scarf slightly more interesting to knit. This time I’m going to make sure that all the yarn comes out of that one bag of yarn because there’s no other way that it’s going to shrink.

If you were expecting to see a sweater today well the body facings are sewn up, the sleeves are blocked, one sleeve seam is done and I’m looking at the sleeve cap. It doesn’t look as if it’s going to sew itself into the body by the power of suggestion but I’m not guilty enough to get on with it just yet.