Wool For Brains

Christmas was faultless. There was the small matter of the tardy turkey which lead to soggy sprouts and I could have done without the Boxing Day shivers and nausea but in the grand scheme of things this was nothing. Peace and goodwill reigned and everyone had something they liked either under the tree, or waiting to be discovered elsewhere. My son was more than surprised to open his instrument case and find that his well worn school euphonium had been replaced with a new shiny model. Santa brought me just what I wanted, I just don’t know how he manages it each year. There was also 600g of white superwash blue faced leicester and a shed load of vouchers for the Wool Baa. They’re not photogenic yet but they will be over the course of the year.

Rather sadly this is the sum total of my knitting since I last posted. It’s not that I haven’t knitted more but the knitting is now ripped and back in the ball. This is too small for me but as it’s not my sock I’m not bothered. This is a mother sock, a little longer in the cuff than I usually make them and with a bit of calf shaping. You can see that the striped Opal dominates the sock, the toe is blue, then it moves through lilac to light pink, white, bright pink and then lilac again. I knew what the yarn would do because I have knitted it before, it had a brief existence as a baby jacket. The colour changes are three times longer than they would be just using the yarn on its own because this is a stashbuster spiral variant and the Opal comes around once in every three rows. I’ll have loads left and I think I might overdye it to tone down the pinks and the white.

There are no photos of the failed knitting. I knitted one third of a shawl and ripped it (technically, my mother ripped it, mohair bobbles and all). I tried something else that involved casting on 275 stitches except it wasn’t that number and I pulled the needles out in disgust after several attempts to get it right. I had another go at counting some days later after I’d calmed down a little and on that occasion got it right on the second go only to knit less than a dozen rows before ripping it again. My next lace project was in mohair silk and that got to the size of my hand before reversing back to yarn. I’m beginning to suspect that this many lace projects couldn’t all be wrong and that it’s me that’s at fault rather than my poor knitting. Maybe I should stick to socks for a while.

If anyone thinks they can hear jingle bells – you’re too early. What I can hear right now is nothing at all. No Raving Rabbids, carols, euphonium practice, singing, laughing or rattling pan lids. I’m home alone in the gap between getting the gammon out of the oven and putting the topping on the trifle. It is very, very quiet but it won’t last for long so I have just a moment to throw my socks on to the internet and get back to my list of things to make and do.

These are finished husband socks. I could be fanciful and call them “chestnuts on fire” or something, they’re basically brown and red and will be warm winter socks. I did ask him to lay on his back and put his feet up against the tree but he seemed to think that this was an unreasonable request. When I told him that Santa was watching he was still unmoved so you’ll have to take the unmodelled shot.

This was the replacement for the round and round socks, more round and round knitting. I don’t usually work toe up as I find it harder to get the heel in the right place but with these I might be making a fancy cuff. The idea was that when I got there I’d have an idea of what the yarn was going to do and so what colour would work well as a contrast. I’m still undecided, I’m going to leave this one on the needles and knit the other sock before I decide what to do with the cuff. That won’t be until after Christmas because the yarn for the first sock is still somewhat fluffy and I’ve put the wheel away. (blue faced leicester, three colour dye, navajo plied)

As I’ve run out of round and round knitting until I’ve made more yarn I had a visit to the scrap bag for another round and round sock. There’s the start of a toe lurking on the right, I think these are going to be plain to the cuff and then maybe a pattern. Again I’m working toe up because I haven’t planned the cuff (my planning skills are fully committed right now on kitchen based activities). The pretty backdrop hides the fact that I haven’t got as far down the list as “vacuum” or “change tablecloth”.

I wish you all a Christmas as enjoyable as the one I’m planning on having. If you’re not having a Christmas at all then I hope you have a really good Tuesday instead.

I did wear my Rogue a bit last year, then I washed it and put it away for the summer. Where I put it was a mystery, I’ve been looking for it since the weather turned cold and it’s taken me about a month to track it down. There never was a modelled shot because the senior photographer was out of the country and the junior photographer had a brief of his very own which did not include getting the features I wanted in the frame. At last, 10 months on, a photo of me in the sweater. This is a lying photo, have a good look at the sleeves and work out what the photo is not telling you. The clue is in all those folds of excess jumperage between wrist and elbow.

I said at the time that the sleeves were marginally too long but I could live with it. My arms must have shrunk significantly over the summer or I set the sleeves out differently when I washed it because the sleeves are now definitely too long (and also covered in what looks to be toothpaste). I’m not rushing to cut and paste the sleeves just now mostly because it’s cold and I want to wear it but also because I need to see what the sleeves look like after the next time I wash it (looking at the toothpaste on the cuff, that should be fairly soon). There’s a strong possibility that if I start fixing the sleeves I’ll end up ripping it all. It nearly fits but it’s not brilliant around the top half. You can see that the shoulders on the sweater don’t match with my shoulders (adding length to the sleeve again). The basic problem with this sweater is that I’m judging it against the blue cardi that fits well and that is showing me that this doesn’t fit well enough. I’m not happy with it and at some point I will rip it but probably not until the spring. It’s warm and it fits well enough for now.

My son’s view is that these are fantastic. He picked the yarn, chose the pattern (not his first choice, the aeroplane he drew would have fitted on a sweater but not a mitten even with lace weight yarn and cake testers) and supervised the construction. My view is that these are dire, they fit but not well, you could drive a bus through the thumb gusset and the thumb shaping is novel to say the least. This is my Lara Croft thumb, I was so busy watching the film that I lost the plot on which of the three needles started the row and which was in the middle of the thumb rather than at the edge. A photo of the thumb would have given everyone a good giggle but I forgot to take that shot and the mitts have now gone off for their first day at school. It’s for the best, there are some things that are best left to the imagination.

I’m glad that children’s mitts don’t usually survive to become heirlooms because I’d hate to be remembered on the basis of the quality of these. They had their good points though, they taught me that duplicate stitch is preferable to attempting to knit single stitches in different colours even though I usually hate anything that involves sewing with knitting yarn and will ordinarily go to great lengths to avoid sewing up. Despite my needle aversion I am now a convert to duplicate stitch. The first R2D2 on the left featured four colours in a row, the second was a big white block with the blue, red and some of the grey sewn on afterwards. It was much quicker, simpler and the knitting looks better. I also learned that it is vitally important to work out where the edges need to be when working on two needles, it’s not as simple as slipping a few (cough six cough) stitches from one needle to another when you’ve not planned ahead enough to calculate how many stitches will be created by the gusset. The result is that the side seam is not at the side and the motif isn’t centred but for what they are it doesn’t much matter. I found the chart here, where there are lots of other charts for the Star Wars fans in your life.

I said that all I wanted for Christmas now was two whole front teeth, preferably on the cheap and with no pain. I got two out of the three and I’m prepared to see reason over the third. My dentist’s viewpoint is that the huge lump that fell off my front tooth is “a tiny chip in the enamel”. Despite my protests that “it was THIS big” (with appropriate arm movements) he is happy that the structure of my tooth is sound and his preferred option for treatment is to leave it alone. Not surprisingly that was my preference too as it enabled me to flee from the surgery at speed. From my viewpoint it seems that the piece that is missing is the size of a small car but I’m happy to go with the (free) opinion of a professional and crunchy roast potatoes are back on the Christmas menu.

There was something else that I didn’t allow for with the mittens and better planning wouldn’t have cured it because I don’t think like a seven year old. To me it seems obvious that the pattern goes on the back of the hand where everyone can see it. That is the traditional public side of a mitten. His view is that R2D2 is there for him and it needs to go where he can see it best so he’s been wearing them with the colourwork on the palm of his hand. They’re his mittens, he can wear them how he likes but it was a good thing that I made the thumb gusset so big.

It looks much more like a sock now. The previous little bit of knitting was the top of the cuff, now joined, with stitches picked up from it and knitted downwards in the normal way. This is the Fiesta Feet pattern by Lucy Neatby. I have knitted this before so I’m confident that I will get a pair of socks from the one ball of Regia (colourway 4261, I found the ballband when sorting through the rubbish bin to pull out the paper for recyling). The last pair that I made was a bit loose in the cuff so on this pair I’ve decreased four stitches after the bobbles, increasing again before the heel. I could have gone down a needle size but I have a poor track record on switching needles and I’d prefer not to relive that particular nightmare. I also made the cuff too short last time (not my fault, I swear that I followed the pattern) so I’ve added a bit there too.

In the best traditions of children’s television, here is one I made earlier. This was no-name four ply in cream and a skein of Lorna’s Laces Jungle Stripe. You can often pick up single 50g skeins cheaply because who wants a single skein? There was enough left from this to go into my first pair of Stashbuster spirals and I still have some leftovers in the sock yarn mountain. I can see that I’ve not followed the pattern on the heel this time which is probably what you get for watching tv at the same time as supposedly reading a pattern but it looks well enough so I’ll stick with what I’m doing.

There is also a mitten in the knitting bag. It’s got a howling error caused by me setting off and knitting without having enough mitten experience to really understand the basic construction of a mitten with a thumb gusset and being too idle to open a book and look it up. I think I’m going to get away with it although I don’t deserve to. I’m expecting this to have a life expectancy of weeks so I’m not inclined to rip and redo, it fits after a fashion and the end user is happy with it so far (that’s a lie, he’s not happy because it’s not finished yet). It won’t be the best mitten I’ve ever made, it certainly isn’t the best bit of intarsia I’ve ever done but it will be good enough. The second will be better, I’m switching the four colours a row knitting for duplicate stitch instead. If it’s not better at least it will be quicker and I’ve already decided not to learn from my mistakes but just make the second equally wrong but mirrored. I shall then have a pair of badly shaped mittens and just you watch, these will be the ones that never get lost.

It cannot have escaped your notice that it’s running up to Christmas. I now have a list of things to do before the big day that includes “make bread sauce” and “freeze sausage and bacon rolls” but has no mention of “knit” or “blog”. I’m sure that I’ll be here on and off between now and the first week in January (when the boys go back to work and school) but not with any degree of regularity. My brain is full of thoughts of turkey (what to buy, how much to buy, when to buy) rather than wool and my part time job as head elf means that I have some urgent tasks this week before school finishes on Friday. I have a list, everything is all under control (repeat to end of row Boxing Day)

There is absolutely no knitting in this post. It will come as a surprise to some that I do things other than knit, but the blog is a distorted view of my life because knitting is all that you see here. I don’t deny that I knit a lot but it is not all of my day (I wish). I do not blog my laundry or the ironing heap, the massive seasonal clearance of the dresser, the supervision of the homework or the cleaning out of the freezer (I lie about the last thing, I should have done it months ago but I’m still procrastinating). Today we are not knitting but baking.

This gingerbread house graced the entrance to the restaurant in the German hotel that we stopped in last year. The six year old boy is included for scale more than anything else but it does mean that the photo contains some knitting, the hat (for Kath who asked about it (rather than any other Kaths that didn’t), the Tannenbaum hat pattern is here, for $4 Deb will email you the pattern and you can print it off at home). As usual, click on the photos to make them bigger.

Compare and contrast this house with the one above. This is the second ever gingerbread house that I’ve helped make. The first one came straight out of a food magazine and I followed the directions to the letter. It wasn’t a mansion like the one above but it still wasn’t so much of a house as a six unit apartment block. Snow White and the boys could all have had separate rooms with a granny annex for the visiting prince. I think that I threw most of it away because there is only so much gingerbread that a family can eat, especially at Christmas time when there are other goodies around. This time I made it up as I went along and ended up with more of a gingerbread shed. It was a much better gingerbread recipe, it tastes exactly right and it turned out to be structurally sound too.

Recipe:(educational activities – reading, weighing, mixing, rolling, washing up if you’re lucky)

12 oz plain flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsp ground ginger
4 oz butter, diced
6 oz soft brown sugar
4 tbsp golden syrup
1 beaten egg

Sift dry ingredients together, rub in butter (or whizz it all up together in the food processor). Stir in the sugar. Beat the syrup into the egg, stir into dry ingredients. Mix together into a smooth dough.

This will make enough gingerbread to make a reasonably sized house and about a dozen small biscuits. Make the templates for the sides, roof and end walls from paper (you can be educational and use child labour). Small is good because then it takes less decoration and the roof won’t need internal bracing. If you don’t use the same template for the roof and walls then clearly mark which is which. Check that the thing looks right by holding the papers together in their final positions. It is easier to assemble if the roof overhangs the side walls and obviously the steeper you make the slope of the roof the more challenging it is going to be to get it to stick in place (educational activity – design and function, consideration of the probability of snowfall in the average kitchen, structural strength of chocolate). Roll out the gingerbread to about 1cm, cut around the templates and transfer to a greased baking tray. Important, skip this part at your own risk. Once you have the pieces on the baking tray, put the paper template over them and use a knife to encourage the gingerbread back into the right shape. It will have distorted when being transferred to the baking tray and the chances of it being square are slim. You cannot block it into shape once it has cooked. (Needless to say I forgot this but if I can’t be a good example then at least I can be a terrible warning) Bake for 12 minutes at 190c and leave to cool slightly on the tray before transferring to a cooling rack. It will be very soft when it comes out of the oven and if you lift it straight away it will break. When cool and hard the fun begins. If it’s broken all is not lost, join it on the back with your glue of choice and a biscuit. If it’s a really bad break Garibaldis are the answer.

Sticking it all together does need some parental involvment. Glue it together either with melted chocolate buttons spread with a knife, icing from a piping bag or an icing pen. To get the sides to fasten together is the tricky bit especially if you missed out the important part in the cooking process and are consequently struggling with constructing a building that does not possess a right angle. Using joining blocks makes it much easier, we used Smartie squares but wafer biscuits or anything else that is rectangular in cross section will do. Glueing the walls to the block rather than to each other gives a larger surface area and a better join. It’s best to wait for the walls to dry before adding the roof, I did have to resort to toothpick bracing while the chocolate set because the roof panels kept sliding off. Once the building work is done the decoration can be turned over to the juniors. Icing pens are really useful here, as are a load of Smartie Halloween leftovers. We did the roof in mini marshmallows last time and that was very effective, I did want to go for a log cabin with chocolate fingers stuck to the walls this year but I was overruled.

Hansel and Gretel are covering up a really big icing splodge on the wall but I suppose now that they will have to feature every year. Again, these are done with icing pens, you buy them in sets of four colours and we’ve used them as edible glue in several different projects. If you make the leftover gingerbread into men you can use the pens to draw on the features.

Our house was built without the necessary planning consents and the demolition team was sent in. It has now been dismantled, to be eaten over the course of the next few weeks. Due to improper planning the cashmere/silk shawl has also been dismantled although I am planning on rebuilding that in mohair at some point.

They look like a pair of socks but it’s a cheating photo, they aren’t a pair at all. Look how the back sock is tucked in behind the one in front – that’s because it has something to hide. These took a long time to finish because there was something seriously wrong with the first sock (the hiding sock) and it took me a while to work out exactly what it was. I know that when I don’t want to knit something there’s a good reason, even if I haven’t identified what it is. I tried the sock on several times, poked it, pulled at it and in the end decided that the cuff was just too short. I can see why it happened, I was knitting plain stockinette in plain purple yarn and there was a more exciting part just ahead with more interesting yarn and a pattern. It wasn’t hard to convince myself that the cuff was long enough so that I could end the boring bit and have fun. Having established what the problem was with the first sock I could then steam ahead and make the second sock more of a sensible length. I now had two socks that were not a pair, but I’d rather have one wrong sock than two.

I now have a proper pair, I snipped a thread between the rib and the start of the pattern, knitted down from the rib and then reunited the cuff (now 16 rows longer) with the foot. The dark yarn is Opal in some colourway or other and the pink is Araucania Ranco Multi which doesn’t come in colourways at all (a blessing for those of us who have problems hanging onto ball bands). It’s dyed in very short bursts of colour and I was hoping that would mean that the leaves/crow’s feet/swallows changed colour rapidly. It more or less came out the way I’d imagined it although the pattern was less fun to knit than I remembered it being the last time I knitted it. I managed to reduce a stitch somehow in both socks as a result of the pattern spiraling around the sock which ticked me off mightily as I couldn’t work out how I’d done it. I have 80g of the Ranco left so I will get to see what it looks like in plain stockinette in some future sock.

In the reward system I’m currently operating the finishing of this pair means that I get to knit with the stripey Kaffe Fasset yarn so I immediately cast on for what is a sock but looks nothing like it yet. It can come back and be properly introduced when it’s passed the cuff. The light colour is Opal 1267 (assuming that “Farbe” means “colourway” rather than “dyelot”) and although I very carefully saved the ball band on the Regia it has now vanished. The colours look identical to the yarn that you could win on Clarabelle’s blog so I’d suggest that you go and look at hers, ball bands and all. I’ll give you a head start on the competition, there is clearly no way she could have done that much holiday knitting without use of the force so the answer to the first question has to be A.

The postman did bring me my long awaited pattern although you will wonder why I was so excited because this is probably as boring a photo as you’ll ever see. Oh look, plain stockinette with a few increases. I am entertained because there is a colour change and it’s cashmere/silk which is lovely to knit with but I appreciate that appealing tactile qualities do not make for a good photo. It will return when it is bigger with lace around the edge. This may not be for a while as I had a request for small boy gloves this morning so my two new and exciting projects look like being shelved as soon as the planning department gets home from school.

Firstly thank you for all the lovely comments about the big blue cardi. I’m realising that either I stand strangely or one of the pieces of the clasp is indeed set higher than the other and sooner or later I’ll have to fix that. I think I’m staying with the one clasp because if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. There’s the other consideration that if I can’t get one placed correctly, what chance do I have getting three right?

On a less happy note the postman did not bring my pattern on Friday, or Saturday either so the big space in the knitting bag is still vacant. I had socks to knit, there will be a pair to show later in the week, but when that’s all you have it isn’t enough. I did think when I cast on that I’d broken my rule of “no Christmas knitting after the summer” but it turns out that this is for me anyway. I wore it on the school run this morning and it’s ideal for stopping the wind from whistling down the front of your coat. This is Ice Queen from the current issue of Knitty, made with cashmere/silk (Sarah’s Yarns) and 8/0 foil lined beads. I had mohair/silk but no beads that matched and beads that were right but no yarn to go with them so this was the only workeable combination that I had in the house. For anyone that is still in need of a one-size-fits-all quick knit Christmas gift then I’d recommend this. The beads would have been better if they’d been 6/0 (the number is how many you get in an inch if you lay them end to end, 8/0 is good for socks which explains why I have them in that size) but we know how much I tend to the “so subtle you might as well have not bothered” approach. The beaded picot bind off is lovely and I will certainly use that again, I threaded my beads onto the yarn at that point which is very much faster than placing them individually on the stitch, especially when you are using beads that you can’t get a crochet hook through. I enjoyed knitting it and I can see another one in my future in handspun cashmere but maybe without the beads.

I am now back to socks and waiting for the postman.
Edited – now with added sunshine. 

I was rejoicing in getting the knitting bag down to four items and then suddenly it was down to three. I wish I’d pulled my finger out and finished this sooner because I like it. There are three things that I would rather have done differently now that I’ve seen the results but they didn’t offend me enough for me to think about ripping back to the underarms to fix them. The first thing that I should have sorted out is that splay at the centre back neck but as I’ve only just seen that it is staying. The main thing is that it fits. Those of you who have seen me in person will recognise that this is no mean achievement, the difference between my bust and hip measurement being something of a fitting challenge. I usually have clothes that bury me around the shoulders so that they don’t gape horribly around my bum. This fits me all the way down. I like the sleeves the most, these are now the sleeves against which all others will be judged. They’re the right length and they just feel good.

I ripped out the bottom band and replaced it with a facing. This was in part because of one of my errors. I put all of the increases at the sides and this has made it flare a little there. It’s less noticeable with the facing than with the seed stitch band I had originally (or at least I think that it is). Another time I’d distribute the increases more evenly around the row and avoid concentrating them in one place. I did actually consider doing that but I didn’t really know whether it would make it stick out at the back. Now it sticks out at the sides instead. It doesn’t flare out all around like the pink hat does because with this I thought about what I was doing and used a smaller needle for the facing. I’d like to say that I’d learned from my experience with the hat but that would be a big fat lie, I’d sewn up the facing on the cardi before I’d even cast on for the hat.

The seed stitch band on the fronts is much better now that it’s worked on the smaller needle but I left off the buttonholes because of my other error. This was just a flat out error in principal. When I drafted out the pattern I had to remember to allow for the width of the band which would be added when the garment was complete. I got really carried away with adding an inch and a half here, there and everywhere and I added it where I shouldn’t have done. The result is that the top buttonhole (placed at the bottom of the V) was an inch and a half lower than where I wanted it because the bottom of the V is an inch and a half lower than I thought it would be. Now I’ve looked at no end of hand knits on Ravelry and lots of them have buttons that start under the top of the bust but that’s not where I wanted mine. I don’t want to be looking at this every time I wear it and fiddling with the top button so to avoid that I’m not having a top button at all. Don’t ask me why having a clasp in exactly the same place makes this any better, it does to me and it’s me that’s wearing it. I bought three clasps but at the moment I’m still uncertain whether I’ll put the other two on or not. I have been wearing it with no fastening at all so one clasp is a step forward.

Was it worth the effort? Yes it was. It feels like your favorite sweater that you’ve worn for years, the one that you know you should bin because it’s too shabby to be seen in but you keep it because it just feels so right. To knit one of your very own I’d suggest a yarn that stripes, a copy of Maggie Righetti’s “Sweater Design in Plain English” and a tape measure. I’d also suggest that you sew in the ends as you go along and use wider bands of colour so that there aren’t as many ends to deal with. Sewing in the ends and avoiding sewing in the ends took about a quarter of the time spent on this.

This weighs 590g, much less than I had anticipated. I have 240g of leftover yarn and another 100g of leftover fibre so I could have probably gone for knee length with a third arm if I’d wanted to. I have learned that it takes less yarn to cover me than I thought. I have also learned that the self timer on the camera resets itself after every shot.

This was a key tool in my grand plan to get things done. This was the carrot designed to get Agatha finally finished, attractive because it used the new pink handspun (and new yarn is always the best that there is) and because it was pretty. The main reason for having this as the next project was that it was small and fast to finish. I have the feeling that I have too much on the needles right now so this was intended as a full stop in that when this was cast off it would not be replaced in the knitting bag. I’m now down to four projects and today four seems like a good number. Three would be better because then I could start something new (see, the motivational tools are still working). On the other hand if the postman brings me my new pattern I could very quickly change to five being an even better number.

This is the picot hem snowflake hat in burgundy Bergere de France Sport and my three ply pink yarn. It used 30g of the BDF and 46g of the lighter pink. I got the tension as in the pattern (7 stitches and 8 rows) on a 3.5mm needle which means that I can happily repeat this combination on a set of matching mittens (probably after Christmas). The only thing I’d change if I was knitting the hat again would be to start it on a size smaller needle. My hem is showing a tendency to flare and if the turned under part was tighter this wouldn’t have happened. I’d probably also have a go at actually following the pattern in the last four rows rather than knitting what I thought it said and then refusing to rip it out. It is a lovely pattern, there are no long floats and once you have the first few rows set up it’s fairly obvious what happens next so it’s very easy to follow. You should all knit one right away.

I know we all like modelled shots of knitting but I have established beyond reasonable doubt that I look a prune in hats of this shape. It is the right size for me and it’s made a lovely fabric so I’m sure that it will make someone a very good hat, but that someone is not me. I knew that when I cast it on so I’m not bothered about that at all. I didn’t want a hat, I wanted something fun to knit and it certainly was that.