Wool For Brains

The idea was that the dyeing post that I’d written in my head several weeks ago would just pop in here. Who was I kidding? I am the woman who was dodging around the house this morning while doing the breakfast and lunchbox routine chanting “must remember to turn the beans off”. I got to school and remembered that…..I hadn’t turned the beans off. I’m counting this as a victory, I could have been halfway around the supermarket with a trolley when I remembered this. I love having my shopping delivered but they forgot the pop up reminder at the end “do you have a birthday coming up – got cake?” Perhaps with my track record it was too ambitious to try to remember something that happened two weeks ago, even if it did have wool in it. It was complicated further by me lending my camera to the junior photographer at the weekend so that I have to hunt my photos from amongst dozens of boating shots.

So much time has passed since dyeing the yarn that I’ve turned the heel on the second sock and am nearing the toe. These are for me, they are superwash and nylon and I’m hoping that they will wear like iron. Yet again the sock yarn that I bought turned out to be knotty, I dyed ten 50g balls and there were only one or two that had no knots. I made this much worse with the red stripe version by giving it a close encounter with a gas flame. I added another two breaks to that skein but I have definitely learned not to light the gas while having the skein hanging over the edge of the pan. The flames that momentarily lick up the outside of the pan when you light it do get high enough to burn the yarn. If I can’t be a good example then at least I can be a terrible warning.

I fancied making a yarn that would have a solid stripe and then a variegated section and this was the prototype. I found a test knitter willing to risk wasting her time knitting socks that might have been tripe just so that I could see what the yarn knitted up like. I’d painted the variegated section and really there wasn’t enough variety there for me, it wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind. Close but not quite right.

This was the second version, I replaced the painted section with a low water three colour pour which made the patterned section a little less predictable. There are three skeins here, in red, brown and green but they all share the same yellow/brown/green patterned stripe. I did say red and it is red, I have managed to overcome my inability to dye a red that I like, the secret was to add a little black. It’s just a pity that I ended up setting fire to it.

These are all very long skeins, this is a doubled skein shown with a foot for scale, they are 10 yards around more or less. I made a long skein between two chairs, tied it tightly in the middle with a plastic bag and dyed one end a solid colour. When I’d dyed and dried all three skeins I untied the bags (there to provide a resist and stop the dye running into the second half of the skein), retied them on the dyed section and then put the three white half skeins in a pan with some yellow, green and brown dye. When I dyed the turquoise (I did a teal one too) the solid really was solid because I took my time but the second batch were dyed in the school holidays and as a result the solids are more semi solid.

I have a cake to make now as we have a birthday tomorrow and I really have to go and do something with those beans. There will be a cake shot if it comes out right, otherwise I shall be back to Sainsbury’s and deny all knowledge of ever setting out to make one.

13 Going on 30 release

One of my key phrases is that life is too short to stuff a vegetable. The piping of mashed potato is also out, it gets dolloped on top of the shepherd’s pie and forked over. I have been told by Mr Celebrity Chef that you eat with the eyes first but I can’t see how it is that your dinner isn’t stone cold by the time you’ve finished your calligraphy in jus all around the edge of the square plate. Decoration is all very well but it can’t take away from the primary function of the item. Dinners are meant to be hot, socks are meant to fit.

Sometimes you can have both decoration and utility, it doesn’t matter how long it takes to fiddle with a sock because it’s not getting cold while you’re doing it. You can put it down, wander off and make a cup of tea and it doesn’t spoil. You can drop the bead from the eye of the flaming bird and spend fifteen minutes crawling around on the floor trying to find it without worrying about overcooking the greens. I may have no inclination to gut and stuff a tomato but I pinned out every one of those picot flames and left them overnight to dry.

It fits too, I changed the heel a little because the first one I made wasn’t quite right for me. For anyone who is wondering, this does have a toe but it’s right next to a particularly shaming bit of carpet that I’m going to deal with later on so I’m hiding the evidence. It’s not as textured as the carpet under the dining table where I dropped the bead but in my defence I’d like to point out that there has been no school for two weeks and my normally exacting standards of housekeeping have slipped just a little. When I originally started knitting this I was thinking that I’d not do any of the embroidery and just let the knitting form the pattern. You can quite clearly see the birdie on the first sock but it’s certainly clearer once outlined. There is another bird on the other side but I’d like to confess that the second one does not currently have a leg to stand on. My attention span is not quite long enough for the embroidery on a brace of birds.

There is just the one sock at the moment and it’s going to stay that way for a while. This isn’t second sock syndrome, when I have that it’s a sign that there’s something wrong with the first one and ruthless ripping is the answer. I couldn’t put the first one down, it was interesting and clever and I needed to know whether it would fit. I want to start the second because I want to be wearing these but there’s other things I want to do more.

This is my second sock syndrome. The first 50g of yarn was spun and plied three weeks ago, there’s less than 20g of fibre left to spin. I packed up the wheel on the 3rd and only unpacked it yesterday. I can’t remember when the last time was that I went so long without spinning. This is Wensleydale, one half in solid turquoise and one in turquoise/navy/green. I’ve not made a particularly good job of it, the kindest thing to say is that it will make a particularly hard wearing sock yarn (too much twist for the fibre and it’s a bit hard)

This is my second sack syndrome. This is all white alpaca from the great alpaca mountain of 2007. I’ve sorted it and washed it and my mother has carded it. This isn’t all of it, I’ve spun some already and there is probably about another two carrier bags to come. I had three fleeces, two white and one black and I split the white into the good stuff and the rest. This is the not good stuff and it’s destined for a rug.

It’s not been all Firebirds – the utility socks had to be finished in a hurry because I needed the needles when the kit arrived a few days earlier than I’d estimated. As usual, there is still a decent amount of yarn left over so I suspect that they would probably make another similar sock. I don’t want another sock in the washing that is too similar, it makes pairing them up so much harder so the oddments will go back in the pile for now.

My week will probably be very unphotogenic as it’s going to consist mostly of a repetition of vacuuming, ironing, spinning white fluff, cleaning white fluff off me and every surface within six feet and vacuuming white fluff off the carpet. Fortunately I have some colourful dyeing photos from last week to fall back on so that’s maybe for next time.

We still do not have anything resembling a reliable internet connection so there’s a strong chance that I am speaking to the wall right now. As a parent of a small child I am used to this, although it’s amazing how rapidly their hearing improves with a sentence containing key phrases such as “pop”, “crisps” or “toy shop”.

The pink blob does now have buttons although I didn’t block it (too chunky, too long to dry). This was part of my Centerparcs knitting. One ball of superchunky cashmerino, 7.5mm needles, 16 stitches, fisherman’s rib to end, buttonholes, cast off. The buttons were raided from my mother’s button tin. I’d forgotten that it was now sadly depleted as a result of a previous phase of toddler artwork. The buttons that I’d remembered had vanished, long since stuck on to sheets of card and displayed on the kitchen door. (The slight lean on the photo is down to the photographer – it’s in focus and in shot so we are improving)

This is my current love and the reason why I have been walking around for much of the day with only one sock on (giving me ample opportunity to look at the two marks that I drew on my foot with what turned out to be permanent marker). I don’t think it needs trying on quite as often as I have been doing, I just like watching the pretty birdie work its way up my ankle. The tail on the foot is pretty enough but it’s the body of the Firebird on the leg that is really captivating me. I want to show everyone how the twisted stitch at the edge frames the plaited basket stitch and how striking the basket stitch looks in a variegated yarn. The last time I found knitting to be this exciting it was the hidden shaping in the cabling of Rogue that I was raving about and to be honest no-one else found that to be as interesting as I did. I love it so much that I didn’t really mind reknitting the 18 rows that I ripped out the other night. The heel had to come out because the fit wasn’t quite right and while it was off the needles anyway I ripped it back a bit further to correct a couple of errors I’d made while I was still working out what I was doing. This is the first kit from the 2008 Flock Sock Club and if I was a better blogger then there would have been a photo of the contents of the parcel but you will for the moment have to imagine the embroidery yarn and the beads.

I do have other knitting, socks, dyed yarn, a bag, lace but that will all wait until I’ve finished with my love affair with plaited basket stitch. I’m hoping that I might have a finished sock, a working internet connection and the return to school all coming together at the beginning of next week, although I’d be happy with two from three.

I will confess that the wheel never came out of the bag at the weekend. I did get some knitting done but as I’m two rows off having that finished it will hold until I’ve got the buttons sewn on because a pink blob with buttons is just so much more photogenic than a pink blob without buttons. In addition it is better to wait until it is cast off because the needles are purple and the purple/pink combination is not one that I’d like recorded. The new knitting can afford to wait for another day because I still have old knitting to show.

I finally finished the Monkey socks that have been so nearly finished for months. I made the cuff of one four rows shorter than the other and it needed corrective surgery. It didn’t take long but I just could never find the right time to do it. These are now officially finished, the toes are not grafted but that’s because I’ve never met the target foot and I’m not entirely sure that they will fit. Madam G can graft the toes when she’s done whatever she needs to do to them to make them fit.

The felted beret was last shown in its floppy stage. It’s had a few trips through the washer since then and is now suitably firm and pert. I made a child’s size and the sizing looks fine. I did try it on my son’s head on the understanding that there would be no photos but teddy is less self conscious. The naughty Noro from the doomed mittens went into this, together with all the odd bits I had left over from other projects. It worked out that many of the leftovers were the same colours and that worked out well, I cheated and spliced the similar colours together so that I could have one colour change in a round. I had to go into a new ball for the last two rounds but it has still worked well in getting rid of a lot of small balls.

Whenever we’ve gone to Centreparcs we’ve been woken in the still dark hours to the sound of squirrels partying on the roof. Every morning at silly o’clock there are thundering feet charging about over my head. It’s hard to believe that this cutey pie could be responsible for waking me up. So sweet, so fluffy, so shamelessly begging for food. I am now prepared to believe that he was framed by the ducks.

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus dvdrip We are yet again in the process of pushing the broadband to reach the higher speed that the telecoms engineers say that it’s capable of. This means that the blog will play hide and seek until everything settles down to working at a speed that it is happy with. I didn’t want to use the internet anyway..

I did have plans for this post, really I did. I shrunk the felted bag a bit more, I have some new lace and the beginnings of a scarf. You will note that there are no photos of any of this. Fortunately this isn’t as a result of any more broken bones but is just down to me being a slacker. We are going away for the weekend and bags need to be packed, clothes to be ironed, swimsuits to be tracked down. This was the first bag packed, it’s a spinning wheel and 8oz of silk. The second bag has my knitting in it (not ALL of it you understand, just enough for a weekend away). I’m off to pack some clothes next. I shall have to remember this the next time my son insists on spending a geological age in choosing the right toy to take with him when he should be concentrating on getting the important things right. It’s all a question of perspective isn’t it?

The school holidays start at 3.20 this afternoon, no doubt I will be back at some point over the next two weeks but don’t worry if I’m not here. Talk amongst yourselves while I’m gone, if you do want some pretty pictures to look at you might want to go here.

• The Agony and the Ecstasy film

Firstly the sock that I loved not is no more. It was never calling to me, I didn’t like the fibre, I didn’t like spinning the yarn in the first place and I didn’t like knitting it. I’d got as far as the heel on the first sock and I couldn’t face the prospect of the second sock so I took the needles out. The pan scourer yarn has a future as indestructible mittens but it needs to spend a few months marinading in the yarn drawer first until I’ve forgotten the bad sock experience. The mitred squares scarf has gone back to the yarn drawer as well, I’ve had enough of those for the moment. I didn’t really like looking at the three bags of scraps and being continually reminded of what the sock scrap pile looks like. I prefer to have a quick sortie, grabbing four balls for a pair of stashbuster spirals and retreating quickly rather than having a full confrontation with the pile.

I did promise to show the Unoriginal hat this time and here it is. It fits me perfectly, which isn’t surprising as I started with a tension square and my head measurement. I needed another pattern repeat to get the sizing right as my yarn is very much thinner than used in the original unoriginal. Although it is just another hat it gave me a chance to experiment with something I’ve never done before. I had a lot of this fibre (carded merino/silk) because I originally bought enough to make a sweater. So far when I’ve used it I’ve spun it by separating the colours first to make it stripe. You know what you are going to get, clear colour changes and no muddying of the colours. With this I didn’t want stripes that fought with the cables so this time I deliberately set out to mix the colours together. I stacked the sections of batts on top of each other, tore strips off the pile lengthways and then attenuated that into something that would have looked like roving if I’d spent more time on it. The end result was fibre that picked colours out of all of the layers of the batt at the same time. I could have mixed it up yet further by making my three ply from three bobbins but that involved more weighing than I could be bothered to give it (this was during my sicky period) and this is a navajo ply. There is some striping but it doesn’t take away from the cabling that much. That’s happened because the batts had been ripped up already to take out the greens and browns for the felted bag and some of them were oddly shaped and thin. My pile of ripped up batts was a bit wavy on the sides and the first strip I’ve pulled off wasn’t as thick as the others and so had a smaller range of colours in it.

This isn’t everything that I’ve ever made from this fibre, there is at least one hat and a fulled bowl that couldn’t make the line up. The hat is excused because it went off to the US before Christmas but the bowl is AWOL and will be hunted down in due course. It was one of the things about spinning that I took a while to grasp, a pile of fibre can be what you want it to be. You can decide whether you want long stripes, short stripes, no stripes, very thick yarn, thick yarn, thinnish yarn, yarn that’s smooth or yarn with slubs. Out of these five things the unoriginal hat is the only one where I didn’t set out to make the colours do something. I like the effect more than I thought I would and I will certainly do this again.

The Agony and the Ecstasy on dvd

Toy Story download

My other big decision this week was that the front grass was dry enough to cut (it wasn’t) so it is now officially spring at Casa Morris. It looks like I’ve cut it with a knife and fork so I suspect that the mower needs the blade sharpening. You can see my hay meadow at the left and the lawn of my neighbour across the road on the right (both photos taken from my bedroom window so I don’t look weird) Compare and contrast. I did think that my grass would look better from a distance and it crossed my mind to take a photo of it from the other side of the road but I have to live here so I passed on that one. The one good thing is that I didn’t lose much knitting time to this because the grass (it does not deserve the word “lawn”) is the size of a postage stamp. Flushed with success at winning the battle with the greenery I went to the allotment and planted my onion sets. This means that my jeans are now muddy at the knee and the felted bag (above, right) can have its final trip through the washer.