Wool For Brains

I don’t have a herd of alpaca in my kitchen but I do have three fleeces. The best bit of alpaca is called a blanket, they’re the bits that would be covered if you threw a blanket over the beastie. I have three of those and a heap of the other not so good bits – coarser fibre from the legs and neck. Now I know that I said that I was reining in those fibre purchases but I didn’t spend a deal at Woolfest and these were cheap. So cheap that I feel guilty for having bought them, I’m making myself feel better by reminding myself that they would have sold to someone else on ebay even cheaper if I hadn’t bid and it’s not my fault that the seller listed them in the wrong place without a reserve. I still feel bad about it and I intend to make something from the yarn to send to the seller. My weaving isn’t grown up enough to leave the house (yes, I have some and no, you’re not seeing it) so it needs to be a knitted item. I’m thinking that a couple of hats (one size fits just about anyone) and a lacy scarf (again, fits anyone) would make me feel better about the transaction. Not everyone would appreciate a big piece of lace and anything that depends on fit is out. If anyone has any other ideas about what a hypothetical animal owner might appreciate made out of their animal’s fibre then I’m listening. I would usually gone straight to my goat-owning readership for advice except as she’s currently moving lock, stock and prize winning flock to the south of France she is probably rather busy at the moment.

Ebay has come up with the goods in other areas recently. There were the 108 Pokemon that are being doled out daily (conditional on no visits from Mr Grumpy), the three Pokemon books missing from our collection, the super mega fantastic 7″ Aero sock needles (be still my beating heart, short, pointy, four sets and cheap) and a rather lovely vintage knitting book. I had hoped to show the book but as this is a week of postal strikes it may be a while longer than expected. Also taking longer than expected are the green socks, I grafted the toes only to find that one of them had to be ripped back to the heel owing to me totally messing it up. The pattern for the bag lost itself and I stubbornly refused to print another copy, preferring to wait until the pattern surfaced again. After four days I woke up to the reality of a total loss and spent twenty seconds pressing “print” to make another copy. Had I not had been so pig headed it might be finished by now, as it is I’m now on row seven. Having a break from it was good because the clamshells are fresh and exciting again and I’d forgotten just how quickly one knits up. I’ve now spun all the pink and yellow and there may be enough to make nine rows, I’m going to take a coffee break after row eight to decide whether to take the risk of the extra row.

The socks had reached the toes before I ripped one back to redo the heel, the bag is as it was only bigger and the bolero is still hanging about. The thing waiting for me at the sorting office (”A4 packet”, “too large for letterbox”) was not the knitting pattern that will probably steal the yarn from the bolero but a big fat packet of 108 plastic Pokemon figures. We will therefore pass over the state of the current knitting and instead take a trip down memory lane.

I was recently asked the question “what is the best thing that you ever knitted?”. It took some thinking about but I got there in the end. This isn’t it but it was one of the contenders. I was searching on the internet for other examples of this pattern as that seemed to provide a quicker solution than actually finding my sweater and photographing it. I found not a single one and I think that is a terrible shame as this was (in my view) a cracking pattern by a fantastic designer. I searched for some of her other classic patterns and I couldn’t find any of those either (hands up anyone who remembers “Grapes and Cherries”) This is “Scrabble” by Patricia Roberts, I can’t remember the book it came out of, the only reminder of the pattern that I have is the working copy that I photocopied, complete with my annotations. There is a house, a tree, a night sky and a sailboat, each accompanied by their initial letter. It was a single size 36.5″ sweater or cardigan, the sweater pattern called for 18 25g balls of Woolybear fine cotton or 15 25g balls of Woolybear Pure Silk or 12 28g hanks of Woolybear Real Shetland and it was knitted at 32 stitches and 40 rows to 4″ on 2.75mm needles (US2). As I was as much of a cheap knitter then as I am now I subbed some sort of mercerized cotton. It wore like iron, even after years of being my favorite sweater there are no signs of wear on it. It could also be knitted as a shawl and I shall have to bear that in mind as a potential baby gift should I ever find a baby that I love enough to knit for at 8 stitches to the inch.
Looking at it now I can see that I didn’t have my current aversion to bobbles then, my tension was much better then than it is now (either that or the repeated washing sorted out my rowing) and I could obviously read charts. The latter came as the biggest surprise because if you’d asked me I would have told you that the first time I knitted from a chart was when making Kiri in 2006. I remember well the trepidation with which I approached the scary chart but the chart for Scrabble is much more entertaining than anything I’ve knitted in lace. I think that I knitted this in the summer of 1987 and needless to say it hasn’t fitted me in years. I have some concerns that although I think I’m a good knitter now, it’s quite possible that I used to be better, or if not better then at least more confident.

See the fibre, see the yarn. That wasn’t difficult to predict was it? I’m not sure what yardage I got from this because I’m still spinning it, I’m managing to keep just ahead of the knitting and I have one quarter yet to spin. I split it lengthways into four as that seemed to give decent sized colour changes. I did set off to spin it as a single and I made a sample skein and then went back to a three ply. I like plying, I like the way that it suddenly looks like yarn. A single just doesn’t look like yarn to me so although I can (just about) manage to spin a low twist single for knitting I’d rather not. There’s also the point that although I’d need one to spin one third the length it was taking me probably three times as long to spin as low twist singles are way off on the edge of my spinning zone of comfort. I know that I would have got faster eventually but I Want It Now.

Did I say that there was stiff competition for my attention? Add in the delivery of the new Harry Potter book (no spoiler necessary) on Saturday and it goes without saying that the bolero is not one stitch larger than it was on Thursday. It is still on the needles but that’s because the pattern that I think will better suit the yarn would not go through my post box yesterday and is waiting for me at the sorting office. On the plus side the book is read and the bag is growing. This is the felted stained glass fan bag by Madeline Langan available from her Etsy shop here. It takes six skeins of Noro but as I’m cheap mine is the handspun bfl above (the colours in the first two photos are truer) with some handspun brown merino. After four rows I’m now past the stage of running around the house for a lap of honour after every clamshell but I’m still captivated. I’m not certain that I will have enough yarn, I dyed all the bfl I had on hand in the hope that it would be enough. I’ve worked out that the number of stitches in the decreasing rows for the base is equivalent to 1.35 rows and I’m almost certain that I have enough yarn if I make it one row shorter than the pattern. It’s all back of the envelope stuff but I’m confident enough to knit 8 rows and then make the base.
I have competition for my attention now so talk amongst yourselves whilst I go and make a bacon sandwich. The blog will return later in the week, no doubt with a ripped bolero, a bigger bag or a finished pair of socks.

It’s not going well so far, I started with not being able to find the right needle which meant that the stitches jumped off every time they could. This yarn is superwash and “smooth” doesn’t come close to describing it. I suspect that it will wear very well, when I drop my dinner down my front it will just slide straight off and drop on my feet. It makes the knitting a bit tricky, the stitches race off the needles and then sprint off. Imagine the fun when you’ve had to rip four rows and then have to pick up the 260 running stitches. Oh how I laughed. One day I will reach the stage of checking for errata before I start knitting. At least I’ve now reached the stage where when I get to the last few stitches of the first lace row and have four stitches left over and that just happens to be the same number that I was instructed to increase by three rows earlier I don’t reknit the row three times before suspecting that it’s the pattern not me that’s at fault. I’m inching ever closer to maturity. I like the pattern, I like the colours of the yarn but at the moment I am not liking the project. It may not survive the weekend.

It has stiff competition for my attention at the moment. This is going to be a scarf, a woven scarf if all goes well. I’m going to navajo ply this when the singles have rested a bit. This is carded merino/silk from Wingham Woolwork. It’s a similar blend to those that I used for the 4″ woven squares (and a scarf, and a hat and a felted bowl) but the colours in this are different. The first bobbin is more striped than the second because I’d pulled off the most striking colours first. I must learn to pace myself with these batts. It’s like eating a box of cherries, if you eat all your favorites first then you have to eat all the blah ones up at the end.

Now that I’ve spun the merino/silk I can start on this. This is 260g of blue faced leicester in Chamomile, Wallaby and Salmon Gum. The yellow/brown pairing is lovely, there’s a rich gold as the two colours mingled together and I’ll repeat that again. The pinky red is not entirely what I was aiming for but as this is for a bag rather than a sweater, it will do. I think another time I’d use a deep green in place of the not-red. If I was really picky I would knit up one of the clamshells and then unpull it to work out how long a colour change I needed for each one. I’ve obviously thought about doing that but I gave up being a perfectionist some time ago because I just wasn’t good enough at it.

This is the last week before the schools break up for the six week summer holiday so it is my last week of part time mummying. This summer looks to be the one where I get up to speed on Pokemon, their attributes, what they evolve from/to and their specialist attacks. I don’t mind really, except when I’m fielding questions about what Pokemon I’d like to be and why whilst at the same time trying to cast 260 stitches onto a needle too short to hold them. It took a while but I got there in the end.

The Leaf Lace shawl is blocked and gone. It measured 70-some inches across the top and thirty-some inches deep and took 175g of Carolyn’s kid mohair/silk (the measurements are a bit iffy because I didn’t write anything down and I’ve slept since then). I used a US8 needle and it was appropriately holey. I dyed 300g of yarn and planned to knit until I ran out or it was big enough and it was certainly the latter target that I hit first. I have plans to use the leftovers from this with the leftovers from the next project, the one with the 260 stitch start, because I used the same dyes in the same ratios for both yarns. I think they will play nicely together, one is soft and fuzzy and the other is smooth and I’m sure I can make a feature of that. Before I get to the leftovers I have to do the knitting of course, I had hoped that it would be of an interesting size right now but because of my extensive Pokemon discussions I have knit all of two rows and quite frankly a photo of the contents of my handbag would be more exciting than that.

The knitting would have been much longer and more photogenic if I had cast it on as soon as the leaf lace shawl dropped off the needles on Friday. Just for once I showed restraint and made myself have a weekend with nothing but socks to knit (the thing with the black and coloured squares is no more, I have been excused from knitting a patchwork elephant and I’m thankful). I am amazed by how much socks can grow if you actually work on them. This is the long standing pair of swimming socks in Opal wool/cotton, finished bar sewing in the ends. The second sock of the green waffle pair is now in possession of a heel, it doesn’t match the first one but we’ll talk about that another day and the pink and brown sock is longer too. Whilst evicting the remains of the elephant from the knitting bag I found another small ball of the yarn that I needed to weave those last 4″ squares. It was a small ball but big enough when put together with a tension square that I found so now I have enough squares for my cushion cover. All in all it was a productive weekend.

I don’t know when you’ll get to see the cushion cover or the green socks with the wonky heel because I’m not going to have the time to have wool for brains for the next few months. I’ll aim to post every week but if not then I will certainly be back at the beginning of September. I am positive that there will be no knitted Pokemon to show then, the shaping on most of them would be a nightmare. Some things are easier in two dimensions as shown by last summer’s project. I had intended to do the colouring in all by myself but I wasn’t allowed. I had also intended to go back and put some freehand background quilting in the white spaces (clouds, grass) but once I’d outlined the Pokemon in black and got it on the bed it was done enough and I moved on. I’d thought that it would get only one year’s use before we were in the throes of the next big thing but it looks like it’s good for a while longer yet.

I do have a rigid heddle loom waiting for me at the end of the growing season when I have a bit more time. I’m finding that I want to spin yarns that I wouldn’t want to knit (thick or textured or both) and I have a hope that weaving might give me a use for those. My knitting time has been eaten up by my obsession with making 4″ squares on the pin loom that my husband made for me earlier in the year. I made one to see what it looked like and before I knew it I had 33 of them.

They were rather unimpressive to start with, floppy and holey but because of the wonder of wool that was easily cured. A a trip through the washer with my gardening jeans shrunk them slightly and left them feeling right instead of like a limp dishcloth. You can see that the washed square on the left is much less holey than the one on the right. I was going to make a cushion cover in a 4 by 4 square but now I’ve set them out it needs to be a 5 by 5 square. Needless to say I don’t have enough yarn to make another 17 and as the wheel is fully committed for a while the job lot is now residing in the bottom of the wardrobe. I shall pause for a moment to consider what a good use of my time this has been, all that knitting time spent on something with no end product. It was more fun than dusting though, which also has no end product and is a waste of my knitting time.

If wasn’t for the squares then this would have been finished and blocked earlier in the week. This is going to measure around 70″ across the top with a drop of some 34″. (It could be anything at all really once it’s blocked but it falls in the size range of “big enough”) Kerrie at Hipknits is now selling this mohair/silk (”Cleopatra”). I weighed my leaf lace shawl and it’s 175g so two skeins is certainly big enough to make a decent sized shawl. You go off and look at the photos of pretty yarn and I’ll go start my day (school lunchbox, recital of the get dressed mantra, breakfast, school run)

I have had some crops out of the weed bed that is the allotment. The purple garlic grew well as opposed to the white that I planted that is pathetic and headed straight for infused oil. When I was braiding the good stuff to hang it I was reminded very much of the sock yarn that I rehomed recently. I don’t suppose that “garlic” would be that good a name for a colourway but the white, purple and sand colours look really well together.
 

For dessert, how about a blackcurrant sundae? I have been using my drum carder, you haven’t seen much of it because it just doesn’t make for very good blog entries. Imagine a pile of lumpy fluff from a sheep. Imagine the same pile looking a bit smoother. It is boring, I have a series of photos showing the progress of a heap of fluff but believe me, you don’t want to see them. My first carded batts were not that good. The fleece I started with had really bad dandruff and the base of the locks were matted. I ended up with lots of lumps from the matted bits. I am capable of learning when I put my mind to it and my second attempt with the same fleece produced a lovely smooth yarn. I haven’t shown that yet because I made a different mistake on that one. If I’m going to spend hours producing the perfect sock blend of alpaca, silk and wool then I’d like it to look a bit special, as if I’d spent hours turning the handle on a drum carder. I used three very similar colours and the resulting yarn is so subtle that it is in effect a plain solid. I haven’t decided whether to overdye it or live with it so it’s hiding in shame at the moment.

This is the third batch from the same fleece. I learned from my previous two attempts, I have a smooth yarn (although still not as smooth as from commercially processed fibre) and there is some slight colour variation. This is the last of this fleece and I’m really glad about that because the way I got rid of the matts at the ends of the locks was to snip them off with scissors. Even with the help of my mother it took a fair chunk of time and I could do without it. I don’t exactly know what this is going to be, I have a few ideas but it all depends on the yardage I get from it.  You can see that I dyed this some time ago when I was still stuck in my pink phase. I had planned for even more colour variation but the blue dye I used looked terrible against the pink. I gave it a good stir it whilst it was in the dye bath to try and even out the screaming blue and that gave me more of a violet. The carding evened it out still further so the scary blue bits have now vanished.

You can see the different shades in the fibre and in the single but the yarn is more subtle. I obviously need to up the contrast when dyeing to allow for the evening out of the carding. Maybe I should have left the screaming blue as it was in the dye bath. I also need to up the twist in the rest of this – it was so much fun to spin that I reverted to my old style of spinning (la, la, la, see the fibre flow, la, la) and when that happens I draft faster than I treadle. It got away from me in a couple of places (well, more than a couple to be truthful) and there are some soft spots. I have just over 300 yards here and there is twice as much still to do. It isn’t the best yarn I’ve ever spun, either in terms of colour or composition but it is certainly the most pleasing yarn I’ve made starting from the sheep’s back.

It’s a short post today, my brain is fully occupied with monitoring the state of my shoulders and checking every ten seconds that my arms haven’t dropped off. I spent a good hour yesterday digging out the compost heap at the allotment. Don’t I just know how to have a good time? Compost is heavy when it’s on the end of a fork, heavy when you’re moving it around the plot and heavy when you’re tipping it out. I’d like to say that I’d done with that but the job’s only half finished, then of course I get to fill the bin up.

Moving swiftly on from muck to knitting.. once upon a time I made some sock yarn. It was good sock yarn and it did what I’d planned it to do but I still didn’t love it because of the red. The red shouldn’t have been much of a shock given that I started with red fibre but I felt that I’d challenged myself a bit too much and as a result I’d ended up with a yarn just outside my comfort zone. If I’d kept it it would have been destined to spend a long time in my stash so I found a better home for it and set it free. It is the first (and only) time I’ve put a label on my handspun and it was so strange to see it sitting there all dressed up looking like proper yarn.

I am very glad now that I sent it to someone who was comfortable knitting it because look what it became, not stash yarn or socks at all but a shawl. It is still red but shiney and stripey and lacey and not at all like socks. Sophie-of-the-comments made this, it measures 46″ by 22″ and she’s planning on wearing it to her daughter’s graduation. I’m so proud, my baby leaving home like that, turning out so well. Who would have thought it? Sophie (her name here, if not elsewhere) has called it “Autumn Glory” which is just what I should be getting through the application of 3″ of well rotted weeds. Her Autumn Glory is much prettier but probably has as much impact on the shoulders, if not in quite the same manner.

I’ll be back tomorrow, hopefully with less whining whenever I move my arms.

Well, the story goes like this. I have to knit three pairs of striped socks to deal with my guilt over the pile of left over sock yarn. This is the first pair, Monkeys on 68 stitches using three colours of yarn (the toes are open in case they don’t fit the foot they were made for). The second pair are the red/orange ribbed ones with the vanishing pattern and I have one of those finished. The third pair are green waffles, the first sock finally reached the toe after having had terminal flood anxiety issues in the heel area. Me being me I started looking towards the next pair.

That was originally going to be the beaded pair that I had reluctantly dropped at the start of the stashbusting programme. I dyed the yarn, I bought the beads (two sets because of my indecisiveness) and I’ve now packed it away.

It couldn’t compete with the handspun three colour pour of the other week, what could?

Well that was dropped too in favour of my new absolute favourite sock yarn, in pinks and browns (an idea copied shamelessly from the Schaeffer Anne that I bought) . It’s a chained three ply from BFL dyed in Landscape’s Wallaby and Plum. I love it and I’m going to work them toe up to use it all. That shouldn’t be difficult because owing to a masterpiece of weighing I have less than 90g of yarn and the ball of yarn for the first sock just looks so small. I have recently been spinning 120g for socks, just to be sure there’s enough, but now that I’ve seen how big a ball that puts into the leftovers I’ve made myself get a grip. I think that I should have had some sort of four stage skein reduction programme because coming down from 120g to 90g is a bit of a shock. I’m looking at the yarn I have and I’m not feeling good.

It’s really just as well that I cast those on when I did because my current absolute favourite sock yarn is now this one (mostly Landscape’s sage with some mountain blue, it went in the dye bath with the yarn for the shawl). I think I’ve established beyond a shadow of a doubt that my most favourite yarn is always going to be whatever I made last. I shall have to be less hard on my son for his attitude to new toys (Must Have New Things Ignoring What I Already Have) because I’ve obviously got it too. Who knew that knitting could improve your parenting skills?

No post now until next week – if it’s fine tomorrow I shall be battling allotment weeds in an attempt to find the crops, if wet I shall be playing with sheep.

There’s got to be some sort of a rule for holiday knitting, something about making sure you have all the right equipment with you before you set off. It’s common sense really, “be prepared” and all that. So guess who set off for a weekend away armed with the pattern, the yarn and the new super pointy lace needle. Top marks there then, except just because the needle is new, shiny and very pointy doesn’t make it the right size. Here we have the start of the Morning Glory stole, looking rather small and scarf like and lacking the drape that is usual in lace. Yes, I did realise that it was on the wrong needle but it was the only one I had other than sock needles and I like knitting so I carried on. It was a fun knit even though I knew that I was likely to rip it. Did they not sell needles at Woolfest? Well, yes but I didn’t think about it then as I was on track (Woolfest = fleece) and the needle issue totally slipped my mind. It wasn’t until late on the Sunday that it hit me that I had probably walked past scores of knitting needles without even seeing them. One of my jobs for yesterday (along with the washing) was to resolve the dodgy project. I had to decide that it was fine as it stood or rip it.

It’s mended now, reborn as a Leaf Lace shawl on bigger needles. I may be the only person in blogland never to have knitted this, I’ve made a couple of starts but it’s never been the right pattern for the yarn. This time it feels right. The yarn is Tolcarne Angoras kid mohair and silk, dyed in Landscapes dyes Sage and Mountain Blue. The photo on the left is the true colour, it’s the only one I’ve been able to take recently with decent light, all the others are too blue. I have 300g and it’s all the same colours. Not only that, I dyed 100g of sock yarn at the same time. Regular readers will deduce that I now have a bigger dye pot, I’m not sure how much I can dye at once but it’s an awful lot more than 400g. I’m going to scale up gradually towards enough for a sweater.

For those of you that thought that I spent all Tuesday ripping and reknitting, well I wish it was so. I spent most of my day carrying armfuls of clothes between the bedrooms, the washer, the dryer, the ironing board and the bedrooms. I did a bit of hand washing too. This is some of Daisy, I’d washed the sheep-black Suffolk Jacob cross (not ShetlandxJacob as I said yesterday) earlier in the day. It makes such a difference when you don’t have to start by removing great clods of sheep poop from the fleece. My standard for what makes a good fleece has now risen considerably, I don’t mind a bit of hay but I would prefer that it hadn’t been previously digested.