Wool For Brains

We are away for the weekend so no post until Tuesday. If there’s as much mud there as there is here it may well be Wednesday after I’ve struggled with the washing. The son of the house gets to miss one day of school (his school is closed on Friday anyway) but I can live with that as there will be a field trip and instruction will be given on the following topics:

breed diversity with ten examples (why sheep come in different sorts)
natural selection versus breed improvement (why sheep look the way they do)
examination of an unimproved breed (what sheep did before there were shearers)
the impact of introducing exotic species into the indigenous population (why red squirrels are rare)
promotion of native species (what can we do to help tufty survive)
stories aren’t like real life (why are all the squirrels in picture books red ones?)

Specifically excluded from consideration are the topics of:

Why does mummy want more wool anyway?
Why is there a stinky sheep smell in the car?
Are we nearly there yet?

I take back what I said about the hatbox Louet. I was wrong when I said that it had a “vicious take up” and I put that down to sulking after I’d had the fibre wrenched out of my hand repeatedly. I had to give the leek planting a miss yesterday and spent some time sorting out what the problem with the wheel was. Well, if I’d followed standard procedure on non-operational toys (take it apart, put it back together and change the batteries) I’d have started out right. The problem was a felt ring of fibre that had built up and stopped the bobbin rotating freely. Once I’d pulled that off I could adjust the takeup down to nothing at all. It’s a nice little wheel and I like it.

Other things I got wrong – well I knew that I’d been finding the slip one, knit one of a heel particularly challenging whilst watching the flood news. I hadn’t realised just how bad a job I’d made of it until I came to pick it up when I was calmer. It all had to come out and I’d dropped a stitch too. I started over on the heel last night but my progress was slowed somewhat by three power cuts and trying to find out whether a local dam had burst and flooded the bit of land where our electricity comes from.

This is wrong too. The client looked at it and told me what I did wrong (there should be no black, all colours) but he graciously allowed me to continue as I’ve started. I’m dithering as to whether to rip and start over or continue as set. This one is half way done and there’s another piece to make the same. I know without a doubt that if I rip it then I won’t reknit it so I just have to plod on with the wrong thing.

My leeks are still unplanted because the road I use to get to the allotment is closed. There is another route around but it takes me half an hour rather than five minutes. The brown lake isn’t usually there, that’s the River Rother. The significance of the four feet high grass covered banks around local fields and the bedroom window height banks at the back of certain houses is now very clear, they are there to contain the water that would otherwise be flowing through the streets of Catcliffe right now. They have enough of it there as it is. There are two gates across the Rother downstream that can be used to choke the flow and cause it to flood here where it causes less damage. (Photo shamelessly nicked from the husband’s blog)

This is also very wrong indeed. I am yet again so thankful that my week is a good one, that I have a dry bed under my own roof, a floor without three inches of slime on it, a fridge full of food and lights that come on when it’s dark.

PS The lake is a puddle now, the road is open and it looks like they’ve stabilised the dam.

I have nothing for you today which is just about as unusual as it gets. I’ve always said that the reason for the overflowing knitting bag is so that I have a suitable project for all occasions. If the lace is too taxing then there’s a sock. If the sock is reaching the heel then there’s another sock. I couldn’t find a project that was suitable for when the husband is stranded in his office in the lower Don valley after the Don has broken its banks and started floating cars along the road. Worried – me? Surely not. Let’s just say that the slip one, knit one of a heel flap was beyond me last night. I’m just glad that he had the sense to turn the car around and end up stuck in the office rather than stuck in the car. He got home at 2.30.

It has now stopped raining and I’m going to plant my leeks out. I may just skip the step where you puddle them in.

This is the last pair of striped socks, at least for a while. This is a Blueberry Waffle, except that mine is more of an unripe gooseberry waffle, coming as it does from the bag of green scraps. It has had a previous incarnation with an interesting lace pattern but the management of three balls of yarn and a pattern full of double decreases proved too much for me. It was lovely but too much like hard work and that wasn’t what I wanted from this sock.The knitting is slow going, I have to stop for a major untangling session every half inch because for some reason it struck me as a good idea to compensate for dropping the lace by adding another two balls of green. Some of them are very small and will probably vanish after the heel (said she hopefully). It’s a classic example of “just because you can doesn’t mean you should”, I did have five balls of green but I didn’t have to use them all at the same time.

The one thing you have to plan in a spiral scrap sock is the positioning of the different balls. You can see that all the joins happen away from the heel, the top needle holds the heel stitches and all the different balls come in at least four stitches away from this (the strand on the far right is the working yarn and I’m just about to turn and purl the heel flap). If you have a pattern as well then ideally you need the changeovers in plain areas. My issue with the original pattern I had was I wasn’t working the double decreases in the right colour when I had a choice of two strands of yarn and as a result the colour change was edging ever closer to the heel.

The reason I am a socks and shawls knitter is that I don’t like finishing. It’s not that I can’t do it, I just don’t like it. I’m finished with a project as soon as that last stitch is cast off and all the bits after that are just things that are getting in the way of more knitting. Far better then to sort out the ends as part of the knitting. This is another project for using up some of the scraps, this one was requested by my son and is not a sock (although he wants socks as well). It was explained to me that there were some rules, no colour can be repeated either vertically or horizontally but they can touch diagonally. I think that’s what was agreed, the seven year old to adult translation doesn’t always work properly. It’s ok so far, I checked. (boom-boom)

I’m not going to tell you what it is because if it all goes horribly wrong then I’m going to lose it and pretend that it never happened and I have more chance of weaseling out of “that black and coloured checked thing” than if I’ve identified it. I drafted out what I think should happen next but lost the bit of paper within the time it took to knit the two layers of squares. Yes, I do have a knitting book but for some reason only the drafts of the really big stuff like sweaters make it in there. The notes for socks and thingys get jotted on the nearest scrap of paper and lost. I may not have reached a level of maturity in my record keeping but I’ve certainly learned from past experiences in my knitting. Weaving in the ends as you go means less ends at the end. Simple really.

Before I forget, there’s a page at the side called “free patterns”. If you can already knit a sock it gives you an idea of how to knit the Trumping Eel Falling Water socks. It’s not been test knit (you’ll see why that is an impossibility if you read it) and I’ve already discussed my basic level of record keeping but let’s face it, socks are not intrinsically difficult. Cuff, heel, foot, toe, done. I wish I could say the same for the checked thing.

(Added – sorry about the grimness of the photos – all the light is grey even when you get right next to the window, It’s something to do with the sheets of rain falling outside the window)

I don’t fancy myself as a pattern designer, I’d rather be knitting than writing and my record keeping is somewhat hit and miss (when I write things at all it’s on odd bits of paper that I later write a shopping list on the back of and then throw away). I do sometimes make things up and this is how I did it.
Falling water sock pattern

So just as you’re recovering from the shock of seeing Cassie’s floor, I’m gong to show you mine too. I’d love to say that her pictures inspired me to discover the joys of tidying but my activities on Tuesday had an altogether more sinister beginning. It is the time of year when I have the windows open, that is on those odd moments when the rain is not lashing against them. As a result things fly in, flies, bees, the odd butterfly and also moths. I can’t identify moths, they all come under the category of small brown jobs and by the time I’ve dealt with them the smear that’s left would be unidentifiable even to an expert. I practise catch and release on just about everything but all moths must die. Last week I saw one downstairs and as a result all the wool on display (”on display” is much nicer than saying “littered about” don’t you think?) was bagged up, frozen, warmed up and frozen again. On Monday afternoon I saw a moth upstairs, in the room where the fibre is (please insert your own scary music of choice here).

I’m happy that my storage is moth proof, everything is bagged up and sealed and the boxes have close fitting lids. The risk is in the stuff that’s not been put away, I have some fibre and wool chucked about just asking to be infested. I did try to identify the moth that I’d seen (and killed) and I’m fairly sure that it wasn’t one of these because the wings were the wrong shape. “Fairly sure” just isn’t good enough with what’s at stake so the vacuum cleaner and I had a together moment in the spare bedroom with a supply of plastic bags. As far as I can tell I do not have a moth problem and I’m glad to say that the side effect of a strip search is extreme tidyness. I did have one scary moment after which I had to go downstairs and spin for half an hour with a large cup of tea while I settled down. I was rifling through the wardrobe on the left of the photo searching through carrier bags with “stuff” in them. I opened the handles on one, put my head over it, looked inside and…

…..something moved. Yes, it’s called gravity and it works on the inside of plastic bags just as well as on the outside. A ball of yarn rolled down inside the bag. There is nothing in this country that you’re ever likely to find in a carrier bag in the wardrobe that can hurt you. My reaction of squeaking and dropping the bag was therefore totally inappropriate. In my defence I will say that my imagination had seen huge, ravenous moth larvae ready to leap into my face which is a thought altogether as scary as scorpions (although just as unlikely).

I don’t mind showing the shaming before photo of the spare bedroom because I can feel smug about the after photo. The first question of my husband and my mother (after they’d finished with the shocked language) was “Where did you put it all?” My husband gingerly opened the wardrobe, expecting to find it all stuffed in there and ready to fall on his head only to find that it was no more packed then it was before. I can’t explain it myself, I only threw two things away and yet everything has found a place for itself with the exception of the drum carder which I’m still working on. The other good thing is that there is no dust under the bed – there isn’t room for it. Even though I trust the storage of all the stuff that’s been previously put away properly I went through it anyway, just in case. I suppose the best part about it all really was the timing, I saw the flutterring harbinger of doom on Monday night and I had to wait in on Tuesday for the carrier bringing my wheel (did I mention that I had a new wheel, would you like me to tell you about it again?)

The other side of the bedroom tends to stay relatively tidy, this is because no-one has been able to get around the bottom of the bed to get over there to mess it up. The only access has been to shuffle across the bed and if you’re just sticking things in that room to put away “later” then that’s too much work. It gets tidied up when I sew and I haven’t done any of that for a while. I’m thinking that maybe I ought to start, right after I’ve tidied the window side of the room and put away the leftovers from the last quilt I made. My first project could be the green thing trying to escape from the heap on the left hand side which is the backing of a quilt that is about two hours from being finished. It’s mostly quilted, it’s bound, the only thing to be done is the quilting of the corners – I ran out of steam and put it away for “later” well over a year ago. We may look at that next week, I’ll write a post about why it is that I don’t know what to do next and then once I’ve thrashed it out in the writing the next step will be clear.

As an aside, Not-Sophie asked if I teach spinning, nope I don’t. I plan on sticking a spindle in someone’s hand, giving them a bit of fibre in the other and letting them get on with it. I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically difficult about using a drop spindle, it is old technology with no bells and whistles to complicate things. It spins, you pull, yarn comes. New spinner born, job done.

The green label on the box wasn’t wrong when it said “This way up please – small machine inside”. The hulking great thing on the left is my wheel, the one that folds and packs into a bag for travelling and on the right is also my wheel, the one that goes in a wooden box for travelling. The big one is a Kromski Sonata, the small one is a Louet S40. It’s called a hatbox wheel because that’s what the box for it looks like. It is very, very small, it is very, very pretty having been painted by its previous owner who obviously had skill and taste. When you are spinning the edge of the wheel is facing you so you don’t have to watch the flowers go round (and round). I did think that it would be an excellent loaner wheel for starting people spinning as it’s small, pretty and simple. It also has a vicious take up so I’m reconsidering that idea. Poppy and I need to have some quality time together to see if I can stop her being so snatchy.

The big wheel has been making sock yarn this week. I made another batch of herbal tea bfl (Landscapes dyes chamomile, mountain blue and sage). This one came out with less white bits because I used more water in the dyeing and I think that it’s a bit darker too. Although I loved the colours of the last batch I made I didn’t love the yarn because of the fight I’d had to spin it. This time I made certain that the whole of the fibre I bought for the socks was of the same type, I wasn’t going to be distracted by the lure of the BFL silk because I’d got some of that bagged up first. I like it and when I’ve finished with this round of striped socks it will be next on the needles. The international tic tac measure is out of commission right now (that’s what you get for having an edible standard) but the solid blue in the bottom left corner of the skein is some Cherry Tree Hill supersock for reference (I do mean left, there’s a strand of it wound in the skein, ignore the confusing bit on the right)

That’s all for the yarn, now back to the photos of my new toy. The wheel at the front goes in the box at the back, there’s a fastening inside the box which holds the flyer and a free running bar with a further two bobbins on it. You can use this as a lazy kate when plying. I know this because it says so in the original instructions that came with it. The bobbin is driven straight off the wheel so there is only one ratio (4:1) but it seemed a deal faster than that, I suspect that it’s my new wheel reaction (scary new thing, run away). It’s not going to need an orifice hook, I can get my little finger all the way through.

I’m calling it Poppy because of the other side of the wheel which looks like this (click for bigger). The one thing I regret is not asking the seller if she’d signed her work, she hasn’t and I guess you don’t when what you’re making is for your own pleasure. If I had a suitable table I’d leave it out on display but without the drinks can as I know just how big it is.

The socks should have had a row of boxes running down to the toe but I cut my losses early. I can’t believe that I ever thought it was worthwhile sticking a pattern over something so stripey. I did actually count the rows and plan it to start the pattern in the right place to have two pattern repeats end exactly at the heel and then a further two down the foot. This was a total waste of time because as you can see the effect of the cabling is lost. There’s socmething going on at the cuff but pattern, what pattern? I did half a repeat of the pattern that I had intended and called it a day. This is nearly a full repeat of pattern 119 from Lesley Stansfield’s “New Knitting Stitch Library” but I had intended to knit it from the bottom of the chart to a few rows from the top and then from the top to the bottom to make a box within a box. I could see how the lines of the square would swoop out from the ribbing and then return to ribbing again. It will work but not on such a busy background. I knew that the pattern would fight with the background stripes but I had hoped that it would be more visible than this. There’s a fine line between “subtle” and “not worth the effort”.

These are another set of Stashbuster Spirals, this time with four sets of leftovers. The brown is from these, there’s some orange/brown from these, the red from these, and the orange and yellow from these. That does indeed make five for those who are counting, there was only a little orange from the stealth socks and when it runs out (just about now on this sock) I’ll switch to yellow. I’ve decided how much left over sock yarn is enough, this year it’s a kilo and next year it will be 900g. I’ve had a massive tidy up and as a result the very large heap of small balls has a home so I’m not feeling as much pressure to knit my way down it. I am still going to knit the third striped sock, I have a pattern ready for it and I just need to get something off the needles so I can start it.

This is a much more visible box that came yesterday, it is altogether a better box, it has good clear edges, it does not fight with the background although I’ll accept that maybe the colour leaves a bit to be desired and the scale is too large to ever get it onto the cuff of a sock. The box proclaims that it’s a four piece dining set but it isn’t, it contained the item on the right. There will be more photos tomorrow, unless of course I decide to tell you about my close encounter with a moth (it’s ok, I don’t have them and even if I did you can’t catch them from a blog)

To all the people who called in from Claudia’s blog – thank you for coming over. You can’t tell from this week’s showing but I do from time to time have knitting that works out as planned, it’s not all about poor colour choices and bad design. There would be more projects coming out as planned if I swatched more and thought more rather than leaping straight into the knitting, but where would be the fun in that?

I said that you wouldn’t see how nasty the yarn was once it had been felted, and it did indeed felt more with one wash than the last one did. It isn’t as sturdy as the last one that I made but I still think that I’m stopping at one wash. It’s a good size and obviously if I wash again it to make it sturdier it will also get smaller (I know I didn’t need to say that, did I?). If I change my mind later I can always shrink it some more when my gardening jeans are washed again but I can never make it bigger.

This is the geometric tote from Iris Schreier’s “Modular Knits”, made without the handle as I didn’t want a tote but a bowl. It’s made from some lumpy handspun held double, on a US 10.5 circular needle. I like the halo that the mohair gives it, there were several yarn changes in there but there was mohair in each section. It’s likely that there will be a few more of these in the future, they’re a useful size and fun to knit (once you’ve written the missing “K8″ into the pattern). With both of these I’ve mixed sheep breeds and varied the mohair content from row to row and in each case I got lucky because the shrinkeage across the projects has been uniform. It is holding the start of a “learn to spin” kit to be loaned out to knitters who haven’t yet worked out that what they really want is to be spinners.

The next bag in the series is this one, made from yarn I spun as a sample. It was a three bobbin sample, not that I got carried away or anything, so I had a bit spare after knitting the square I needed. I might still be spinning this had I not been to Wentworth with my birthday money at the weekend. The second photo is the fibre that it was made from, I thought that the dominant colour would be the red but as it turned out it was more brown, with less red and gold. The yarn is navajo plyed and is supposed to knit at 17 stitches and 21 rows to 4″ and substitute for Noro something or other. It does in fact knit to this but it’s a little sturdy and I need a second opinion on whether to press ahead or to make ithe yarn a little thinner. The reason for the oversized sample is to make sure that I can stick with the grist I’m aiming for (when I’ve worked out what that is), I’m going to knit another tension square from the third bobbin and compare it with that from the first. I want to spin enough for a sweater but before I start I want to be very clear that I have it firmly fixed in mind what this yarn is supposed to look like. I have a tendency to drift off into sock weight if I don’t watch myself. I’m hoping that if I spin enough of it I’ll get the feel for it and stick to my target with less effort. The fibre for the sweater is in different colours to this but it’s the same fibre content and prepared the same way. It is lovely to spin and to knit with and it should be no hardship to spin and knit my way through a sweater. I worked my way through three bobbins without a thought and I’d need about 7 or 8 for the sweater.

 

One of the reasons that I like knitting socks is that you can go mad with the colours. You don’t have to worry whether the yarn will work with the rest of your wardrobe, whether it suits your colouring or whether it will clash with your winter coat. I like these colours in a sock, saturated and with a colour change for the knitter with a short attention span. The thing is, this is not a sock (as you may have realised with this being in garter stitch). When I was buying the yarn I knew what I wanted this for, it was never intended for socks, but I still stuck to my preferences for sock yarn. All the socks I have made have been in strong colours, there are no pastel scraps in the leftovers because I’ve never made a sock that could be called “light”.

This is the last project that I cast on before I reined in my recent fit of startitis. It’s currently residing in the knitting bag in the twilight stage of a work in progress, I’ve not touched it for over a week but I’m not quite ready to rip it. The issue is the colour. To be honest I had realised that well before I finished the front and half of the sleeve but I’d chosen to ignore it in the hope that I might feel better about it after a full pattern repeat. As a sock I love this combination of colours, as a baby jacket I think I’d have been better served with a ball of the more pastel ”Petticoat” rather than the vibrant “Feelings” and something more subtle than aubergine.

The reason that I wanted to make this was the interesting construction. This is a free pattern from Garnstudio, it’s worked sideways with short rows to give the fullness at the bottom that you need when you’ve got inches of nappy padding your bum. There are stitches currently on hold where you would expect to put the side seam, once the arm is worked then you pick them back up and continue working the front (except it will be the back by then but you know what I mean). There are no side seams, just the sleeve seams. I did have a cunning plan to avoid that seam with a provisional cast on (in yellow) and a three needle bind off but it is more than likely that I won’t get to the end of the sleeve to see how that worked out. I still like the pattern, I still think it would be interesting with a self striping yarn, just not the one that I chose.

Things I have learned from this – I’ve never knitted pastel socks (truely, I had not noticed this despite washing them every two weeks) and the magical property of sock yarn to go with anything does not apply when worn above knee level.

That’s the last in the line of new things that I trotted out at the end of my few days of knitting blah. Thing the fifth was a long pink scarf that I got sick of, cut in half and made into two keyhole scarves. Those have now left the building, unphotographed except for this action shot. Thing the sixth was to have been some beaded socks but the size of the leftover heap of sock yarn stopped me in my tracks before I cast those on. Thing the seventh still needs some time with the tension swatch, pattern and a calculator to work out what pitfalls I’m digging for myself in using entirely the wrong yarn. I was supposed to be doing that last week but it more sort of didn’t happen. It’s probably not going to happen this week either because I’ve been so good in spinning up the fibre mountain (1.4kg since February) that I spent my birthday gift token on this. There will be some dyeing and some spinning and that is so much more attractive than the number crunching and risk analysis that I need to do with the pattern.
I promise not to dye it all pink.