Wool For Brains

There has been some spinning over the summer holiday, not much to be sure but more than I’ve shown on the blog. None of it came out as I wanted. There was the pink shetland, this was the second batch of fibre through the drum carder and I knew that left to its own devices it would be lumpy from the little tangles at the base of each lock. This was mostly lump free and it’s not fantastic but it will do. There are 900ish yards here and I’d love to tell you how much it weighs but the batteries have gone in my scales. They are the weird flat ones that are not readily available with the groceries so there will be some estimation for a while.

This is the same shetland but in not-pink format (toothpick for scale, I really must buy more Tictacs). It’s free of the lumps and much smoother than the pink but it still failed miserably to achieve what I had planned for it. This was my first attempt at blending on the drum carder, turquoise shetland, turquoise alpaca and jade silk, all carefully measured. It was supposed to be my killer sock blend, subtle but interesting. What I learned was that if you take three very similar colours and spend a lot of time blending them together really well you get a solid. I’m all for subtlety but if I’ve spent hours standing over a drum carder I want it to look like that’s what I’ve done. The other learning point is that when I have really well prepared fibre I draft much faster than I treadle. It was even, it was really soft but it was not sock yarn.

Once I’d stopped looking at it as failed sock yarn and just as yarn it was actually quite nice, apart from the colour and an application of navy dye cured that. This is based on the scarf on page 90 of Victorian Lace Today but as I had comparatively big yarn and big needles two repeats of the edging were enough to make a scarf width. I then had to shorten the repeat on the body of the scarf so it would fit with my greatly reduced number of stitches. It was lovely to knit with, the dye gave it the subtle shading that I failed to achieve with the blending. I did have some of the amazingly soft and well blended not-sock yarn left over but that will be a hat to go with the scarf in the give away box. All traces of my failure will have left the house by Christmas.

This will also be leaving the house. It was supposed to be sock yarn but it isn’t. I used some of my old dyes and the result was that there was a fair bit of colour left in the water. My heavy handed rinsing came very close to felting the fibre and as a result it was not a pleasure to spin. There were also some tufts of short fibres in the length of top and they ended up as lumpy bits. Yes, I should have pulled them out but that was a bit tricky as I’d stuck it all together in the dyeing. The deal is that the recipient will take it off my hands so I won’t have to look at it again and I’ll make her some nice sock yarn at a later date.

I think the major lesson I have learned from this is not to try and spin anything I care about during the school holidays. I’m not a good enough spinner yet to achieve anything like consistency with five minutes here and there and because I know I’m short on time I rush. My rushed yarn does not have enough twist – my hands speed up but my feet don’t. I just have this nagging fear that if I stop spinning altogether for a while I will forget how to do it. I enjoyed the process, wool is cheap and I learned something from it so it was still worthwhile.

As a result of not casting on for a new sock but concentrating on the projects stuck in the mire I have made progress. Gosh, who would have thought, spending time on one item moves it along.

The baby bog jacket that was dithering in the region of shall I/ shan’t I start the shoulder shaping now has shoulders and a neck. I have the shoulders to unshape and then it’s mindless knitting for another 40 some rows to the end. I know it looks like a blanket at the moment but you are looking at the back, the lower fronts and the arms there.

The ugly socks now have the pattern (trust me, it’s there, chameleon like, blending into the background) and it should be plain sailing to the toe. This is not quite as mindless as it would first appear. Last night I was knitting along waiting for the dark brown yarn to appear where the heel will be so that I could measure it against the other sock of the pair. I had been knitting for quite some time before I realised that the brown yarn (which is sometimes red) was not spiraling around the sock as it should be. It wasn’t there at all – I’d dropped it about an inch lower down and abandoned it, knitting merrily away with the remaining three balls.

This will never be mindless knitting but at least it’s long enough now to show some signs of a pattern. This is the Knitspot Honeybee stole. I got exactly what I wanted in the dyeing, it’s very subtly variagated but it won’t stripe. I’m not sure that I actually like the colour but as it will be small enough to swim in a dyebath I’m not overly worried about that. It’s been stalled for a while as I fiddled about with needles. I usually don’t faff about with needles, if they are the right size and pointy enough then I’m away. For some reason nothing has felt right with this, I tried two sets of straights and two sets of circulars before I felt comfortable.

I cast on for a new sock as well and it did survive the weekend. I’m not sure whether it has a future as a sock, the patterned bit is way too big as you can see by the way it is not being blocked on the sock blockers. I’m still knitting in the hope that the plain stockinette above and below will stabilise it and in some way magically pull it into shape. I suspect that the reality is that there will be plain (fitting) stockinette and then a wildly coloured baggy part ballooning around my ankle. I shall knit a bit further before deciding its fate. It has potential for being a small drawstring pouch if all else fails. One thing is certain, I’m not ripping it. There are four circular cast ons in there (I made a lot more than four, the ones where the needles fell out on the first row fell by the wayside) and as I’ve sewn in the ends they are staying.

This has not been a good week for the blog. My camera has been in Paris for a few days, which should not have been a problem as I was left with the BBC (big black camera) and instructions on how to work it in full idiot mode. When I steeled myself to get it out of the bag my diagnosis was that the battery was flat. It turns out that the battery was in fact fully charged but not actually in the camera.

It doesn’t matter about the lack of photography because it’s not been a good week for knitting either. Everything in the knitting bag is at a stage where it needs some thought, it either needs reference to a chart, measuring to place a heel or measuring to start shoulder shaping. There’s nothing that I can just pick up and knit in between doing everything else that I’m called upon to do. My usual solution to this problem is to cast on for a new sock but that will result in another pair of socks and a bag of knitting that is still on the tricky bits (school starts on September 5th, at which point all tricky knitting will be swiftly despatched). I decided to spend a little time to get one thing past the thinking part and onto the mindless knitting stage. As (this week at least) I am pretending to be a mature knitter I chose the item that has been lurking in the bag for the longest time.

I’ve had a bad case of second sock syndrome and I’ve used one excuse after another. I cannot start the second sock because I am short of needles. This was briefly true but I held onto that thought until I bought several more sets and could believe it no more. I cannot start the second sock because I can’t find the four balls of yarn it needs. This was a good excuse that held me up for weeks until I tidied up the overflowing yarn basket and found the two balls that went with the two in the knitting bag. I cannot start the second sock because I can’t find the pattern. I knew that was a big fat lie but I was running out of plausible excuses by that time and had to fall back on the pathetic ones. If it needs graph paper then it’s in the book so all I had to do was find the book and as that is a decent size, red and lives permanently under the coffee table it was a job that must have taken all of twenty seconds. I now have the needles, the yarn, the pattern and no excuses. The real reason that I didn’t want to knit the second sock is that the first one was pants. It fits but I should have left out the orange and the pattern on the cuff was a waste of effort. I am confident that the primary function of a sock is to warm the foot and stop the shoe rubbing against the skin so this is a good sock because it fits. It’s just a good sock that looks pants.

It is a long time since I started the first sock so I should have been grateful that (compared to my usual standards) I made copious notes. I told myself which yarn started the first working row and how to set up the first row. My self-congratulation came immediately before a tinking session. My notes clearly say “30 st(itch) panel + 2 p(url) each side”. What a pity that I never engaged my brain for long enough to realise that this relates to some fantasy sock of 64 stitches, not the 72 stitch sock I am actually knitting. I do not wish to disclose how many times I reknitted that first pattern row before I realised my error. If I’d written nothing at all I would have taken a moment to work out the pattern repeat and the border, but I was so clear in my instructions that it didn’t occur to me that they could be wrong. I would like to say that I feel a tremendous sense of achievement in having started this but I don’t because now I have no excuse for not finishing it.

If you’re thinking “why didn’t she just cast on for another sock?”, well I thought that too and I did. It may not survive the weekend…

It wasn’t a difficult decision to stop after row 8, at that point I had spun all the coloured bfl and I was fairly sure that there wasn’t going to be a great deal of it left even if I stopped a row early. It was a good decision, the bits on the left clearly would not have made a row of fans. When I came to spin the last batch of fibre I pulled it apart to split it into pinks and golds. That meant the last ball was pink at one end and gold at the other rather than having colour changes throughout the ball. The plan was that I could do pretty colour changes on the bottom shaping rows but that went out of the window when I used all of the pink on the first round. As the fans then get very small very quickly I wasn’t that concerned about running out of yarn but it did mean that my colour choices from there on in were a bit limited. It’s been nearly finished for weeks, I ran out of the brown very near the end and I was so certain that I had made enough that I’d packed the fibre away and started spinning something else.

I made the knitted on edging for the top as given in the pattern except that I used a crochet hook to attach it to the cast on row rather than picking up and knitting two together. If I was knitting this again I think that I’d start with a provisional cast on, knit the top edging and then knit it together with the cast on stitches, keeping the stitches live then continue on into the bag. I can knit a facing once I’ve recognised it.

I was not sure what this would look like after felting. I had to make it shorter because I didn’t have enough fibre and as felted items shrink more in length than width I thought that I might end up with something wide and shallow (although once I’d knitted the base it did look more reasonable in shape). For this reason I didn’t make a handle until I’d seen that it wasn’t all going to be a waste of fibre. It would appear that I’ve made a perfectly acceptable knitting bag, sensibly proportioned and not at all like a bowl. It’s about 10″ in diameter and 12″ high. It was slightly too large to block it over a bucket, I’ve just thought that I could have wrapped the bucket in a towel but it’s too late for that now. I have to decide whether to go for the one long handle for a multipurpose bag or two short carry handles for a knitting bag that isn’t going to get out much. To recap, this is the felted stained glass fan bag by Madeline Langan available from her Etsy shop here, it’s handspun bfl and I think it was on US9 needles (bad blogger, I’ve put them away already but it doesn’t matter because no-one is going to reproduce it as it’s a non-standard yarn)

Badger, you missed it by one.

There will be a small prize to recognise the 500th comment (click the photo for a larger version). I know that the comments are numbered in the 26,000 region but that’s because of the large number of drug and debauchery comments that the spam eater deals with on a daily basis. At some point in the next couple of posts the number of true comments will top 500. In keeping with me being a cheap knitter the prize is small, you’re not getting it all. The winner can pick from (back) 4oz Jaggerspun Zephyr laceweight in peacock, teal, vanilla or any colour I can dye it, (front, left to right) three skeins (410 yards) 3 ply double knitish merino silk in pinks and gold, 450 yards superwash/nylon sock yarn in blue and teal (this is a commercial yarn, if I’d spun it then there wouldn’t have been any knots in it), 92g and unknown yardage handspun 2 ply bfl in teal, yellow and green (enough for socks but you’ll need to handwash them and if you make them long you may need a contrast heel and toe), 450 yards superwash/nylon sock yarn in amethyst and gold (this is the same yarn as the blue and teal. Same knots too. Grr), 700 yards 2 ply fingering/4plyish weight handspun baby suri alpaca (currently white but capable of a makeover)

If you spin I’m sure that I can find an acceptable alternative to yarn.

There may be good reasons why you really don’t want to comment, if you peep in from work and don’t want your address plastered over the internet, if you have a serious job/blog/life and don’t want to be caught slumming, or if you are a closet knitter and are not ready to be outed. If this applies to you then you can email me instead (caroline at woolforbrains.net). I promise that you can stay as Secret Squirrel.

I am well behind on replying to comments, it doesn’t mean that I don’t love you but I played out on Sunday and I am expecting a visit from “How clean is your house?” at any time. Big Kahuna Reef isn’t helping either.

(We have a winner, Sue, there were no secret squirrels, more details next time)

 

This is the finished baby surprise jacket, pattern from Schoolhouse Press, 4mm needles and home dyed mystery superwash yarn (it worked to 6 stitches to the inch over garter stitch). I didn’t cast off the final row but added the applied icord border in cream. This was a fantastic trick because it meant that I was forced to sew up the sleeve seams to be able to finish the knitting. I am usually through with the project the instant I set down the needles so sewing up tends be done “later” (think in terms of months). I icorded my way around to the first sleeve, sewed it up, knitted across the back of the neck, sewed up the second sleeve and there it was, done. It is an ideal project for those of us who procrastinate about finishing. It is just a pity that I couldn’t somehow work the buttons into the knitting because that took over a week to get to. I don’t know what it is about me and a sewing needle.

This is hopefully going to be another finish-free project as it’s knitted all in one piece. There are no seams to sew up because they are grafted and for some reason I don’t have the same hang ups about grafting that I have about sewing. This is the baby bog jacket from Elizabeth Zimmermann’s “Knitting Around”. It’s going slowly because the first seven inches are all plain garter stitch with none of the exciting shaping that the BSJ has. It also looks huge, this is possibly because the shape of the baby bum is very different in real nappies than in disposables or maybe it’s just written for an older baby. I have been looking about and I’m happy that babies come in all sorts of sizes so I’m sure that there will be one to fit this.

It’s also going slowly because it has had non-blue competition. First you take your pound cone of white Zephyr, then you walk around two chairs making a quarter of it into a really long skein. After that you dye it, dry it and walk around it again with a niddy noddy to make a skein that will fit on the swift. When you’ve finished with all that walking you sit down and wind it back onto a cone. The bit with the cone took hours, one can of lager, one glass of wine and four cups of tea. I could have just bought the yarn but where would have been the fun in that? I’ve had about a day’s messing about just to get the yarn in a fit state to knit with.

Thank you for all your comments about the sock surgery, I didn’t think that it was that interesting but it was either that or sew on the buttons on the BSJ and at that point I wasn’t sufficiently guilt stricken to do the latter. I was glad to hear that I’m not the only slacker who doesn’t repair worn sheets. The heel makeover is straightforward enough, the tricky bit is unknitting the heel to get back to the right position. I will end up replacing the toes in time, if the rest of the sock holds out that long. I’m still going to keep on knitting through my oddment heap, repairs can always be done in a contrast and in two and a half years of sock wearing I’ve only replaced one set of heels and one set of toes and done a bit of darning. I don’t think it’s worth keeping the yarn just in case it comes in useful later on.

I was supposed to be showing a completed BSJ but it has so far taken me seven days to not sew on five buttons so it’s not technically finished yet. I have the buttons and I like them, I just don’t like sewing them on. Instead of a BSJ how about some emergency sock surgery instead?

I don’t think that we mend things like we used to, it’s easier to buy new rather than repair something that’s worn out. Considering the time I’ve spent knitting a pair of socks I do think that it’s worth the effort of mending them. This pair has gone beyond darning. It’s Opal with silk and it hasn’t worn as well as the indestructible all wool Opal ones. Admittedly these have been my mother’s favorite pair so they have had more wear/wash cycles than some of her other socks so perhaps it is unfair to blame the yarn. There’s no point in mending the hole, the entire heel is thin and it will only go somewhere else with the next wearing. This calls for drastic measures, the sort where it looks worse before it looks better.

It looks bad but remember that it had a hole to start with, I just made the hole a bit bigger. I cut off most of the heel and then the next step is to tink it back to the last row before the heel, catching the stitches on spare needles as I go. I know that I’ve gone far enough when I have the number of live stitches that I knitted the sock on (or thereabouts, if it fits when I’m done then it’s good enough). At this point if this was a sock with calf shaping or a pattern that continued down the foot then you’d just reknit the heel and the next step would not be an option (if it was a sock with an asymmetrical toe then you’d have to replace the heels on both socks so as not to end up with two left feet but you’d probably want to be replacing both heels at the same time anyway)

As this is plain stockinette I can get a bit more wear out of the sock by putting the heel back on the other side of the sock so that the area around the current heel ends up on the front of the foot and the area affected by toenails goes under the toes. Instead of reknitting the heel in the hole I just made, I grafted this closed (the final graft looks better than this, I left it in its initial scabbiness so you could see where it is). I now have a tube into which I can stick an afterthought heel. I turned the tube around and snipped a thread in the middle of the same row on the other side (this is another reason for leaving the graft a mess as I know that I am quite capable of going to a lot of trouble to put the heel back in exactly the same place). I unpicked the yarn in both directions back to the sides, picked up the stitches from the row above and the row below and knitted a new heel. I could have knitted the same short row heel that I used before, grafting the last row of the heel to the reserved stitches but instead I knitted a toe, round and round with decreases every other row. When you get to the last 10 stitches on each needle you graft it closed and your toe is now a heel.

Any holes at the corners can be filled in with the copious ends that you’re left with, this photo was at the test for fit stage so the graft at the end of the heel is still messy and I can see that there’s a hole at the corner of the heel. By rotating the areas that get the most wear they should go longer before wearing thin (which is one good thing about tube socks, the fit may be lousy but they will wear well). Back in the days when we used to mend things good housewives were advised to cut their worn bedsheets down the middle and seam them with the side edges together. Turning the sides (in pristine condition from spending their life tucked under the mattress) to the middle gave your worn sheets a new lease of life but I did always wonder how much you could feel that seam in the night. At least with grafting there is no seam and, if you’ve got some of the original yarn, no sign of drastic surgery.

I am now suitably ashamed of my procrastination and will go and sew some buttons on.

Look at that frill! That’s the plan anyway, it is there to distract the eye from the running-out-of-yarn issue. I knew when I set off that there was not really enough yarn for a pair of socks, that’s why I was working them toe up in the first place. By the time I got to the heel, the place where it would have been easy to add a contrast yarn, I’d managed to convince myself that there really was going to be just enough to finish. I managed to hold on to my delusion for another inch of sock by which time it was obvious that the small length of yarn left was not going to magically extend to another two inches of cuff and a bit of ribbing. The rescue yarn is that intended for some beaded socks, there will still be enough left for those. I didn’t use a great deal from the ball and as it started off as a ball of Opal then the yardage is on the generous side. I have dusted off my plans for beaded socks, thrown them away and am currently on the mark 4 version. At some point I’ll just cast on and start something.

These are toe up from a figure of eight cast on, 68 stitches, short row heel with no gusset. It’s a three ply blue faced leicester dyed in wallaby and bloodwood (pink and brown), rescued at the cuff by an overdyed ball of Opal. The Opal needed the dye, it was one of those internet purchases where the colour you get isn’t close to what you were expecting and it is far better looking now. The colours aren’t true in the photo but the photographer had packed in and the other shots are somewhat blurry. I swear that I wasn’t moving that quickly, or even at all.

The frill that was previously on top of the hedge has now left the building. This isn’t all of it, there are several garden sacks full and some more bits that will go in the green bin. It’s a pity that there isn’t a use for conifer loppings because we certainly had enough of them. The bonus is that the boys are now cleaning my car out, there’s a multitude of small toys and coats that have come in and the vacuum cleaner has gone out. I have to go out and admire their workmanship now (and provide refreshments) so my other finished item will have to wait for another day.

Yes, the benighted bolero bought it. The slippery superwash was saying “baby clothes” to me so that’s what it turned into. Now you fall into one of two camps here, you look at the photo and either say “BSJ” or “Whaaat”. It looks like a mutant dishcloth knitted by someone incapable of reading a pattern until you fold it and then it transforms into a perfectly reasonable jacket. This is the classic baby surprise jacket by Elizabeth Zimmermann and it’s great fun. It is perfect TV knitting and small enough not to be mind bogglingly boring although I think the Adult Surprise Jacket would bore me to tears. It’s so much fun that I think I’m going to make another, I will have plenty of yarn left after all as babies have less chest to cover than I do. For some reason I thought I was knitting the bottom edge and the cuffs which really would have been mutant dishcloth territory because you start at the cuffs and top and work down and in. I’m all for things that change direction so this is just up my street and it helps that I can feel smug because the pattern is older than me. I can see now why you always see these knitted with stripes, when something is so mind-bogglingly shaped you really want to call attention to it. In the absence of flashing lights and sirens then stripes will have to do. (I ought to apologise for the poor lighting, I was trying to find a flat background that wasn’t covered in crumbs, toys, paper, hay or fibre. I managed that but didn’t get one that was uniformly covered in daylight)

You can see that the camera and I have resolved our differences, fortunately the resolution was a new memory card rather than a new camera. In the period that it’s taken to fix it I’ve tidied away the pretty things that I dyed so they missed their photoshoot and will have to wait now until they are knitted/spun to make their appearance.

Quick, post something before they come back. I’ve determined that the barrier to school holiday blogging is not the lack of woolly things to talk about but the fact that I don’t seem to be able to gather my thoughts. My ears are overworked and I’m Pokemonned out.

I have finished (bar the ends) the socks that did not want to be knitted. It took some doing because of all the socks I’ve made this is the pair that has put up the biggest fight. One (the second) went according to plan; start at the cuff, knit heel, knit to the toe, graft. The first one was more along the lines of – start at cuff, knit heel, rip, knit heel, rip, knit heel, work to toe, graft, rip, knit heel, knit, rip an inch (I left one of the strands of yarn behind), knit to the toe, graft. As with all ribbed socks they look much better on but as the camera and I are currently in a disagreement that can only be resolved by the manual or the returning husband you will just have to imagine a modelled shot. This is a 72 stitch Blueberry Waffle pattern using five green yarns from the scrap bag. One ran out just after the heel but the other four stuck it out to the toe. This is the first pair that I’ve made with any calf shaping, there’s not a lot but you can just see that it is there. The other thing that you can see is that the heels don’t match. The more pronounced eye of partridge heel at the back was made by slipping the knit stitches and the front one by slipping stitches on the purl row. I wanted to see what difference it made and now I know. It’s not as if I didn’t have enough opportunities to make them both the same but I was interested in knowing whether there was any difference in the feel and the appearance. As it is the hottest day of the summer I’ll stick with saying that they look different and leave the wear test for a cooler day.

Much of my time this week has been spent working on another green project, I started it on Tuesday and finished it on Friday. I had some help with ripping the floppy edging on the top as I’m not that confident up a ladder. It’s not the height so much as me liking to hold the ladder and when you need two hands for chopping the hedge there are no hands left for holding on. I would like to say that the brown bit in the second photo is not of my making, that’s the result of over-enthusiastic trimming last summer and I wasn’t in charge of the shears at that time. It needed doing and I’m glad that it’s done but I would rather have been knitting (or even ironing come to that).

I have some pretty dyed fibre and a new project neither of which are entirely green but as the camera is continuing to sulk they will have to wait for another post. There won’t be any more photos of the bolero though…