Wool For Brains

Cue the frogs because this makes three finished things in the week. If I could turn back time I’d have brought in the frogs sooner and ripped it at the stage where I realised that this wasn’t going to be a dubbelmossa. It has turned out to be a functional hat, head sized at the bottom, of a suitable depth and closed at the top. If you were cold and didn’t have a hat then you’d be glad of it. Hopefully some chilled child somewhere will be glad of this next winter (maybe after the addition of a big, fluffy pom pom)

Vampires vs. Zombies buy

This is the heel motif from the Victorian Christmas stocking, my pink handspun and some burgundy Bergere de France Sport. It is the same yarn combo that I used in the Snowflake hat and as I had leftovers it seemed sensible to use them again. Because the heel pattern was very deep (ha, 4″ my eye), I only just finished the pattern before the crown decreases so the pattern is distorted at the top. It was an idea that was doomed in the planning stage. I did calculate my row gauge and work out how deep the pattern would be but it looks like I got it wrong. It’s so wrong that I can’t see how I managed to think it was right without accidentally dividing by two or something.

This is the plan for another hat. Needless to say it is not of my own design, it’s a commission (or put another way, I’m following orders). The main design feature is the fringe of prawn legs framing the face, with a sea coloured background. The notes say “prawns under sea, legs hanging down, sea patterns or decorations on top”. I don’t mind making something that no-one is ever going to wear, it will amuse us both and that’s the important thing. So far I have no prawns (I’ve made two, both have been named and loved and cannot now be sewn to a hat) and no yarn made for the background. That’s fine by me, I want to wait a while to see if this design is ditched in favour of a new and improved one featuring frogs or elephants. I know my client very well and I know that his attention span is shorter than the time it will take me to make the hat. There is no way that I can make unwearable hats as fast as he can dream them up, the trick is to make the right one out of the line up. There might turn out to be something even better than prawns just around the corner. I shall wait to see whether I’m questioned as to progress on the prawn hat or whether he asks me if I can knit a frog (elephant/mythical beast/cartoon character)

This makes two finished things in a week, never mind that all this has been needing was the ends sewing in and the facing sewing down, it is now finished. My strange behavior should be heralded by a plague of locusts, a rain of fire or maybe an earthquake. One out of three isn’t bad. When you’ve been asleep for two hours it is very easy to convince yourself that the bed is jumping around because the extension is collapsing and you are about to be deposited in the garage. It was terrifying, it took me about an hour to calm down enough to get back to sleep. Needless to say, the child and the guinea pigs slept through it. Once I was capable of rational thoughts, my first one was that I was glad that I’d got the roof fixed this week.

I’m not sure to what extent this is still the Fireside Stocking from the Holiday edition of Interweave Knits because I deviated a long way from the original. The original creates the colour changes within the snowflakes by using multiple colours of yarn. That’s never going to happen here – can you see me sewing all those ends in? If that happened it would result in a plague of frogs for sure. My colour changes happen because the blue yarn is self striping, it’s part of the leftovers from my V necked jumper. I was following the pattern for the toe but messed it up because I was watching something half way interesting on tv and didn’t pay enough attention to the chart. I went my own way on the heel and also put it in the wrong place. The result is that I have two motifs and two half motifs on a side rather than three full ones. It’s not like me to leave a mistake like that but I was so not loving the whole thing at that point that I couldn’t be bothered to rip the heel and reknit it offset by half a motif. The reason I was not loving it was because it looked a mess. The combination of slippery superwash and handspun bfl was not a good one, I just couldn’t knit it to make it look anything other than pants. I know things improve magically when blocked but there are limits. Clearly I was within those limits because it looks so much better now that it has been firmly encouraged to even out. I don’t know whether there is a recognised blocking process where you pull the item into shape while it is still swimming in the sink, it is possible I may have invented a new form of extreme blocking for the truly desperate.

The computer took advantage of the husband’s absence yesterday and has eaten the email software. This means that I haven’t had the opportunity to reply to your comments but given that most of them were prawn related I’ll give a brief update on Peter. I would like to have added a photo here of Peter together with his new petite friend Poppy but they have mysteriously disappeared this morning; I suspect that they have been smuggled to school. Peter is not a knitted prawn, if he was I wouldn’t have needed to rip Peters one to six. Peter is a crochet prawn, as crochet stitches come in a small, medium and large height then the shaping needed to make the tail curve down from the body is so much easier than the short row knitting equivalent. The pattern is here, I also have the octopus with voluptuous legs but I’m rather at a stop with that until the husband retrieves the pattern from the depths of the non-functioning email.

I can’t decided whether to continue with the character building crochet or switch the prawn to knitting where I find it easier to keep track of what I’m doing and don’t create stitches out of thin air. I’m definitely getting better, Poppy didn’t need to be ripped at all but in part that was because I managed to dispose of the stitches that I acquired. I can’t decide whether I’m working past the start of the round or whether I’m making two stitches into the same loop. I’ve caught myself doing both but I think that it’s mostly the latter. Constant vigilance, that’s the key.

This is the Zetor scarf in hand spun silk and angora on a 5mm needle. I did manage to knit it on straight needles all the way to the end although it wasn’t the most comfortable knitting experience I’ve ever had. It used less than 500 yards because I had a bit left, I thought that I’d better keep a sample in case I ever managed to spin anymore. It came out to a good size, bigger than I’d hoped for with the feeble yardage that I had. It’s something like 64″ across the top and a 34″ inch drop. As I’m 5′4″ or 64″, then it’s a good size for me. It’s too large for the euphonium case and had to be folded over at the top, should I ever be called upon to make a shawl for a euphonium I’ll bear this in mind. My points aren’t very pointy because every time I cast off I kid myself that this time things will be different, this time I will cast off loosely enough just by thinking about it. I know lots of tricks for getting a loose cast off but I don’t use them because I can do this. Obviously I can’t.

I did struggle with the self timer, the secret to my getting a half decent photo that way seems to be to take dozens and hope that one of them is good enough. I started and finished this in less time than it has taken me to sew up some of the knitting I have that’s off the needles. Knitting is fun, sewing in ends is not. I should confess now that the ends on the shawl are not yet sewn in, you just can’t see them. That’s a job that can be done in the evenings, photos need daylight and therefore have a higher priority.

I’ve made certain promises about having made another prawn by school pick up today. It needs to be white and smaller, so I am told. The junior designer has plans for a hat but I’ve already had to promise that we won’t put Peter on the hat, or Peter’s new (as yet in the ball) friend either. Personally I can see that we’re going to have prawn attachment problems, none of them will get as far as the hat because they are all going to be named and loved. Peter does not have antennae, we agreed that if we managed to make them stiff enough to stand out then they’d be too poky to take to bed. Peter would have been easier if I hadn’t made him inside out, by the time I realised what I was doing then I was well down the body and reluctant to rip. It’s exactly the same as knitting a sock, if you join in a round and knit at the back of the circle then you are knitting the inside of the tube, if you have the working needle at the front of the loop then you are knitting on the outside of the tube. I’d realised that the stitches looked wrong but I couldn’t work out why. In my defense I would like to say that it is 30 some years since I used a crochet hook for anything other than adding beads or doing reconstruction of knitting.

I have something else blocking, the pile of nearly finished items is getting a little on the large side and this is the week when I get to grips with them. I also have plans to empty the linen cupboard and refold it all and take the vacuum cleaner to places it doesn’t usually go. Spring must be in the air.

The lace is off and running, after a few false starts. I tried twice with the Twisted Sisters Lust but I couldn’t find a lace pattern that played nicely with the yarn. The start of the Adamas shawl looked promising except that all the red was on one side and all the yellow on the other. It would have worked itself out as the rows got longer but the pattern wasn’t what I was looking for so i ditched that. The second attempt was a simple horseshoe lace stole which would have had the Kinzel lace pattern on the ends. I thought that it looked blotchy and given that the stitch count wasn’t going to change this would have been the effect from one end to the other. I ripped that too.

The Lust is now in the lace drawer until I see the right pattern for it. I was having to use two balls together because there is a small but noticeable difference between the two skeins and I can’t help but think that this might be causing the colours to stack up on each other. I think that I might get a better result using one skein at a time and that says “scarf” to me rather than “shawl”.

I did see the right pattern, not for this yarn but for the silk and angora that I made recently. One of the wonders of Ravelry is that you can see what your Ravelry friends add to their queues and you get some really interesting patterns waved in front of your nose. I wanted a triangle with a simple pattern and a knit until you drop edging and Ms Etherknitter added the perfect one to her queue. Sometimes you just know when the yarn and the pattern will work together. This is the Zetor scarf, a free pattern, which is probably going to be a bit on the small side as I don’t have much yardage. I started this yesterday, within half an hour of seeing the pattern. It’s already too big to extend fully on the needles but I don’t have a circular in this size and I’m too cheap to buy one as 5mm isn’t something I use very often. The Denise set doesn’t have an exact 5mm and I’m trying to put off the inevitable for as long as I can. The yarn is lovely, shiny and fluffy at the same time and silk/angora is now definitely on my want list.

Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny movie full

It’s been a fun packed week, we’ve been to the dentist, cinema, barbers, wool shop, chocolate shop, measured up for a new bathroom floor, made Patrick Star biscuits, chosen new vinyl flooring (we will be fitting that later today), turned the front room into a theatre and done stuff with card and sticky tape. I must admit that I hadn’t realised how much fun you could have wrecking mum’s attempts at photography. It took a long time to get a photo that was free of body parts and toys and in the end it cost me a biscuit and a glass of milk.

I’m just popping in to show what last week’s dyed yarn looks like knitted up. It just goes to show that the proof is in the knitting. These are Monkey socks with all the purls as knits. The colouring is well behaved with no strange spiral patterns and it doesn’t look patchy, mottled or any of the other unpleasant words I used about it. The rather scabby looking skein that produced the sock on the left is this one on the right, it doesn’t look much but it looks so much better knitted up. The sock is knitting itself, or rather they both are because I’m more or less finished with these. The front one needs minor cosmetic surgery to restore the missing four rows from one of the pattern repeats but that needs to wait for some alone time.

All I have on the needles right now is socks, the other projects are in that limbo land of being off the needles but not finished. I’d promised a half term visit to the chocolate shop, which just happens to be around the corner from the wool shop. How good is that? I’m still spending my Christmas vouchers so I felt that I had to come away with three balls of sock yarn and it looks as if I’m still in my pink phase. The one on the left is for the husband, the other two will be mine.

It’s not all pink around here, this is fibre dyed by the low water method. There were three colours of dye but the Mountain Blue is a bit shy. I think the trouble I have with it is that I’m expecting it to be navy and it isn’t, it’s more of a grey blue. If I ever get to the bottom of the dye tub then I’ll replace it with Midnight Blue which is closer to the colour that I’m after. Seeing as it is a 100g tub and I use maybe 3g at a time, this may take a while. I also managed to dye a rather lovely red this week – the secret was the addition of black to the dye bath.

…and he’s not coming tomorrow night. Santa’s not coming for a while as it happens so I’m going to have to take the stocking down for a while. This is the action shot, I hang the stockings from the handles of the dresser where they stop the doors opening and generally get in the way. They do look pretty though and as there’s nowhere else to hang them I can say with certainty that’s where they will be going next Christmas. This is the Victorian Christmas stocking, originally from the Summer 2002 issue of Interweave Knits, now available as a separate pattern from Knitting Daily. I used plain old sock yarn rather than the alpaca called for in the pattern and there was 54g of the contrast colour (overdyed Opal) left. I don’t know how much of the white I used as I was knitting off a cone and made no appreciable difference to it. I used a 3mm needle to get the 9 stitches per inch recommended and while it felt all wrong to be knitting sock yarn on that needle the resulting fabric is fine. The beads are 4mm clear glass with a silver lining, I bought several packets of them from Ebay a while ago for a project that I then ditched so they came in useful eventually.

It is possible that I might knit another one of these before Christmas. I loved the braids with a passion, so simple, so pretty. The pattern for the body of the sock was easily memorised and the leg and foot were tv knitting. The heel was a bit tricky, I’ve lost the brain cells that used to deal with stranded purling, I’ve made fairisle sweaters in the past on two needles so I should have been able to do this with less frustration and tinking. I also found adding the beads on the purl rows to be harder than I expected. I think if I’d started with the heel then I would have given up on it but by the time you get to that stage you’ve reached a certain level of commitment that means you’re more prepared to slog through 35 rows. The star toe will make a lovely hat crown in another project, I’m not convinced that I did the decreases where they should have been but it’s good enough. I doubt that Santa will be looking at the toe that closely when he’s stuffing it with satsumas and chocolate pennies.

Half term starts at 3.20 this afternoon so the blog will probably be taking a week off and returning on the 26th after I’ve caught up on my silent tea drinking. In the event of there being interesting knitting I may be back in the meantime.

This post is mostly about dyeing, for Carolyn because she asked about it. Before starting that I thought I’d show you what the lace swatch looks like now (the photo on the left). It swoopeth not and I am happy with that. It occurred to me when I was writing yesterday’s post that there was no need for the side edges to go outwards even though the pattern is getting bigger. The bottom edge is not straight and the excess fabric is used to create that fan/butterfly/leaf shape that sticks out in the middle. When I blocked it the first time I was resigned to it being a failure as a straight sided piece and didn’t try to force my will on the edges. Once I’d threaded two tiny knitting needles through the edge to enforce straightness then all was well. This is part of the “Rose of England” tablecloth from Marianne Kinzel’s Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting. The tablecloth is round and so the edging pattern gets wider as it gets longer. I think I’ve proved that if I keep it fairly short then I can block it out straight and thereby use it as the edge on a rectangular shawl. The centre of the shawl would run down the centre of the swatch so that’s where the corner turning magic will be. Don’t hold your breath – it’s half term next week.

This is the end of the knitting, the rest of the post is all about dyeing, if you’re interested (even if your name is not Carolyn) read on.
(Read on …)

The plan was for there to be a finished stocking today or an illustration of how I dye three colours in one pan. That didn’t happen because I went chasing off after lace patterns yesterday afternoon and it’s all I’ve been thinking about. Adamas wasn’t what I was wanting right now and has been ripped, I looked at Icarus and then thought I already had a pattern that would tag on the bottom of a shawl in a similar way. I have, but it’s for a circular shawl and I wasn’t sure whether it would be possible to block out some of the roundness. The answer to that is clearly “no”, it is swooping out at the edges, which is what you get for having a pattern repeat that starts at 20 stitches and ends up at 36. I have to decide whether to jiggle it to lose some of the increases, after which I will then have to work out how to make it turn around the corner of the triangle or whether to put this away for another day and make a Leaf Lace shawl from the Lust. The big thing that I like about it is that it will bend the lines of colour in the yarn which will make the boring bit at the top slightly more entertaining to knit.

I’ll be back when I’ve finished messing with graph paper, I know how to lose the increases but the corner is a mystery to me.

(Plan B -  I’ve gone for a reblock with added encouragement at the edges)

This is the heel motif from the (still unfinished) Christmas stocking, without the beads and with a slight tweak to make it fit the number of stitches I need. After a while of watching the stitches build up into a pattern the thought occurred to me that this was looking a little big. I did what I normally do at this point, reminded myself of my careful measurements and told myself that I was worrying about nothing. Just for once it’s not the stitch gauge. I know that the last time I knitted this particular combination of yarns that I got 7 stitches per inch on a 3.5mm needle so it’s reasonable that I’m getting 6 per inch on a 3.75mm needle. I’ve also had it on my head just as a further check. The issue with this is the height rather than the width.

Before I started this I checked that the 35 row motif would fit nicely in the space that I had for it and I worked out that it would be four inches tall. This was good because what I thought I was knitting here was a fold over brim so that there would be more layers of fabric over the ears (if anyone wants a photo they can go and search on “dubbelmossa”). I’m nearly half way up the motif and I can no longer ignore the fact that it isn’t going to be four inches tall when done, six inches is more like it. I’ve made an error in principle, the motif is indeed four inches tall but the braid and the few plain rows that frame it add another inch at each side. I could rip it but I don’t want to, I have plenty of yarn to make the mark II version (hopefully the one that comes out right). I’m going to carry on knitting until I reach the top of the motif and then decide whether to make another braid, knit a turning row and knit a facing. It would then be an earwarmer thingy except that I think it might be a bit too wide. My other option is to omit the second braid and just make this into a normal hat. I suspect that I’ll be ready for the crown decreases just about as soon as I finish the motif. I’m sure that it will be a decent enough hat, it’s just that it’s not the sort of hat that I thought that I was knitting.

This has not yet gone wrong, I did make a mistake but it was in a good way. I knew that Twisted Sisters Lust has the same composition as Kidsilk Haze but I hadn’t realised that the skeins are 50g rather than the 25g that the Rowan yarn comes in so I have twice as much as I thought. There could be a good sized shawl here, something simple because of the “look at me” yarn but I like simple lace anyway as it makes for good tv knitting. I think it will be triangular because I get bored knitting rectangles, with an integral edging rather than one knitted on because otherwise the colour changes in the edging will be blotchy. The front runners are currently Adamas or another leaf lace shawl although I am open to other suggestions.

I did wonder why it was that I’d had two people award me with this. After due consideration I have come to the conclusion that it is because of my unfailing ability to carefully plan projects and then louse them up anyway. There’s nothing like watching someone else struggle with their knitting, especially if you’re at a safe distance and are not reliant on them for meals and laundry. If I can’t be a good example then at least I can be a terrible warning.

All along my mother has been saying that this would make a fine hat, with certain amendments of course. The beads would be too much and the heel would be rather eye catching. Now I’ve done the toe decreases I can see that she’s right. The heel motif would be the cuff, the leg motif the body of the hat and then the toe pattern at the crown. I don’t really fancy knitting it at 9 stitches per inch though, I’m thinking more in terms of 6 stitches per inch. As you can see, the Victorian Christmas stocking is off the needles but not finished, there’s the ends to sew in, the facing to sew down and an icord hanger to make. It is possible that the finishing will take me longer to do than it took to knit.

This means that the other stocking can step forward. The long awaited needles came on Wednesday and I was right, it is much, much easier on that than on dpns. You can see the difference at the join, the blobby bit at the bottom was before the transfer to the circular and the nice smooth bit at the top is what I knitted last night. You can see the way that the yarn changes colour through the background of the snowflake, this is what I’d hoped it would do and I’m pleased with that. Needless to say I’m not happy with the blobby bits, I know that they will get better after blocking but there are limits to what blocking can achieve. It looks all right from a distance so it might become one of those decorations that you hang up high in a dark corner.
There was a bit of sun yesterday so the still damp silk and fluff got the spotlight. I forgive it everything and take back every word I swore at it. It’s shiny and fluffy at the same time and for that I will forgive it its pinkness. I’m even prepared to overlook that I don’t like knitting silk. There will be another skein like this, there will probably be in the region of 400 yards when I’m done and I just wish that there was more. I haven’t got to the bottom of the first bobbin yet, where the sweat and tears were, but I’m hoping that it won’t look as bad as I remember it.