Wool For Brains

That’s the problem with having a blog break, things happen in the meantime and I struggle to put them into any sort of order. The lack of knitting is therefore a bit of a bonus.

I had a couple of comments to ask how I managed to make the cake train when I was feeling so wretched. It wasn’t that hard to mix up a 4 egg sponge, pour it into a cake tin shaped like a train and let it cook. I did that bit. The real work was in the decorating and I contracted that out. David made the engine and the boys worked together on the rest. Yet again icing pens made the sticking together of sugar filled foodstuffs really simple and not at all messy.

I decided I was fully recovered on Saturday when after a few days fooling around in the sock scraps bags it occurred to me that the best thing to do with them was to cast on for a pair of socks. These remind me of summer pudding, all sorts of berry colours mingling together. They are another pair of stashbuster spirals using four balls of yarn, all bar one of which have been knitted during the life of the blog. I’m not sure why I decided to knit a heel flap, it seemed like a good idea at the time and I’m sure that I had a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel. The brain cell entrusted with said plan has now shuffled off this mortal coil and left me totally clueless. Don’t ask me why my sock has a heel flap when I only ever knit myself short row heels, I have absolutely no idea. Needless to say the colour isn’t true, my camera and I continue to have fundamental disagreements over the portrayal of anything red. I fiddled with the colour balance and made things worse so this is the original unrepresentative photo (as opposed to the adjusted unrepresentative photos)

This is the reason that I have been messing around in the scrap bag for the last few days. I don’t want to marry it and have its children but on the other hand I don’t hate it either. I haven’t decided whether to knit merrily on and make enough mitred strips to turn this into a scarf (I have three more strips in hand) or whether to stick it back in the scrap bag for another day. The squares start with a cast on of 35 stitches on a 3mm needle and the plain strips are worked by picking up 17 stitches from the two central squares and 8 stitches from those at the ends. After working 8 garter stitch bumps I did a contorted construction where I picked up stitches across the length of another strip and then did a three needle bind off. I’m sure it wasn’t the easiest way of doing it but it makes for seamless knitting and I’m all for that. I lost my enthusiasm for this a little once I’d weighed a strip. It is hardly going to blow a hole in the odd ball mountain at 10g a strip and my dream of this being a stashbuster is just that, a dream. It’s wide for a scarf, perhaps three blocks would have worked better.

My original plan was to join the big mitred strips with little mitred strips but I made all of two squares before deciding that my life was too short to even begin to contemplate this. I’d planned to finish the edge with an appliqued icord and although it looked fantastic it was tedious in the extreme and I swapped it for a double crochet (US=single crochet) edge in black. It is less fantastic but very much quicker while still having the outlining effect that I was looking for. The ends weren’t that much of a problem, most of them were in pairs and once the strips were joined there were plenty of seams to run the ends along. I’ve left those from the top strip but all the rest are sewn in. By me. With no whining. Maybe I’m not as well as I think I am..

Next time – the unoriginal hat (providing of course that the yarn has dried enough for me to finish it)

Knitting has just about stopped. I have at last managed to make the connection between this worrying event and my sore throat/ears, headache and sneezing so I assume that the knitting lethargy is just another symptom of lurgy. Everything is just too much effort at the moment. The lace topped sock is still not done, I need to count the rows of ribbing on the first one and work out how many rows I need to knit and that is just too taxing. The green sock which I’m still not taken on is in need of a heel sometime soon and that requires more thought than I want to give it. I’m not up to taking the scissors to Carolyn’s socks and there’s nothing in the world that’s calling me to knit it.

There are some signs of recovery. This is a braided hat which used up some more of the unloved merino heap. The colour isn’t true (needless to say I can’t be bothered to fix that) and it’s not really pancreatic pink at all, it’s a lovely brick red with dark and light flecks. I am still attempting to spin thicker yarn and this is a two ply that knits to 3.5 stitches per inch. It’s soft and smooshy and will probably pill but my experience is that children’s hats usually get lost before they are outgrown so it will most likely get dropped before it gets shabby.

Oh look, another hat. This is the Yarn Harlot’s unoriginal hat with an extra pattern repeat because my yarn was a bit thinner. I’ll be back to this one later (when I can be bothered to take a better photo) because I learned something from making the yarn. It’s going to stall at some point because I pulled the batt into three balls of roving but only spun two of them. I knew that there wouldn’t be enough but I just couldn’t bring myself to put the last ball onto the bobbin.

If I stick with this then this is a scrap sock yarn eater. It’s not the sock yarn blanket of doom, I don’t have the staying power for that even when I’m well, but it has the potential for becoming a scarf. I have no idea why I picked such staid colours out of the zingy scrap bag, there’s co-ordination” and there’s “need not have bothered” and I think I’ve come up with the latter. I like the square on the left though. I’d like you to ignore the ends hanging down, I’m trying my level best to pretend they are not there and I’d like you to join me in that particular fantasy. I think I’ll knit another strip that’s a bit less plain and then decide whether it has a future.

I’ll be back when I’m feeling less sneezy – it shouldn’t be long now because I’m starting to be bothered to cook and bothered to do the laundry and bothered to blog. There were some things that had to happen this weekend whether I was up to it or not. The cake was one of them and the other was the egg hunt. I backed myself into a corner with one or two of the clues (Anklyosauruses, Do not eat like the rest of us, Their food is in the salad drawer, No it doesn’t rhyme, Just go there) and I resolve to write them before Saturday night in future. I think I had the same thought last year as well.

Thank you to everyone who has left a comment over the last few days, if I didn’t reply to you yet then you know why it is. If you’re expecting something from me in the post (Cynthia, Carolyn, Clarabelle) that’s not happened yet either. I’m getting there, just slowly.

No, still no knitting happening here but I do have new yarn and eggs with wheels and you have to admit you don’t get to see that every day. When we were shopping for the candles for the birthday cake “we” (as in “not me, I am trying very hard to not see it”) saw an egg decorating kit. It came with dye, stickers and wheels to make four emergency vee-egg-les. You are supposed to use hard boiled eggs but I know from past experience that egg toys can be loved for too long, I remember the tears when Eggbert had to go despite the fact that he stank. This time we used blown eggs, which was handy because I’m making a cake later where the recipe calls for four eggs. Waste not, want not.

After we’d dyed the eggs there was still a lot of colour left in the water and it did seem a shame to waste it. I did a four colour pour, the orange down the sink and the rest on some sock yarn. I made a long skein between two chairs so hopefully it won’t pool unattractively. The blue refused to exhaust, I left the yarn to cool in the water and it was still blue, there were three tablespoons of vinegar in each colour of dye so I was reluctant to add more. It’s only for me so I’ll just wash the socks on their own to start with.

Fierce People movie Some of the stickers are a bit wonky but it is tricky to manage that with just one hand. I stuck the eggs to the wheel bases with some blue-tacky-type stuff because otherwise they came out whilst cornering. They have had some tough races on the kitchen floor and one has had to have sticky tape repairs but hopefully they will hold out over the weekend. Judging from the screams of excitement coming from the kitchen if they can only hold together then they are going to provide massive entertainment for £2 and a bit of white vinegar.

The yarn doesn’t look bad either.

I had to say it didn’t it? There I was on Tuesday morning with a sock within sight of the cast of and I said “although this is not a finished pair as I write it probably will be by the time you are reading this”. It’s grown a bit but I’m still just about half way through the ribbing. Now usually this would mean that I’d cast on for something new and exciting that had sucked up all the available knitting time but that’s not what’s happened at all. There has been no knitting time to speak of, the time I’ve had has been spent watching the clock to see when I could decently call it bedtime.

I should have recognised that there are other benefits to being time rich, it’s not just about the fun stuff with the ankylosaurs. I was at home on Tuesday to take the phone call from school, able to be at the school gate three minutes later and had my diary free to sit about waiting for doctors, X rays and the plaster room. I didn’t have to fret about canceling meetings or how we would manage with Dan not being at school and then I had another queue packed afternoon at the hospital today for the doctor, plaster room and the second cast. Fortunately this break is not as painful and upsetting as the last, it’s not weight bearing and it’s not his dominant hand. The reason this blog came into being was as a place where I could escape from the reality of having a six year old with a broken leg. The early entries mention knitting in waiting rooms but that’s as close as I wanted reality to get. I’m so glad that it’s different this time around.

Bound move

Toy Story movie download I have a busy weekend approaching, there’s the Easter egg hunt to arrange and the cake to make for the birthday on Monday (I’m sure that he will be able to unwrap things with one hand). I’m not so keen on having Easter and birthdays at the same time, there’s too much to do in too short a time but as it’s unlikely to happen again for over a hundred years I can’t really grumble. Normal service will be resumed next week, touch wood and fingers crossed.

Frankly the pay stinks but it’s still very rewarding in other ways. If I was still working out of the house for 12 hours a day then no way would I be finding the enthusiasm in the evenings for finding the edge of the sticky tape and supervising the homework topic. Even sourcing the correct size of cardboard box takes time that once I didn’t have. (click for bigger, legible photos)

The one thing I did miss about leaving work was the money. I know they rabbit on about all the reasons for working (Maslow’s hierarchy of needs anyone?), the socialisation, the status, the feeling of self worth and respect and maybe they are the key things for some people but I can’t say that I missed them one jot. I did sort of miss the ability to blow several hundred pounds on toys for me without batting an eyelid, that doesn’t happen any more but then I don’t need cheering up in the same way that I used to. I get yarn money from my mum in the same way as my son gets toy money from me. I have a cheap hobby, I can have weeks of entertainment from £2 of fibre (dye it, spin it fine and knit it on tiny needles). It’s so out of character for me to fall down the sock club hole. You don’t know what you’re going to get in terms of pattern or yarn and let’s face it, I am picky. I’m also incapable of following a sock pattern as written and I nearly always make socks with plain feet. The only plausible explanation for me joining the Flock Sock club would be alien possession. They are likely to be very fancy socks with patterned feet and they are out of my usual price range by a factor of three, it makes no sense at all.

That is the reason why the knitting bag has been running empty for the last six weeks. Everything was cleared out to make way for the first sock of the year but then the Yarn Harlot blogged about her Vintage Socks and in the wink of an eye there was no yarn left for the sock club because it had all gone into leaves and wine coloured yarn. With impeccable timing the mill decided to stop making that yarn so that meant no yarn in hand and no yarn to be had. As a result the sock that I was expecting to be in my knitting bag at the end of February is still weeks away, the yarn has been spun but it’s still at the mill. It has to be shipped, dyed and dried and shipped again before I get my sticky mitts on it. My knitting bag is remaining empty, I’m starting one small project, finishing it and looking around for something else rather than having half a dozen things on the needles at any one time. The absence of must-knit knitting means that I have plenty of time for finding the right sort of glue and explaining the concept of armatures in sculpture and model making. I have some time consuming cake making scheduled for later this week and I won’t be feeling that it’s taking me away from my precious knitting because all I have is a pair of socks.

I made these toe up in the expectation that by the time I reached the cuff I would have come up with a pattern that worked perfectly with the yarn. That didn’t happen, I had hoped that the lace would bend the stripes in some entertaining way but as it is I’m left feeling that I needn’t have bothered. The cuff pattern is from here, the Anne lacy cuff socks except the pattern in mine is two stitches wider and a row longer so that I can actually get them on. The second sock needs one pattern repeat and the ribbing so although this is not a finished pair as I write it probably will be by the time you are reading this. The yarn is Lana Grossa something or other, it is wonderfully soft to knit but contains enough nylon for me to expect it to be hard wearing. I do have another pair of socks (I have to say that as there are witnesses) but they haven’t yet reached the stage where I’m guaranteed to finish them. I didn’t like the yarn when I spun it and it’s not improved with age.

The black box (not recycleable) holds a model anklyosaurus that is part of the son’s project for school. As you will note, its key features are its armoured back and clublike tail. I have knitted inches of plain sock whilst finding the end of the sticky tape and supervising the foil and cocktail stick armature, air dry clay and paint. I shall miss it now that it’s gone to school, I’ve found that it has brought home to me what it was that I gave up work for. There would have been no time in my week for this (and the accompanying written work on “how I made an anklyosaurus”) and although I don’t seem to be getting much use out of all those years of higher education I slogged through maybe I’m looking at it from the wrong angle. I can explain natural selection, the differences between mammals and reptiles and what you can learn from looking at teeth and jaws. My knowledge is a bit patchy, I’m no good on geography and history but get me on maths and science and I’m away. I know more about dinosaurs now than I did three weeks ago so I suppose that by the time he finishes school I may be better educated in a number of areas and I may actually get to learn about the kings and queens that have always been a mystery to me.

I can plan to death even the simplest thing. I have a pattern for a felted bag, it uses three colours of a yarn that does not exist here. No probs, I just need to sub for something that’s super bulky, 5 wraps per inch, 65 yards per 100g and feltable and it doesn’t matter much if it’s not an exact substitute because it doesn’t have to fit. My first thought was pencil roving, Wingham’s sells some with some twist in and it’s heavy dense stuff. I had it in my hand and put it back, it would be better to forage in the stash first because then I can feel virtuous, save money and reduce the fibre heap. It was only last week that I was whinging that the batt I had was mostly brown and green and blah. I pulled out some of the greens and browns and made three 100g piles, one brown, one green and one that was half of both. Plan A was to have three broad stripes, green at the top, moving to brown at the bottom with a brown handle. I have a lot of brown and not much green and that’s what’s determining the main colour.

Vampires vs. Zombies film

• Bound divx

This has been character building stuff because I don’t often spin thick yarn, which then means that I find it difficult to spin thick yarn. This is without a doubt the thickest two ply I have ever made but I still need to knit it double. This meant that I could move on to the more elaborate plan B, starting with two strands of green held together, then moving to one strand of green and one of green/brown and ending up with five stripes in the bag rather than three. Then I realised that the top and bottom of the bag would only have one transition and the middle stripe would have a transition at each end. Would I make the middle stripe smaller? How would I decide when to change colours? Would I have enough of the middle yarn? I did manage to pull myself out of the quicksand of overplanning when I found myself thinking about counting stitches to allow for the bottom of the bag needing less yardage as it decreases. I am now back on plan A, three colours held double.

Big fat yarn on big fat needles (US17, 12mm) goes really quickly, the three skeins just finished the body of the bag (shown upside down due to lack of planning). I need more brown to make the top of the bag (there’s a spare cable at the bottom of the photo holding the stitches of the provisional cast on) and the handle. The downside of big skeins of big fat yarn is that they take a big fat length of time to dry. Now I may occasionally knit with yarn that is not entirely dry but I’d prefer that it be not dripping. Progress has now stopped until I’ve made the yarn and got it dry (enough). I put the hat in the shot with the bag because I thought it was interesting to see the two projects made from the same fibre. (Well I was interested, your mileage may vary) The yarns are so very different, the hat was much more predictable because I controlled how the colours would change. The yarn for the bag was spun randomly from the various coloured heaps, with it being that much thicker you can see blobs of different colours here and there which you don’t get in the thinner hat yarn. I would have been finished by now if I’d bought yarn for this rather than making it but I wouldn’t have had the chance to spin outside my usual range and I wouldn’t have seen the back of 400g of year old fibre. It’s a feel good bag, so far at least.

The junior verdict is that this makes me look like a “whacked out sunflower”. Personally I think that this represents a big improvement on the torpedo head style and I like it. This hat is made from the same fibre as that torpedo head hat, I bought a very large bag of it intending to make a sweater and then changed my mind so although I’ve made a few scarves and hats from it, there’s still a lot of it left. The yarn was roughly double knit which was good because that’s what the pattern was written for and my hat came out the same size as it was supposed to.

This is worked from the centre of the crown outwards. All the squares have the same number of stitches, the shaping after the turn under comes by moving to a smaller needle. The last few rows of ribbing and the rolled hem should have been worked on a smaller needle still but I diverted from the pattern at that stage as my yarn with that needle size would be a recipe for hand pain. I stayed on the 3.5mm needle (3mm for knitters with normal tension) and added a second decrease row, reducing by another eight stitches. It fits, I like it and the junior fashion advisor can disown me if he wants (”if you wear that when you are with me, I shall tell people that you are not my mummy”)

I did make another hat over the weekend, this is very definitely not for me. My view is that this would be massively improved by 2g of navy dye but my family petitioned that it should stay as it was as it would look better after felting anyway. It’s in the washer now so we’ll soon see about that. This is the entrelac felted beret in its prefelted stage, knitted in Noro Kureyon in a scary colourway that I think is now discontinued. Let me think why that might be. This is knitted from the bottom up (corrugated rib on a 6.5mm needle, ho, ho, ho) and the shaping is due to working progressively smaller squares in each round. I did cheat like stink with this because the colour changes in the ball aren’t long enough to knit the early rounds in one colour. I dug through the scraps drawer to find all the leftover bits I had of this yarn and I spliced the colours together. The colours in the hat run according to the length I had. I probably used two balls in total, the full ball I started turned out to have a green/purple knot just like the one I started the mittens with. I’m feeling pretty smug about that, it just goes to show that I can learn from my past mistakes because I found the knot before I started knitting.

I think I may be over my entrelac phase now although I may come back one day and knit another four ring hat in prettier colours rather than just using whatever was to hand. It has meant that I’m now much better at knitting backwards and I no longer throw my tension out of the window on the return row. I also have a hat to wear which does not make me look like a torpedo head. This is not the end of the search for the perfect hat, I have some others lined up that I still want to try out but I doubt I’ll ever come up with one that meets with approval from the son.

This is a navajo plied yarn from a merino silk batt from the bottom shed of Wingham Woolwork, bought originally for a sweater. I spun it as fast as possible because I was itching to cast on, in fact I was so driven that I steam blocked the yarn rather than giving it the usual warm soak and drip dry. It’s the first time I’ve ever done that so it was a bit hit and miss, I decided that it was steamed enough when it started to smell of wet sheep. The yarn looks ok and it’s knitting up fine so I can recommend steaming yarn with the iron to set the twist if you feel you need to, it certainly cuts down on the drying time. Don’t ask me what was so urgent about casting on for a hat, it’s not particularly cold, there’s no up and coming gift giving occasion but I was driven to get it on the needles as soon as possible.

I have done entrelac before but I never really understood what was going on and had to have markers everywhere and follow the pattern. This time it has been straightforward and obvious and I think that is because I’ve been working on two dpns with a circular needle to hold the rest of the stitches. With my previous efforts I just used a circular needle and you can’t see the relationship between the blocks in the same way. If you look at the photo on the left it’s fairly clear that as I knit up from the stitches on the dpn at the bottom they will want to join up with the stitches on the dpn at the right and that is what’s going to happen at this point. If there are no stitches lined up at right angles then the block doesn’t want to join to anything. The stitches on the circular needle are just hanging about waiting for their turn on the dpns, it’s just a stitch holder rather than a working needle. When it’s all gathered on a single needle the angles are all wrong and it’s easy to start working off at 45 degrees and not notice.

The pattern is the Four Rings Entrelac Hat by Lynne Vogel. I saw it on Ravelry, as you do, and bought it despite having had a pattern for a brim up entrelac hat sitting in my project queue for two months. I put this down to it being photographed in stunningly pretty yarns and me being overcome with desire for the yarns rather than for the hat. At the moment I’m not at all sure whether it will fit but I’m not losing sleep over it. A hat knitted crown out has the same feature as socks knitted toe up – you can stop making it bigger when it looks the right size or add some more increase rounds until it’s big enough. The thing that’s stopped me knitting the other entrelac hat pattern is that it involves me knowing my gauge. I know now why the Ravelry photos show it from this angle, you go around and around making little squares, watching the pretty colours change and then you do something slightly different. Suddenly a point appears where before there was flat knitting. It’s exactly the same magic as that in your first sock heel, you follow the directions without a clear idea of where it is going and then you’re running about trying to interest people in the wonderful shape that’s mysteriously appeared on the needles. This is better than heels because you get to do it more than once. I’m finding myself laying it out on the settee and patting the points into a more pointy shape. I am holding myself back from an interim blocking, there’s no reason for it until I finish the round and start addressing the issue of fit but I just want to see how pointy those points can be.

It must be looking good because the son of the house has already started to imagine his teacher in it. The last time I saw her she had only the one head and she’s already had one hat this winter, which is one more than me. I’m still not sure that this is The One, the hat which suits me and does not make me look like a torpedo head, but style and suitability come further down the list than fit. Once the pointy magic is over then there will be something resembling a brim and at that point it needs to start approximating my head measurement. Call back next week for the final installment…

I know that supposedly three knots in a ball of yarn is considered to be acceptable by the manufacturers. I guess that they don’t knit much. I know that I am spoiled, I get to knit with handspun yarn and one of the big features for me is that there are no surprises in it. If you’ve made it yourself you know how the colours change and you know that there are no knots lurking unseen in the ball. I get really ticked off at knots in patterned yarn, I know now to carefully examine sock yarn if I find a knot after making two pairs where the pattern reversed part way down the foot. I have also learned not to knit with Noro without rewinding the ball first to check for knots.

Strange as this may seem, this was going to be a mitten. I knew that it would take two balls to get a matching pair and I’d been careful to note where I’d started in the ball so that I could make the second mitten to match or at least match as much as you can with this yarn. This was as far as I’d got when the pale green I was knitting with jumped sharply to purple after a knot. After I’d finished ranting my love for the project was gone. I could have continued and had a pair that didn’t match, I could have attempted to cut the yarn in the second ball and get the second mitt to jump in the same way or I could have ripped it out. Guess which I did?

I just didn’t feel like rewinding a new ball, checking it for knots and starting again so this is the closest I came on this occasion to Elizabeth Zimmermann’s mystery sideways mittens. I thought that the striped yarn would show off the shaping nicely and that looks as if it would have been the case. I’d just finished the thumb (the sticky out bit on the left) and would have then been knitting on the hand and the cuff. This particular colourway has now been discontinued, it’s a bit on the screaming bright side even for me but it was a bargain and I do love a bargain. I’d love it more if it didn’t have knots though.

On Friday the sock drawer came up empty and I had to wear shop socks for the first time in a long while. It could be a year since I had to put my feet in something that wasn’t hand knit. They were thin in my shoes and the heel kept walking under. I hadn’t realised until then that I don’t ever have to pull knitted socks up, they just stay where they are put. I’m running four pairs short at the moment, three pairs need mending (the mending fairy is in Spain) and one pair went in the bin last week. I could have reknitted the toes and the heels on those but I never really liked them anyway and only ever wore them when I was desperate. I was desperate on Friday, if I hadn’t have already emptied the bins I would have gone hunting for the grotty pair. I did consider darning the toes in one of the benched pairs but was worried that the sock darning fairy might see this as pinching her duties and fly away. Darning feels like a variant of sewing up, I can do it but I don’t like it.

I make more socks for the husband and mother than for me because they wear socks every day of the year and I live barefooted in sandals between the frosts. It makes more sense to make socks for them when I’m only a part time sock wearer but the result is that I reach the bottom of my sock drawer when the husband is only half way down his.One way of evening up the score is to make fewer socks for him, this pair found a pair of feet that they fitted and left home on Sunday. These were Megaboots stretch, toe up with a waffle cuff in the standard husband size (which fits other people’s husbands too). I liked the colours but not the splittyness or the stretch. I have another ball stashed in greens and browns but I won’t be rushing to buy more.

As I have sock shortages in mind it made sense to turn some of this pile of bits into fibre for socks for me. There’s a big chunk of mohair in there and most of the rest is merino or merino/mohair. In there is some of the first fibre I ever bought, the colour wasn’t what I thought it would be and I never touched it. That’s the reason that it has all accumulated, they are all colours that don’t really call to me. The last time I tidied up I piled them together to be a blending exercise. Better by far to wreck something you don’t like rather than be practising something new on the good stuff.

The downside is that if you didn’t like the colours to start with then blending them isn’t going to magically improve things (it can do, but not if they are all shades of the same unhappy colour). The last time I used the drum carder for blending I carefully weighed everything, split the batts and recarded them several times and ended up with a totally uniform batt that wasn’t worth the effort. This time I made no attempt at uniformity, made four batts and sent each one through twice. I like this method much better, it’s far quicker for one and I like the variation in the yarn.

It wasn’t surprising that I didn’t like the overall colour of the finished yarn, it was lovely when wet, a coral with brown, but when dry it was ever so slightly repulsive. After I’d named it pancreatic pink it was doomed. I like the red much better, this is my emergency make over – half a bottle of Supercook food colouring and a big dollop of white vinegar. Cook until hot, leave to cool in the water and then rinse. I now have 500 yards of a red and brown two ply. This shows why it is that the pile of scrap sock yarn is so big, this is a 120g skein.

The carding was so much fun that I’m going to play with the other bag of fibre that I don’t like, this one has yellow and red/orange and some gold kid mohair. I’ll add brown to tone it down and maybe some of the pancreatic pink leftovers will find their way in there too. That will be another pair of socks for me out of something that I just didn’t fancy spinning. Maybe this time it will be transformed enough to make into a yarn that I like the colour of but if not then there’s always the dye bath.