Wool For Brains

If you knit for the desire for the finished item then I imagine that you get more focussed as you reach the last stages when you get to see the item you imagined taking shape. That doesn’t happen to me, I knit because I like knitting. When I reach the stage where the end of the knitting is in sight I start planning the next knit because I’m done with this one. I have been known to cast off, bundle the project into a bag, stick it in the bottom of the wardrobe for six years and then reclaim the yarn. I know myself very well which means I know what sort of a push I need to get this done.

It may look as if I went shopping yesterday and I did indeed visit a yarn shop. I’d like to make it clear that this is not just any old stash enhancement, what you are seeing here is a finely honed motivational tool designed to get the big blue cardigan finished. It may look like a pile of wool to you but it has been very carefully selected to fulfill certain criteria. The white is the yarn for the project that will come after the blue cardi, the blue is for when I’ve finished the sock that I cannot bring myself to pick up and the pink that is pretending to be black is for a hat (or mittens) when Agatha is done. I have the yarn, I have the needles and the patterns and the plan is that this will give me the desire to finish. I know myself well enough to know that what will happen is that I will finish Agatha and start on the new project well before the cardigan is done and that’s why the Agatha successor is a small project.

It’s working, last night I sewed in 18 ends on the cardi, worked out exactly how many rows I need on the sleeves and this morning I’ve had a good look at the front band. It’s going to have to come off, I had hoped for a crochet cure but I’m kidding myself. The bands on the cuff are worked on 3.5mm needles and they are good (where “good” is defined as “I like them”). The band on the bottom of the body is on a 4mm needle and that is good (I didn’t use the smaller needle there because it’s an area where I didn’t want any pulling in). The front band is on a 3.75mm needle simply because that was the closest size I had that was long enough. The picking up was probably the best I’ve ever done because I’ve learned how to do it right rather than just guessing so the band sits well. I’ve been struggling to think why it is that I find it so horrid and now that I’ve had a good poke at it I think that it’s simply because it’s too floppy. Version two will be a sewn on band as then I can use a 3.5mm needle and hopefully get a fabric I like. This time around I might ditch the buttonholes because I don’t like those either.

If I’d spent all my knitting time over the weekend on one thing then I would have a finished item to show you now. How boring would that be? Instead I have three nearly finished items. I started on Friday by knitting a sock from heel to toe, that has now vanished into the depths of the knitting bag so isn’t in the photo. I then knitted some very long rows in blue until I reached the long awaited big blue cast off. I still haven’t sewn the other sleeve seam or finished all the ends so the knitting is finished but the cardigan isn’t. I’m not happy with the front band but as yet I haven’t decided what it is that I think is wrong with it. The band may be too wide, the cast off may be too loose, there may be nothing wrong with it at all. I have plenty of time to think about this while sewing in the ends.

I then switched from long rows of blue to long rows of grey. I’ve reached the edging of Agatha so the end is now in sight. I still like the yarn and the pattern but I’ve reached the stage where I’m thinking of what to knit next. I’ve had enough of it now and I’m counting the rows to the cast off. This would no doubt be blocking if I hadn’t then abandoned grey for pink.

The wheel has been empty for a week and I always have this lingering fear that if I leave it too long I will forget how to spin so I felt the need to spin something and it didn’t matter what. This is a three ply from three pink rovings that came in the big surprise box. It was no surprise that the resulting yarn was pink, there was a bit of variation in the bobbin on the top right but the other two were pink on pink. This first skein is 138g and 386 yards and this is half of the fibre. This is the first time I’ve used the jumbo flyer for the Sonata and this went on the big bobbin easily. I will probably end up with 800 yards of double knit which means a revision of my plans. I had thought to spin something for some colourwork mittens but I’d not actually considered that I’m going to get a fair number of mittens from 300g of fibre, especially if I use another yarn as the contrast rather than overdying the pink. There will be a swatch, some washing and drying and then maybe a rethink.

The dalek was finished around five o’clock yesterday. Today the would be master of the universe is unavailable for a photoshoot because it’s gone to school. By the time it has finished exterminating year 3 I suspect that it will be decidedly worse for wear but that’s ok, I got my photo last night. It does mean that I can’t tell you exactly how tall this is. I’ve measured the dalek house because I know that it can look out through the window and I’d estimate that it stands about 9″ tall. That was from using doubled sock yarn and 3.5mm needles, obviously the finished size would vary according to the yarn used. This is the Extermiknit pattern which I knitted exactly as written. (I know that I don’t often say that, shocking isn’t it?) What’s more, I’d make it exactly the same another time (apart from the single black line that runs under the plunger and gun, next time that would be body coloured rather than contrast because I like it not). There are a couple of really clever things in it, the head is reverse stockinette as is the black bumper right at the bottom edge. I just love the way that the shaping utilises the natural tendency of the fabric to roll. The shaping on the skirt of the dalek was not easy to follow but it made the base the right shape, not round, not perfectly square but dalek shaped. You do get the opportunity to totally wreck this feature by overstuffing it and forcing it to be round but I managed to avoid that.

After the sprint to the finish I should maybe have taken some time on the marathon project and finished the bands on the blue cardigan. I’ve reached the stage where I need to decide on the button placement and rather than sit and think about that it was just easier to cast on for something else instead so that’s what I did. I feel bad about it today so this is the last cast on until something is finished.

I have previous convictions for turning “understated” into “plain”. My yarn tastes do tend to run to conservative, traditional boring colours and textures so this is really out of my comfort zone. I can feel it building character with every stitch. It was something that I wanted to spin but not something I’d ever want to knit but without knitting it, how do I know whether I made good knitting yarn? I know it was good yarn in that it was soft, strong and balanced but there’s a lot of yarn that looks better in the skein than it does knitted up and I wanted something that looked good when knitted. I can report that it’s fine to knit with, it’s not splitty and the sequins have a very clear idea of where they want to be but I can’t help thinking that I would have liked it more if the sequins had been half the size they are or even absent altogether. It is just not to my taste but I did like making it. Feel free to tell me that I am staid and boring in my yarn choices or dead right. I’m keeping knitting either way because it is a pig to rip.

I did have questions about what it was going to be so I shall share my decision process. It isn’t much of a process when you have only one skein because the yardage limits your options. I have just short of 200 yards of aran weight silk so it needed to be something small, it would make a scarf, a small bag or a hat. Silk is inelastic to start with and plying it with sewing thread doesn’t do anything to improve that so the hat is out unless of course you are a fan of baggy hats. The sequins aren’t that scratchy but I wouldn’t want them next to my neck so that eliminated the scarf (a scarf would have worked with beads in place of the sequins or if you are more willing than I am willing to suffer a little to make an impact). By elimination of all other options, this is a bag.

I think that you’re looking at it sideways on, I’m using the yarn doubled on a 6mm needle and I’m getting a firm fabric (although happily not as firm as the dalek) which means that I might get away without lining it. Obviously if you know at the outset that you are going to line it then you can settle for a looser fabric or even a lace pattern, secure in the knowledge that the contents of the bag aren’t going to fall out through the holes. If you’re after a bag with some structure then the only way to get that starting with silk is to knit it tight and then line it with something stiff like buckram with a pretty lining over that. I’m not after that level of work, this is going to be a simple floppy bag because there’s no point going for a classy structure with a screaming glitzy yarn. Whatever I make it into, all you’re going to see is sparkle so I’m keeping it simple. I’ve already made the icord handle so I can knit until I run out of yarn or it’s the right size. There will probably be some sort of edging around the top and a zip closure, which means then that I will have to line it after all because the wrong side of a zip is messy at best. That’s it really – from a skein of yarn to a glam bag. All I have to do now is knit it.

If he finds out that I’ve been wasting my time blogging rather than knitting I will be in big trouble. I’m not sure that I’m allowed to stop to eat and I had better have made some obvious progress for when he gets back from school. Despite what the sheet says I was not on row 32 at all when he left for school, I think that is some form of motivational tool. After the breakfast knitting inspection this morning the junior slave driver came out with the line “oh, I crossed off too many mummy, can you knit up to row 32 so it matches the list?”. I knit fast but let me tell you, not fast enough. The bobble rows were particularly trying because even I agreed that they took too long and I also agreed that I couldn’t STILL be on row 14 after all that time. My cardigan (stitches picked up, about a quarter of the band knitted) and my shawl (seven repeats done) are gathering dust until I’ve finished his dalek.

I’m not telling him I slacked off when he’d gone to school and made this. Sequins and silk, just what a girl needs for a bit of pre Christmas knitting. I’m not sure whether I like this yet even though it looks lovely on the skein, it’s balanced and I didn’t run out of sequins before I got to the end. From a spinning perspective it’s good enough yarn but I’m more interested in what it behaves like when knitted. That will have to wait until it’s dry and until I’ve finished knitting plungers.

I have to go now, I have the last bobble row to do before I get to shape the shoulders on a dalek. I have two and a half hours of knitting time providing that I don’t stop for food or housework and there’s a fair chance that if I crack on then I can get it looking like a recogniseable dalek by hometime.

It’s Friday so it must be time for a big blue cardi update. The buttons that I’d ordered on line turned out to be a little smaller than I’d expected so they are acceptable rather than wonderful. What I am going to do is make the buttonholes bigger than I need and then sew them up to fit the buttons I have so that if I ever see my dream (bigger) buttons I can make a quick substitution. The front bands are the last thing I have to do now but before I start I want to block the fronts to stamp out that rolling stockinette edge and make picking up the stitches easier.

I have a few ends to sew in as well. I’ve started, I’ve set myself the target of sewing in ten ends a day until they are all done. I do usually weave them in as I knit but I’ve found that if I do a lot of weaving in I get a pain across the back of my left hand. That meant that I’ve woven in the ends from the odd ball that ran out but the first and last rows have a lot of ends to tackle. I explained the construction to everyone that asked in the comments but I’m not sure whether I ever said it on the blog. This is knitted with vertical stripes, the stripes happen to change colour a little but there’s just one ball of yarn for each stripe so you knit for 20 or so stitches and then swap to another ball of yarn. It’s simple knitting but the multiple balls of yarn can make a big tangle on the back if you don’t know what you’re doing, which I clearly don’t. I have made intarsia sweaters before now and I just don’t remember there being such a mess on the back so I must have had the trick of yarn management back then (or more likely, fewer balls in a round). I estimate that there are close to 80 ends to weave in so by this time next week I should be at the end of it. You will notice that I’m at the end of the back as well, that’s a cast off edge at the bottom of the photo.

I did finish the hat. There is a reason for the really dodgy photo on the left, it failed to meet even my low photographic standards but it was the best of the dozen I took. I had to take it in bad light, in a mirror, in my nightie because by the time it was daylight the hat was wrapped up and ready to leave the house. I finished it on Wednesday evening, my son then declared me to look a “total idiot” in it but went on to say that his teacher would look fantastic in it. He doesn’t usually show much interest in my knitting unless it’s something that he’s designed and then I can’t knit fast enough to come up with the product. He wanted the hat very badly so it went to school on Thursday morning. This was a quick knit, as hats often are, the pattern is the Wedge hat and I have 20g of the skein of Manos del Uruguay wool left over. I may well make another, but not for me as I have the message now that mummy does not wear hats, even ones that other people are going to look good in. I think a “total idiot” is better than a “torpedohead” though so I’m moving forward. I have a skein of cashmere drying for the next chapter in my efforts to have a warm head this winter.

I talked earlier about hats being a good way to sample yarn, well this too is a yarn sample although it will be a bit bigger than any hat. The yarn is Jaggerspun Maine Line 3/8 (although I have the 2/8 as well) which I was thinking might knit up for a particular sweater I have my eye on. The original yarn for the sweater may now be unobtainable, if they still make it it will be out of my price range anyway so I need to substitute for something I’ve never seen and don’t know much about (see, it was totally reasonable to buy both the fingering and sportweight) Do I like the yarn? Well, yes I do. I’d have no problems at all in knitting a sweater from this, it is a pleasure to knit with. Time will tell what it wears like.

The not hat is of course a shawl, it is the start of Agatha. I’ve made three shawls that have swooping arms like this and they are easy to wear because they stay on in a way that triangular shawls don’t. I keep forgetting this of course and knitting triangular shawls that I then give away. I think I shall be keeping this one, it will be warm and it’s my favourite non-colour.

The hat now bears a passing resemblance to the dinner plate that I blocked it on last night. I have a few more decreases to do until the brim is reduced to the same size as my head. It was obvious even to me that if you’re going to slightly stretch the top of the hat you’re also going to be stretching the bit that it’s joined onto so I blocked it before I finished knitting the brim (there’s a rolled edge and the stitches are on waste yarn underneath). This is a good thing because it fitted me before blocking and now I think that I have at least three more decrease rows to do to make it fit again.

Rather sadly I didn’t think ahead in the same way on the big blue cardi and as a result it is now off the needles in a heap. A few minutes thought would have avoided me ripping the five rows of the bottom edging that I did yesterday. I did try some reconstructive surgery with a crochet hook but I was trying to make several stitches appear in the same place at the edge and it wasn’t a pretty sight so I ended up ripping it anyway. Sometimes it is just the only thing to do. There will be a photo of the held mitre edge once I have made one that does actually mitre.

I like knitting hats, they come in useful when you want to knit something small in between other things. You can use them to see how a particular yarn looks like knitted and get an idea of whether you really want to go on to use it in something big. If it’s splitty, pills easily, grows on washing or has other nasty traits it’s better to find out with a single skein. Hats can be a taster for a new technique before you go on to something bigger, you can use beads, cables or practise fair isle. As you can see I didn’t do any of this over the year but I did use up a lot of odd balls left over from long ago knitting. Tychus becomes mindless garter stitch once you’ve made it once or twice and I find that mindless garter stitch makes for very soothing knitting.

I have hats, Christie wants hats (and mittens but I don’t feel the love for those in the same way). Christie lives in Minnesota where they have real winters with proper snow and where a hat is not a fashion accessory but an essential to being outdoors. That’s where my hats are going so that children who are going through a rough patch in their lives can do fun stuff outside in the snow. I usually look for potential hat wearers closer to home but I think my carbon footprint can stand the load of sending a bag of hats across the Atlantic (it’s very small because I holiday 30 miles from home and I don’t get out much). Should you have hats or mittens that need a home please think about sending them to Christie. Why Christie rather than a cause closer to home? Well, although we’ve established that I don’t get out much, I used to do and I’ve met her “for real” (as my son would say). We met as quilters and have both drifted across to knitting. She doesn’t spin yet but there’s still time…

Now that all hats have left the building then it must be time to cast on for…..another hat. This is the “testing ground for a new yarn” sort of hat. This may be for me if it turns into the dream hat that flatters me and does not make me look like a torpedohead (you’ll notice that hat nestling at the top of the first photo). If it goes true to form then it will be looking for a new home around this time next year. It’s not looking at its best at the moment because it’s crammed onto a circular needle but when you see it next it will be blocked and ready for a proper photocall. It will undoubtedly look better than it does now.

I can’t blame it on the dog (we don’t have one) but I was struggling to come up with a reason for not making bigger advances on the cardigan. A quick tidy up of the house gave a few clues. My copy of the holiday issue of Interweave Knits came on Monday so that was a few hours lost there. I went on the school visit to the fire station yesterday which was another two hours of knitting time given over to a good cause. I’ve helped build a K’Nex tilt a whirl and a racing buggy (which is very hard on the feet when you stand on it at half six the next morning) but the biggest culprit was the pile of pink silk which took more time than the rest put together.

I got 300 yards from just under half of the bean coloured lump of silk. I could have made it finer but that takes longer to knit and spin so I’m happy with what I’ve got. The drape and shine is lovely but I’m still not in love with the colour. When I have spun the rest of it (I have half of that done already) I’ll think about adding a touch of red, something to take it away from the blue side of pink. I should have a little over 600 yards which is enough to give me a lot of choice in patterns. I shall overlook that I don’t like knitting silk to the extent that I swore that I’d never knit with it again.

There has been some progress on the big blue cardi even though it spent the earlier part of this week in the bag while I had a lengthy discussion with my inner knitter over the sleeves. Despite all my measuring and calculating they seemed narrower than I’d wanted. Part of me knew that this was just because of the fabric taken up by the roll of the stockinette and that it would be fine when blocked but the part of me that was doing the knitting wasn’t convinced enough to want to knit any further. I did what needed to be done and wet blocked one sleeve. It was fine so while it was nice and flat I sewed the seam. Now I have the cuff the sleeve is about the right length although I can’t be sure of that until I have the bands on the fronts. At the moment the fronts have the nice rolling stockinette edge that the sleeves had and the neck is gaping . It doesn’t do much for the fit of the body which then knocks on into the fit of the sleeves. I’ve had two attempts at getting the sleeve length right and have settled on leaving the stitches live and sorting it out at the end. (There is another sleeve off the right of the photo but as that one wasn’t blocked and doesn’t have the seam sewn it just looks plain odd)

The body needs a few inches more on the length, then the seed stitch border that I have on the cuffs. Hopefully by then the postman will have brought my buttons, they will turn out to be perfect and I can work out what I’m doing with the button holes. Then it’s buttonbands, sleeve alterations, one sleeve seam, blocking and done. There is the business of sewing in the ends of course but that’s such a little job that it’s not worth mentioning (self delusion will get me through it)

I have been holding an anti-Rav position for a long while. I’ve seen bloggers been sucked in and disappear for weeks but I couldn’t see what was there that would be of any use to me. I don’t need my yarn/needles/books organising any more than they are now and I’m not so nosy as to want to know what yarn/needles/books other knitters have. My phase of hanging about on groups and forums is mostly behind me and as Google is my friend I don’t usually have a problem in finding out what colourway X looks like knitted up. I was quite happy to wait until Ravelry opened to the general public and then see what all the fuss was about. When some apparently sensible bloggers went over to the dark side I thought I’d better put my name down just in case there was something there for me. Well you never know, do you?

You may have noticed the Ravelry button in the sidebar on the right (if you’re lucky – the button keeps vanishing and the sidebar has taken to hiding at the bottom of the screen when I look at it from the laptop) You can keep the groups and forums, the friends and the organising but I’ll take the pattern search thank you very much indeed. When you live on the other side of the Atlantic to the majority of pattern designers then yarn substitution becomes a daily chore. Yes, I could search on a pattern name in Google and then click on each link to see what it looks like knitted in different yarns but I can do that in Ravelry and see one page full of photos, with the yarns used right there next to the photo. For that one single thing I like it.

There was another benefit. (click on the photo for the bigger version) One of the reasons that I didn’t sign up sooner was that the beta version of Ravelry needs you to have a Flickr account to shoot your photos across and my blog photos are self hosted. More fussing about, grumble, moan, whinge. After all my moaning, setting up a Flickr account took no time flat and it seems to be fully idiot proof. Once you have a Flickr account with loads of knitting photos in it then making Moo cards becomes a piece of cake. Thank you Flickr, thank you Ravelry, thank you Clarabelle and Webbo. I now have little cards with my knitting on and what more could a knitter ask for?

Well, little stickers would be nice, they’re on their way too.

Children look to have two approaches to dealing with things on their plate that they don’t much like. The first approach is to eat the least liked thing straight away, thereby removing it from sight while they still have the appetite for it. The second strategy is to leave it until last in the hope that their superhero of choice smashes through the dining room window, overturns the table and eliminates the problem vegetable altogether (substitute aliens or dinosaurs according to the child). As a child my least liked thing was always beans, nasty green things that squeaked against your teeth. It didn’t matter how much gravy you put on them they were still squeaky and tasted of bean. I don’t mind them now, I even grow them, but if the species suffered a freak overnight extinction I wouldn’t cry.

What have beans to do with anything? Well over the weekend the postman brought me a big box, the best sort of box because I didn’t know exactly what was in it. It was an end of season sale box, a box with a kilo of fibre in it, assorted fibre, assorted colour. The one bump I normally would have bought for myself is the blue, I buy and dye a lot of blue because it’s one of my favorite colours but right now, after spinning the cardigan, I’m happy to see a heap of not-blue. Although this pile does not reflect my normal colour choices I can see how the fibres will work together and in some cases work with what I already have. The yellow will meet up with the orange that I disliked so much last week in the socks for a trip through through the carder with a dose of brown. In a kilo of random fibre there is bound to be something that is a personal challenge and for me it is the pink and violet in the middle at the back, the wool that is on the left of it probably resulted from the same dyes but that attention seeking fibre is all silk and as a result is much brighter. It’s wonderfully soft, no crunch to it and a delight to touch, but it is very Bratz-pink and lilac. If I were to close a box lid on this it would never come out of the stash, it would be the equivalent of hiding the beans under the mashed potatoes and hoping that you wouldn’t have to deal with it later. It has to be spun first while I’m still feeling anti-blue, leaving the less challenging fibre for another day.

We had an end of season sale at the allotment too, everything must go. When I’ve saved runner bean seeds from one year to another I’ve always left them in the pods, by the spring the pods have shriveled and the beans inside look just like the deep red and navy ones that I buy as dried beans for making chilli. This is the first time I’ve tried podding them from a green pod (because I want to eat them before next spring) and I found it hard to believe what colour they start off as. You just couldn’t make this up. I’m confidently expecting the beans to turn darker as they dry otherwise we will be having some very unusual chilli.

Should the blog vanish and I fail to answer emails please do not adjust your sets. The home network has me at its mercy this week while the chief fixer of technology is away fixing someone else’s technology in France and Germany. It’s been stable enough of late but you know how it is, things never go wrong while there’s someone competent there to fix them.