Wool For Brains

It’s not often I get to make two mistakes in a project before I’ve even cast it on. The first thing I did wrong was when I dyed the darker blue, it wasn’t dark enough in comparison to the light blue or any of the other colours so it had to go back into the dye pot (that was part of yesterday’s things to make and do that were not knitting). That was easy to fix and after all it’s easy to dye it darker than lighter. My second mistake was only just recoverable. It wasn’t as if there was just the one skein, there were five (the four on the left and the one on the right). It was a simple mistake to make, I put the wet yarn in a laundry bag, threw it in the washer and pressed the button to spin the water out. I wandered off upstairs to check if the internet was working and when I came back twenty minutes later the washer was still going round, with a drum full of water and 55 minutes left on the programme. Yes, I hadn’t set it to spin at all, I’d set it going on a regular wash cycle. For the record, just in case anyone was in any doubt about this, if you wash your handspun shetland on a normal 40 degree wash it does felt. I considered crying but couldn’t see what that would achieve so instead I settled for prising the felted mess apart. The yarn doesn’t look that bad now, I’m just going to regard it as an exercise in extreme finishing.

The yarn is intended for something with a steek, for no other reason than I’ve never cut my knitting up in that particular direction. I can attest that Shetland sticks to itself very well indeed, especially when you wash it wrongly. I may want to deny the existence of this if it all goes wobbly so for the sake of argument we’ll call this project a dog blanket. If it goes wrong that’s what it will be anyway. This is on hold until such time as the needles that I ordered for it turn up.

Did I finish the heel flap? Well no, but the end is in sight now. I’ve not much enjoyed it to be truthful. I’m spatially challenged which is my excuse for making a pig’s ear of the purl rows where I can’t work out which way the pattern is moving. Some of the beaded rows are worked from the purl side and they were much harder than I’d expected. I don’t have a problem on a knit stitch getting the bead to pass through the stitch on the needle (the beads being strung on the working yarn) but I found this to be really difficult on the purl side. There are a few more rows to work, some sort of shaping, then the two sides are grafted together, stitches picked up around and then it’s plain knitting to the toe.

I was going to tell you about the excitement of taking off the U bend on the kitchen sink. I think I’ll pass on that as there’s a real danger that I might yet throw up but I believe that the washer may now be cured of throwing water on the kitchen floor. I just need to enable the mind reading programme on it and then we’re sorted.

My achievements for today have included washing two sinkfuls of alpaca, filling a bobbin with pink bfl, dyeing two hanks of yarn and attempting to skein several thousand yards of laceweight yarn. That is all either wet or dull or both so no photos there. My biggest job was shoehorning most of Sainsburys’ grocery department into the fridge, freezer and kitchen cupboards and do you know I didn’t take a photo of that either. As a time saving measure I am aiming for one grocery shop every two weeks, which was fine last week but didn’t seem like such a good idea today. The result of all this is that the total knitting for today has been a few rows of garter stitch. The worrying thing is that it wasn’t me that knitted this, my total in the nine hours and a half I’ve been awake is exactly zip. My husband however has managed to add a few rows to his scarf. (Go see, leave comments, tell him how good his tension is because he doesn’t believe me when I say that he is doing incredibly well for a first project)

It’s a poor state of affairs when the non-knitter can wave around more knitting than I can. I am determined to have something to show tomorrow even if that means shelving my plans for dinner, digging the pizza out of the fridge and making an effort to finish that beaded heel flap.

It looks like we are mended again. The thingy has found a speed that it is happy to run at, it’s now not going so fast that it generates errors and falls over and so all is well again. It just happens that the speed it’s running at is the same as before it was improved but we’ve learned something through having a week of dodgy connection so that’s something. (What we learned was to not do this again) I would like to thank everyone who left a comment, it was reassuring to know that I was not talking to the wall, as the mother of a small child I get enough of that in real life.

See the pretty stocking (Victorian Christmas stocking, originally from IK Summer 2002, pattern available separately here) It looks as if I was running at a speed that generated errors. The cuff is supposed to do that but the leg isn’t. You will need to make that photo bigger, even I can’t see my mistake in the thumbnail and I know where to look. Having spotted my mistake I had three options, leave it and carry on, fix it by sewing the right colour over the top or fix it for real. If you think I chose the first option then hello, my name is Caroline and thank you for visiting my blog for the first time today. You know that I am not capable of leaving it alone, it’s not whether it’s visible to other people, it’s whether it’s visible to me. Even if I only have to look at it for a few weeks a year I will know that it is there and I’ll be forever wishing that I’d fixed it while I had the chance. If I had already turned the heel then it would have been duplicate stitch to the rescue but I hadn’t and this was only seven rows back so it was a quick fix. I think that I’ve already spent more time typing this paragraph than it tool me to mend it.

The essential tools are a grabby needle (it’s about the only time you’ll see me using wood) and a clear record of what you intend to do. I know from past fixes that what looks to be a straightforward change when all the stitches are at the same point becomes harder when they start being at different rows. My notes show which two stitches need to be fixed, what row they need to be dropped back to and what the rows above them should be. The poor light is a giveaway, it may only take five minutes to do but it’s a job best accomplished when everyone else is asleep. You drop the stitches off the needle, encourage them to run to the place you want and then knit them back up again following the sequence on the paper.

It’s a little longer than this now, I’ve done three repeats on the leg and it needs a total of five repeats and a few rows before it gets to the heel. It’s not quite as much fun as it was, the pattern is inching along the continuum from “exciting” to “boring” but I think I’ll get to the heel before I run out of steam. The carrot is the beaded rows, they come along often enough so that there is always one in sight, just a few more rows knitting gets you to one with a bit of sparkle.

I have been amazed by how much easier stranded knitting is on a circular needle. Recently my colourwork has been on mittens and socks – all dpns. I know that they do make tiny circulars that you can knit a sock on but I had to send mine back because the tip was so small that I couldn’t hold it with any comfort. I’m not sure what my little finger does when I’m knitting but it needs to have contact with a needle. Way back when I used to knit fairisle sweaters they were knit flat on two needles so this is the first time I’ve stranded in the round. It’s so easy when there are no corners to turn, my knitting looks tons better even before blocking. I may be changing my mind about this being the year of the mitten, it may be the year of “small things that can be knit on one needle”. Catchy eh? The sock yarn scraps may meet their end in tams, cushions and Christmas stockings.

It’s strange to be posting to a blog that has no readers whatsoever. Just at the moment (click, click, click goes the router) I know that there’s no connection between us and the internet but I have hope that at some point during the day the world wide web will reach as far as here. We’re not allowed to have a fault with the line for ten days, what we are currently experiencing is officially “settling down issues” so things aren’t going to get better this week. If you managed to struggle in, well done you, have a cookie (you’ll have to provide your own, we’ve eaten ours). I’m realising just how much time I fritter away on the internet over the course of a day, five minutes here, ten minutes there, it all adds up. I’m finding that knitting time adds up in the same way. Here is my top ten guide to alternative sources of entertainment in the absence of an internet connection that actually connects. I went to 11 because it has been dodgy since last Wednesday and ten wasn’t enough.

1. Complete your tax return. Would you believe that I didn’t take a photo? Believe me when I say it was neither creative nor interesting.

2. Knit 3″ of mind blowingly boring white stockinette on itty bitty needles. There may not be exactly 3″ but I’ll deal with that later, I couldn’t face another row.

3. Knit a scarf. This is the Huckleberry Ascot from Interweave Knits 2007 Holiday Gifts in some three ply handspun. I had hoped that the colour changes would show in the short row sections and they do.

4. Spin. This is superwash bluefaced leicester dyed in Desert Pea, Chamomile and Wallaby (also known as red, yellow and brown). I was hoping for a cranberry red but got rosehip instead. I have now to admit total failure on the dyeing of red, I had three goes at it and still didn’t get the colour I wanted.

5. Knit a Latvian braid. I’ve never done one of these before, they are stunningly lovely but really simple. I did find some directions here so that you can see that it is just knit and purl despite it looking fiendish and sideways on. That’s the only link you’re going to get today as I had it bookmarked. Hopefully it’s the right one.

6. Knit socks (handspun, handdyed blue faced leicester, for me)

7. Spin. This is blue faced leicester in shades of pink. We will note that I can dye pink even though red is beyond me.

8. Bake oatmeal and raisin cookies. These are by far and away the best I’ve ever made, especially when you sandwich two together with vanilla ice cream.

9. Rip a scarf. See 3 above. The colour was lovely but it had the drape of a cereal box. Next time – bigger needles.

10. Spin. This is superwash blue faced leicester in shades of pink, deliberately lighter than 6 above.

11. Knit some more of the Victorian Christmas Stocking (originally from Interweave Knits 2006 Holiday Gifts Summer 2002 but now available from Knitting Daily. Much as I’d love to link to it you’re on your own there). I am hoping that the piece of string that connects us to the rest of the internet will be mended before this is finished because my love for this is what is keeping me happy.

I am hoping that the blog will return reliably towards the end of next week, I’m going to pretend that it doesn’t exist until then because most of the time it doesn’t. You may have noticed this already but I’m sure that you’ve not been noticing it as much as I have. See you in February then..

Hello world, can you hear me? The husband is filled with guilt and remorse because he’s improved the internet connection and now it’s much faster. Sometimes. The rest of the time it doesn’t work at all.
I will be back when the router has stopped clicking away as it repeatedly resets the line.

My method for using up leftover sock yarn is to knit more socks. I don’t like sewing in ends so generally I don’t knit stripes but stick with a spiral which means that there’s only two ends for each ball used. The Stashbuster Spiral pattern as written uses three yarns and uses a different one for the cuff, heel and toe so it will need similar amounts of each of the yarns. This sock used one of the balls from the bag of bits that weigh over 45g and three smaller similar coloured balls from the odd ball bag and I made the cuff, heel and toe from the larger ball. Of the yarns I started with I reached the end of one of them, the small red ball of handspun merino/mohair on the right. I was really careful in measuring the balls into two before I started so I can now say with some certainty just how much yarn you need for a stripe. The sock weighs 36g (I knit a fairly short cuff, most of my socks end up around 80g for the pair) Assuming you want two the same you will need 14g of three similar colours of yarn for the stripes and 30g for the yarn that will form the cuff, heel and toe. Left to right the balls are: Opal for the heels and toes used in the hope that the nylon content will make it wear well, Cherry Tree Hill Supersock in Indian Summer and Cabin Fever and some handspun mohair/merino.

I am still spinning, if I spin up what I got for Christmas then I don’t have to deal with the issue of putting it away. This is superwash merino in colours that are really lovely, think of a dark cloud at evening with the sun behind it, dark purple and a light gold. I have 8oz, the first half I made into a three bobbin three ply. It will stripe after a fashion, you can see the colour changes on the bobbin, but they are going to be very subtle. I might make the second half into a chained three ply to make a really stripey stripe but again I’m a little wary of the dominance of the gold in the finished sock. I shouldn’t be really, it’s just a sock and if I can wear flaming red then why be bothered by a bit of gold?

I came very close to making a big mistake on Friday. I had the bobbin in my hand and was about to start filling it when I realised that this was the last one, all the others were full. It’s the equivalent of painting yourself into a corner, you need to keep one empty bobbin as an escape route to ply onto. If you don’t then you have to wind off the single or buy another bobbin and both are a waste of valuable daylight spinning time. From the left this is the second bobbin of my dyed bfl (the first bobbin of this is already a sock), the Hawaiin Shirt superwash merino that Santa brought (from Dyed in the Wool Handmade) and some superwash bfl in my “oops” colourway. It’s all sock yarn, the first two will stripe and the last one will do whatever it likes. There will be stripes emerge from the heathered bits but it’s all going to be a bit more random.

That last yarn was going to be a striped navajo ply like the others but I lost my nerve before I started to spin it. If it was to have a proper name it would be something like “caramel chocolate cherry” and it was the caramel that I had issues with. I was happy with the red and the brown but the gold in the roving was just too scary. I thought that a stripe in that colour would dominate the sock so I did what you would do if you didn’t like the caramel sauce on your dessert, I stirred it in. I made a two ply so that there was less chance of seeing a gold/gold combination in the finished yarn. It’s come out ok but I need not have bothered. Once it was on the bobbin and smooched into the red and the brown the gold was perfectly acceptable even to my picky eyes. That hateful blancmange pink just vanished without a trace. I’ll try and dye this again and this time go for the stripes.

There has also been knitting, although not much because I’ve been spinning whenever I could. I’ve turned the heel on both active socks. The heel on the Christmas stocking took forever, I knitted and knitted and knitted and it still wasn’t done. I think in the end I started short rowing back out before I should have done but it was either that or have it eat into a second evening’s knitting. It’s not as if it has to fit anyone, it turns the corner appropriately and that’s all that it needs to do. I am very glad that I don’t have to make a pair of these, I could not face another heel. When I’ve finished the toe on the red sock I’ll be able to see just how much yarn you need for a cuff, heel and toe and how much you need for a stripe row because before I started I weighed all the yarn into two halves very accurately. I think that it’s will be not much at all just for a stripe because I’m always surprised how far down a sock I can knit with a tiny ball of yarn when it’s only knitting one row in four.

There’s no reason for this photo other than I like it. It’s all grey outside, the heavy snow that was forecast for Thursday has now changed to heavy rain so that means rain all week. I think it’s a time for dyeing some more nice bright colours so I can think of sunshine and flowers on grey days.

Normally I would have quietly slipped this from the needles and pretended that it never existed but I have several witnesses to the start of this project so I feel I ought to explain where this one went. It shows my design process anyway which might be of interest to someone.

I decided to knit my son a sweater seeing as he’s grown out of the ones that I’ve previously knitted for him. The pattern was easy enough because I have his current favorite sweater to copy from. It’s hard to see in the photo but it’s a fairly wide rib with a saddle shoulder and a small zip at the neck. I like rib for small boy jumpers, it means that you can buy or knit them big and because the rib pulls in they don’t look like they’re wearing a sack until they’ve grown into it. User consultation said that this should be mostly green, with red and white and not itchy. Consultation with the laundry slave said that this should be cheap and machine washable given that he’ll have grown out of it fairly quickly and he gets yoghurt or gravy down the front each time he wears it. I measured just about everything there was to measure and wrote it all down somewhere safe. I measured the small boy as well and discovered why it is that his Beaver’s sweatshirt looks small on him. Guess what, he’s grown and he’s wearing a 28″ sweatshirt on a 31″ chest.

After I’d bought the yarn but before I’d cast on I had five minutes of panic when he decided he’d draw me the jumper he wanted. Non-knitters don’t feel the constraints of gauge and yarn and I was imagining a group of photographically correct intarsia guinea pigs roaming freely across the front of what had previously been a simple sweater. I got lucky – he added another stripe on the arms and lost the stripe on the front but otherwise stuck to the original. The arms were fine but I would have talked him back into the stripe on the front because you’ve got to have something to look forward to at the other side of inches of plain rib.

This is as far as I got when I hit my knitting-blah period. I put it down on Sunday afternoon and I was done with it. I felt terribly guilty but I didn’t want to knit this any more (this, or anything else in the world either). What is a mother to do to avoid disappointing her son? I got lucky and found a substitute in Sainsbury’s when I was doing the grocery shopping. He loves it, it fits and he looks fantastic in it. The green and red is now back in the ball and at some point will emerge as mittens and hats.

I’ve had three days without knitting a stitch. I found that it is possible for me to sit and watch tv at night without knitting, I’d like to say that my experience was enhanced by really looking at the screen as opposed to half watching what was on but that’s not the case. Last night I poked through the sock scrap bag, came up with some co-ordinating balls and cast on for a sock. I’m still sneezing but I think I might be over the worst now.

No knitting today, knitting is still off least I pull everything back to the needles but I do have some photos of pretty balls of fluff to share. With a little imagination you could see them as socks. I did spend a bit of time under the poorly quilt yesterday afternoon being ministered to by Dr Morris. He prescribed a lie down, a pillow, the quilt and a teddy (all of which he fetched for me). He looked after me very well and I made a full recovery very quickly because at seven he’s not old enough to be entrusted to tea making so I can only be lie-down sick for as long as it takes me to drink one cup of tea. I’d not noticed before that the colours in the current sock are those in the front of the quilt and the next bump of fibre queued for the wheel features the colours from the back. The left hand fluff is superwash merino in the Hawaiian Shirt colourway from Dyed in The Wool Handmade. Santa must read the adverts on Ravelry too. I love the vibrant colours but they’re not ones that would have ever have occurred to me to dye. By the time I’d made up the dye stock I would have had plenty of time to talk myself out of the orange, it’s not usually a colour that calls to me.

I was not too sick to dye yesterday, especially as I didn’t have to do the brain taxing part of picking the colours. I just copied off the Yarn Harlot’s latest socks. You can’t really go wrong with dyeing fibre, it’s easier than yarn in many ways. White patches can be a good thing as they give some colour variation in the yarn and you need a long stretch of white to actually end up with white yarn. The only way I’ve found to mess it up is by felting it and I thought I’d be safe there as it was superwash. The camera and I disagree on what colour this is and after taking six photos with and without flash against various backgrounds it is still obstinately refusing to show what I see. You’ll just have to take my word that the blue isn’t there at all, it is actually teal (Sage in the Landscapes dye range). This is a new fibre to me, superwash blue faced leicester (another one of my Christmas presents). I’m hoping that this will become my standard sock fibre for other people. I don’t mind not-superwash for me because I have the fancy pants (but currently leaking) washer and enough knitted socks to make a load a fortnight but I think that superwash is more laundry-friendly for other people. Are there people out there who hand wash their socks (other than my mother)?

Sometimes I see only what I want to see and manage to overlook what should be obvious. I saw the lilac and blue in the big striped ball and decided that it would work well with the lilac and blue in the glittery ball at top right. There was pink and lilac in the Koigu (bottom right) so the big striped ball would tie the two smaller balls together and everything would knit up in some wonderful harmonious way. I managed to totally overlook the salmon, white and fuschia in the big ball altogether although they are quite clearly there and I didn’t really stop and think what part they would play in the finished sock.

I like the blue and lilac sections because they look like I thought they would but the totally unexpected (by me at least) salmon and white slap me in the face. I’m sure there’s a big learning point here but I’m equally sure that I’m going to make the same mistake another time. The other thing that I am certain of is that the remaining striped yarn is going to have a close encounter with some navy dye very soon. On the positive side there is next to nothing of the glittery yarn left and there is only a very small amount of the Koigu to go back into the scrap bag. I seem to have been knitting socks from the glittery yarn for years, it went into the scrap bag as a full 100g because I’d found it impossible to knit with on its own. Sock yarn gets three outings, if I’ve tried to knit it three times and failed then there is no fourth attempt, it’s destined to be a stripe.

The sock scraps bag is starting the year at a very respectable 390g and my aim is to end 2008 with less than 400g without having to redefine scrap yarn again. When I weighed it in September there was just over a kilo of leftovers so it’s clear that the reduction to its current size has been done by magical means or creative accounting. It could also have been achieved by determined knitting of eight pairs of scrappy socks but I think it’s obvious to everyone that I didn’t do that. Anyone can add numbers up, the skill is in deciding what numbers to use. I have recently decided that a single 50g skein is not a scrap in sock terms because with a contrast cuff, heel and toe it could knit a pair of short socks. The junior contractor was instructed to weigh all the balls and put anything over 45g into another bag. I didn’t weigh that bag, it went back into the sock yarn drawer and so doesn’t count. I can’t get the drawer shut now and I’m reminded why it was that I took all the part balls out of it in the first place.

My dissatisfaction with lace has now spread to the rest of the knitting bag. I think the reason that socks escaped for as long as they did is that I knit socks for function, if it fits it’s a good sock even if it is as ugly as they come. Lace doesn’t have that fall back, if it’s not pretty then it has no reason to be. The Fiesta Foot would look better in another yarn, the Christmas stocking would be better on that circular needle that I still can’t find and I can’t decide whether I actually like the yarn I bought for a sweater. I am thinking that there will be more housework than knitting this week because whatever I pick up from the bag is in danger. There is only one thing in there that I’m pleased with, everything else could equally well be ripped as knitted. I suspect that I’ll feel more positive when I’ve seen off the lurgy that I’ve had since Boxing Day.

This is the only thing that’s safe because I love the colours and it fits perfectly. This is as far as I can knit for the moment, I put the wheel away for Christmas before I had the chance to make the yarn for the second sock. There’s enough yarn for another inch or so of cuff but I don’t want to knit that until I’ve got the other sock to the same point, there’s no guarantee that I split the roving equally into two and I might have less yardage on the second sock. This is a week for spinning and housework and maybe a new scrap sock, I’ll probably be back at the end of the week when hopefully I’ll have stopped sneezing.