Wool For Brains

My first attempt at solar dyeing was a success. This is some 2 ply BFL that was left in a jar in the greenhouse with dye stock and a little vinegar. In the end I left it a week but I could have got away with less, I pulled it out after three days to check it and the colour hasn’t changed since then. Hopefully I’ve provided enough standard orange things for you to see what the colour really is, it should go well with the black in the stealth socks. I’m happy that the idea is sound and the next step will be a big pot with a sizeable amount of yarn in it. I should be able to dye a greater amount in a solid colour than I’ve previously been able to simply because I will be able to put it in a bucket. My biggest heat proof pot just isn’t that big. That will be need to wait a while until we have periods of reliable sunshine and I’ve emptied the greenhouse of seedlings.

I’d like to thank Sophie-of-the-comments for the identification of the noisy green bird. It is a male Indian ring necked parakeet and I can’t wait to be knowledgeable about this to my allotment neighbours. I may know next to nothing about growing veg (except for squash which I can hold my own on) but I should be able to keep up my end of a conversation about parakeets.

The blog will be back on Tuesday, probably with some blocked lace.

Why knit socks when you can buy them for £X a dozen at Shop B? Yes, well we’ve all heard it and you either know the reasons why or you don’t. You might as well compare Spam and Parma ham. If you want to argue with me about it, it’s a good way to be struck off my knitting list. If you don’t like the idea of socks then there’s no way on this earth you’re getting the lace. This pair may turn out to be the best example of why I knit socks. My husband plays in a brass band and at Christmas they play in the entrance to a supermarket. The phrase often heard is that “Christmas is a band’s harvest”, meaning that the money that they take in the six weeks running up to Christmas supports them through the leaner periods of the year. (Stay with me, I’m getting to the socks soon) David came in shivering after one afternoon’s playing because his feet were cold. Now this is totally unacceptable at Casa WFB, if your feet are cold then put on some socks. To have cold feet whilst actually wearing socks is a thing outside my comprehension, the socks must be faulty in some way so I had an immediate foot inspection. The fault was clear to see – they were shop socks. The answer was clear enough too, I’ll knit a pair. The teensy problem was that they needed to be plain black to meet the band’s uniform requirements. I love my husband very much, enough in fact to immediately buy a ball of black sock yarn. I love my eyes too so I’ve only recently cast it on, it being still quite a while until Christmas.

Once you think about the challenge, band uniform socks don’t have to be plain black. The bits that show do have to be black but as black shoes are also part of the uniform the foot of the sock can be whatever colour you like. These are stealth socks, the public part is sombre, the private part is not. As an aside, it also gets me out of knitting plain black all the way to the toe. I’ve not decided whether these are going to be part of a husband’s present so you may not get to see the more interesting parts for a while. I have a chart and the yarn but I need to get off the lace kick and back to socks for these to be going anywhere.

(There is no fibre content in this post, zip, nada, zilch. This does not mean that I’m lurching over to the green side, normal fibre related content will return shortly)

I’m only showing you this because there was some interest in my green fingers. This is why there has been no spinning of late. I did threaten you with photos of my beans but it was an idle threat. They are pretty unimpressive right now as it’s a bit early for anything other than broad beans especially if you’re slow off the mark in planting them. Broad beans are hardy but the rest will keel over with frost. In an effort to show that I am “a multidimensional person who occasionally stops knitting” (thanks Christie) I do have a selection of greenery to display. The onions (three varieties), garlic (white and purple) and shallots are at the front, what’s left of the leeks is behind them and the beans and peas are lurking behind the leeks. The runner beans will be on the left (they are not in yet but I have the start of the canes up in a rare show of forward planning), with sugar snap peas, broad beans and dwarf beans running to the right. That was the plan but the dwarf beans aren’t going to be dwarf enough to go in the space that’s left so my plan is obviously in need of revision. The peas and broad beans are planted out as I’m betting that there won’t be another frost, the runners and dwarf beans are in the greenhouse, still to show their heads above soil level. This has a lot to do with me being a slacker and only sowing them last week. This is what the plot looked like when I took it over. the photo is taken from about the same place and you can see the same window frame lurking at the bottom of the plot.

The trees and daffodils on the right hand side of the photo mark the middle of my plot, there are two eating apples, two cookers and a feral thing that needs to come out. The right hand side of the garden is a bit bare with the last of the purple sprouting broccoli and six red cabbages in it so far. It will have potatoes, squash, courgettes and a variety of brassicas in due course. If it hadn’t rained yesterday then the potatoes would already be in. The asparagus is going in over that side too. The bottom of the plot is full of glass and wood that someone thought might come in useful and I think needs to go to the tip. I have a ten year plan for clearing it all up.

Daniel has his own plot at the front where he can grow whatever he wants and engage passers by in conversation about guinea pigs and Spongebob Squarepants. So far he has sunflowers, sweet peas, a hollyhock and pansies. He’s got some celery and carrots to go in (for the guinea pigs) and he’s growing some sort of a squash that looks like a snake. He is the reason that we have the allotment, it’s not a back to nature kick but more of an educational project. We can see the pretty red flowers on the beans being visited by bees, then the flowers shrivel and reveal a tiny bean. There are flowers on the apple trees, in time there will be tiny apples followed by hulking great Bramleys that fall with a thump on any crop that’s underneath. We are watching the development of the tadpoles and have been reading my biology textbook to see what happens next. We missed the eggs and the external gills (I must try to catch that stage next year) and we’re waiting on back legs at the moment. I didn’t know that at the same time as their back legs grow their gut shortens and they become meat eaters. He hasn’t stopped to consider what meat there is for the tadpoles to eat in their pond (think of it as evolution in action) but we will be giving them a few slugs as soon as we see those legs.

I have a ramshackle hut cum greenhouse of my very own, complete with every type of seed tray known to man. I am confident that in there is the right sort of plant pot or tray to grow anything at all, should I only be able to find it. It is the typical allotment hut, having evolved over the decades from anything that was to hand and free. I did start having a bit of a tidy up as I took over a 30 year collection of “stuff” and could barely move in there for things that might come in useful one day. I sorted though enough of it to reveal the windows (I kid you not) and now I have enough shelf space to put my own things on. I’ve not taken down the bird’s nest yet but I did take out the bird’s skeleton after Mr Gruesome had given it a close inspection. There are yards of shelving that I haven’t had the heart to poke under yet, I’m hoping to eventually work up to having enough room to swing a cat. That might take me ten years too.

On the right of the photo is another construction that resembles a greenhouse in that the walls are transparent. It’s about 6″ square and tall enough to stand up in and I haven’t a clue what I’d want to grow in it. I may take it down but I don’t want to do that until I’ve worked out what it would have previously been used for. It’s not as if I’m short of space at the moment, I’m happy to lose a 5″ by 15″ piece of land to a crop that is permanently in the ground but is only productive for six weeks (asparagus). For anyone desperate to work out how the two photos link together, the first photo was taken from a point on the far right hand side of the second photo, but looking the other way. There’s a rhubarb bed and tadpole pond to the left of the shed in which you can see my mother sowing seeds. The blue water butts are an essential allotment feature because our site has no mains water. You catch what rain you can and if there’s a prolonged dry spell then you watch your plants shrivel. The annual rental is cheaper than sites with water but in a dry season your crops suffer. I have a line of them around the side of the greenhut (”greenhouse” sounds much too classy for what I actually have) so with eleven of them I am well provided for.
It’s a patch of green in an urban area, there are mice, rats, rabbits, foxes, toads, frogs, adders and a parakeet. The last two are very unusual, I’ve been told someone has seen adders which are the only native poisonous snake in the country. I’ve never seen a snake in my life and I’m never likely to when accompanied by a stomping seven year old. There is without doubt a parakeet, it’s done well to survive the winter but now that it has discovered next door’s bird feeder it should live through the summer with ease. I’ve seen it hanging about with the marauding pigeons but it doesn’t look to have the right sort of beak to rip my cabbages apart.

My jobs for this week are potato planting, digging trenches for my asparagus plants and weeding. It’s a pity I can’t have a ten year plan for the weeding too.

I said I’d next be posting on Tuesday but I do have some actual knitting to show so I didn’t wait. I was spoiled for choice with the arrival of three lace books on the same day. A new start was inevitable, but which one with so many to choose from? In the end this pattern won out, in part because I thought I had the ideal yarn for the pattern. This is “Springtime” from the First Book of Modern Lace Knitting by Marianne Kinzel. The yarn is mine from the Crown Mountain Farm pencil roving in the seafoam colourway. I had hoped that it would show some colour variation without being in your face stripey and that looks to be the case. Springtime is a dinner cloth or tea cloth designed for a square table. I’m working it as a triangle and I think I’m going for five repeats of the leaf pattern followed by the edging as in the book. I have 900 yards of yarn and as I only used half of the roving I’m not worried about running out. It is possible that this might come out from the first 900 yards,  I seem to be getting a lot of knitting from not much yarn but I will have now blighted my chances of this happening by talking about it.
 

My first impression of the pattern was “argh” because it has blank spaces and a 28 stitch pattern repeat that’s written over 38 squares. I’m used to working lace patterns where only half of the row is given, when you reach the centre you turn back and work your way from right to left along the row, reversing the shaping. This can be charted in the same way so I found that I could write it down in half the space. That made it look less of an effort but I had to live with the blank squares in the chart because they are necessary as the stitch count varies from row to row. I found that challenging to start with because I couldn’t see on the pattern which bits were supposed to line up. It was clear enough after I’d worked the first repeat and found the line for the leaf stem and the lines for the edges of the leaves.
 
If I was starting this again I think I’d replace the central increases on the vein of the leaf with a YO, k, YO because it’s faster to work than a k,p,k in the same stitch. I’m not sure whether I’d skip the twisted stitches on the stem of that smaller central leaf, I’ll know whether they were worth the effort when I’ve finished it and blocked it. The yarn was worth the time I spent on it, it wavers a bit in thickness and twist but on the whole it’s good and I like it. The photo was taken on Friday when I could still stretch it out on the needles. I have another two pattern repeats done now and I think that I’m about to start the border.
 

Who knew there would be so much interest in my beans – I’ll have to turn that from a threat to a promise. I managed to take some photos without labelling myself as a crazy lady and I’ll show them later in the week.

It’s not my birthday today, it was (and will be) in June but today I received the last of my birthday presents. I am one of those people who are apparently difficult to buy for (although funnily enough I never have a problem buying for me) and if you have to buy for someone like that, book vouchers do it every time. I used the last of my Amazon vouchers to buy some knitting books (no surprises there then). I did have “Victorian Lace Today” on preorder sometime last November. The original shipping date of early January kept moving backwards. When it reached the end of February I felt just a little messed about with and cancelled the order. I keep seeing some interesting VLT knits out there in blogland so I thought it was time to try to order it again. The two Kinzel books are an example of why bidding on Ebay is not always best. I was hanging my nose over a bobbin winder and the seller was also selling the first book of modern lace knitting (that would be “modern” as in “1954″) I thought I’d wander over to Amazon and have a look and by the time you add in postage it was cheaper to buy it new there than second hand on Ebay. I have no interest in knitting doilies but the only difference between a doily and a shawl is size and presentation. I am spoiled for choice and it’s a lovely place to be.

I now love lace again, I’d forgotten how much fun it could be. The only lace I’ve knitted since September was not much fun. The Inky Dinky Spider Stole was a chore to knit because I knew deep down that I was wasting my time knitting it. The green fluffy floaty thing was ok but I was never in love with it, in the state where you can’t put it down and you turn down the offer of wine because it might interfere with your knitting. The thing that has made me feel the love again has been the Swedish scarf, nupps and all. It’s just been a pleasure to knit, the lace is lovely, the patterns are self evident and the rows are short so the pattern shows really quickly. Maybe I should knit more scarves instead of shawls.

So if I’m in love with lace and I have three new lace books, did I immediately throw my lovely Swedish scarf to one side and cast on for something new? Of course I did. It was difficult to choose a project with all those voices saying “knit me, knit me now” but I went with the one that shouted loudest and had the sense to suggest a yarn. It’s a swatch at the moment although it has the potential to carry on growing if I like it enough. At the moment I haven’t decided whether I love it beyond reason or I’m going to rip it out. I’ll decide when I’ve got to the end of the next pattern repeat. No, you don’t get a bigger picture, I’m trying to generate fibre content despite spending all my knitting time at the allotment so I really need to maintain the suspense and keep that bit of yarn for another day. It’s either that or I have to start showing you pictures of my beans and you don’t want that do you?

I hope you all get the weekend weather you need, either rain for your seedlings (me) or an end to lashing rain or snow. The blog will return on Tuesday, hopefully with fibre content and bean free.

Look, an actual finished object. Let’s not go back and see exactly when was the last time I finished something that wasn’t a hat, we can agree that it’s been a while. These socks have two parents that have previously been seen here. The link with the orange and red is clear enough to see, the left over BFL fibre from that sock (without any glitter) is one ply of this yarn. The other ply is the fibre that reminded me of rhubarb and custard and although it looks nothing like the green sock it is the same base fibre (30% mohair, 70% merino) just dyed differently. There is another sibling sock in the pipeline, made up of the rhubarb and custard and the left overs from some reddish merino. You’ll have to wait a while for that one though as there is a queue for the wheel right now. My spinning time is spent at the allotment and the wheel is gathering dust.

Usually I have a clear idea of what I want the yarn to do and I force the fibre to do my bidding. (Be glad that I don’t set my sights on world domination) With these I just let it do what it wanted. I don’t do random very often because I’d prefer something that looks random but is carefully controlled so I know what it is going to do. Random colour changes mean that you don’t necessarily get two socks that match and you don’t necessarily get two socks that you like. These socks come under the category of “ok” because although the yarn is good they don’t match and they are uninspiring. The first one had chunks of solid red and the second one was more yellow. They aren’t the most stunning socks that I’ve ever made but it means that there’s another pair in use before wash day.

I did experiment on the cuff with a pattern that I’d seen on a blog. It involves knitting three together and cabling and I was concerned that it was going to be tricky to knit at a tight gauge and I also wondered whether it was going to be rather more textured than I’d want on a sock. This is a pattern sample, just one repeat set fairly well down the cuff. It was enough to see that I wouldn’t want to make an entire sock in it. I liked the result but not the knitting of it, unlike the rest of the sock where I liked the knitting of it but not the result.

Regular readers may recall that I’m seriously thinking about hand painting enough yarn for a sweater but the stumbling block has been lack of a big enough pot. My idea was to paint the skeins, wrap them in black plastic and lay them out on my mother’s hot concrete path. It’s still not hot enough outside for that but under glass is another matter, I have a little greenhouse at the allotment and the thermometer was sitting at 100F on Saturday. The forecast was for hot and sunny all week, it may only be April but last week it was warm enough for shorts and sun cream. With an eye on the big yarn dyeing exercise I’m starting with a test skein. I have some 2 ply BFL that I bought on a kilo cone. It was the green in the Anemoi mittens and it’s also been socks. I need a small amount of orange to go in something that I haven’t shown you yet and I decided not to trek to the yarn shop and buy 300m+ of a colour that I may never use again. I’ve wound off what I hope is enough, put it in a pickle jar with some yellow and fuschia dye, wrapped it in a black plastic bag and stuck it in the greenhouse. I’m hoping that over the course of the week the liquid becomes clear as the dye is absorbed into the yarn.
 

Those of you that live in this country will be laughing now because the weather changed about three hours after I put the jar in the greenhouse. Sun, what sun? On Thursday I’ll pull it out and put it in a pan if necessary. You have to try these things.

I have always thought that nupps were bobbles with a PR consultant. Not that I’ve ever knitted a nupp, the appearance of one in a lace pattern is enough to make me put the pattern back on the shelf. I decided some time ago that bobbles were too much work for their impact, I can knit backwards but I don’t enjoy it and I don’t much like turning my work for all those 5 stitch rows. Bobbles are out chez WFB. That’s not to say that I haven’t made my fair share in my time, I once made a cotton dk sweater with intarsia flowers with the name of the flower spelled out underneath in bobbles (that would be navy bobbles just to make things worse) and I’ve made several sweaters with cable and bobble motifs. Since my return to knitting I’ve made exactly one item with bobbles and that was socks. These are Lucy Neatby’s Fiesta Feet, it’s a fun knit and I’ll do it again sometime but probably without the bobbles.

How then did I end up knitting this which clearly does have nupps? Well the pattern wasn’t in english (although the designer now has an english version on her website) and I translated the number of pattern repeats and so on. When it came to the charts I had a good look at the first chart but only glanced at the second and third charts and of course they are the ones where X marks the nupp. By the time that I realised this I had knitted enough of chart 1 to be committed. I did think about substituting the nupp with a bead but in the end decided to just knuckle down and knit them. After all there are only 76 stitches in a row, it’s not like starting a 400 stitch row full of nupps. I am so glad that I did, what do you know, nupps are not at all like bobbles. You create them in one row and finish them in the next with no turning of work or knitting backwards required. They have a high impact to little effort and that’s my sort of knitting. I liked knitting chart 1, I like chart 2 even better. I can see a wrap consisting just of chart 2 and an edging, which could be chart 3 providing that the edge doesn’t roll when I block it. I have my doubts there and I think I really should have followed the directions to cast off with doubled yarn or added half a dozen rows of garter stitch.

Instead of making the second half of the scarf starting with a provisional cast on, knitting the body with chart 1 and then returning to complete the edging I started with a provisional cast on, knitted the edging and then started knitting chart 1. My reasoning is that the edging is only 15 rows so I could cast on over the cable of a circular needle and not have it flapping about menacingly for too long. By casting on the 77 stitches for the edging when I came back the other way there should have been the 76 stitches I needed for the body of the scarf. I say should have been because I had spares. I still think that should work if you are experienced in that particular cast on, which I clearly am not. It is really the same yarn as in the photo above, this was taken in poor light and it’s gone oddly blue. The swooping points are due to the pins that don’t show in the photo, I suspect that they’ll be rolling points after it’s blocked.

(I know that I don’t post on a weekend, just think of it as a Monday post a little early)

(Click for the big picture) After the Inky Dinky Spider stole where I couldn’t read my knitting on part of the pattern this is a relaxing knit. It would be going better if my hands were less rough from gardening but such is life. I’ve had a trial pin out to see what size this is likely to finish to, I’m on the third repeat of the first chart and I have one more repeat to do before the pattern changes. If I want to make it longer I need to make that decision very quickly. What I wanted to end up with is something to drape around the shoulders rather than a scarf. This is pinned as wide as I could decently make it, 14″, and a pattern repeat is 5″. I estimate that if I follow the pattern as written it will finish to around 55″. I’ve draped a tape measure around my shoulders and that will just about do although a few more inches would be nice. I don’t want to add another 10″ to the length (which I’d get from one more repeat of chart 1 on each side) so I’m sticking with the pattern and doing four repeats of the first chart. I may yet add more repeats of the second chart but that’s a decision for another day. I think that my goose is cooked with respect to a stole – I really needed it to be wider and however long I make it now it will still be a scarf. Before anyone says it, yes, if I had knitted a sample first I would have been able to work out the likely finished size but I hadn’t really thought about what I wanted until after I’d started.

Questions from the comments (you have absolutely no idea how much I’ve always wanted to say that) – no, I don’t speak a word of whatever the pattern is written in (Swedish I think). I didn’t see that as a problem with this pattern because it’s charted and I can read a lace chart. Lace is lace, there are left and right slanting decreases, double decreases and yarn overs. There are also nupps but I hadn’t worked that out when I started (note to self, in future look at all the charts before casting on) I did flounder a bit in finding the words that told me how many pattern repeats to do until I found a web page on counting in Swedish. In hindsight it would have been faster to look at the photo but I just didn’t think about that at the time.

As I’m knitting this in a standard yarn (rather than something that I made) when I’m done I can weigh it and work out how many yards I used. I have a feeling that I might be knitting this again (although I might not be saying that after I’ve finished with those nupps).

I have four pairs of socks on the needles and I’m not knitting any of them. Instead of filling in an idle minute with a sock, it’s a hat that I pick up. I’ve no idea why this is, maybe something to do with me wearing sandals but it’s all hats here at the moment. The other good point about them is that because they are thick yarn there’s less chance of my gardener’s hands snagging the yarn. It’s been a real problem with the Zephyr, my right index finger is the main culprit. It’s not that I don’t wear gloves in the garden, I do, but at some point I’ll take them off for delicate work and then forget to put them back on for the mucky stuff. I’m sure that I will return to the heap of socks at some point but for now it’s all hats and hand cream. Well actually, less of the hand cream. I have a big pot of it and good intentions but I’m noticing that it doesn’t do any good if you don’t actually get it on your hands.

These are Tychus from Knitty. I made dozens of these last year and in the process used up all the oddments of aran weight yarn. I’m now working my way through the next bag of odd balls and using two balls together seems to come out about the right weight. It also gives a bit of depth to the colour when you use two balls in a similar shade. You can see that better on the sole representative of the blue family of hats (whose siblings are already in the give away box) This is probably my favorite hat to knit, it uses the same needles throughout rather than changing from circular to dpns and if I use a provisional cast on and a three needle cast off then there is no seaming. It is probably faster to do a standard cast on and sew the seam but because I am such a tight knitter I find it a real challenge to get the cast on and cast off rows to be as stretchy as the rest of the hat. This way I get a nearly invisible, stretchy join. I also really dislike sewing up and will find any excuse to avoid it. The other amendment I made to the pattern is to add two stitches for a deeper brim and add wraps to the turns. A vertical row of holes is not a design feature that I want in a hat.

The allotment is coming along after being ignored all winter. So far this week I’ve planted gherkins, lettuce and shallots and eaten leeks, cauliflower and purple sprouting broccoli. I also have an amazing crop of tadpoles, there were many people who mocked my “wildlife pond” when I took over the allotment last summer but the toads don’t mind if their pond is a sunken blue plastic bath. I think it’s going to need an hour’s work a day every day until I’ve finished weeding and planting so that’s my spinning time gone unless we have a wet spell. I’ve seriously considered putting the wheel away but it might yet rain despite the forecast for this week so I’ve left it up just in case.