Wool For Brains

Let me not keep you in suspense a moment longer – it was a close run thing but the post arrived a full twenty minutes before the last fence panel went in. I feel so much better now that my garden is useable again and the dog was delighted to see the grass. The fence needs painting, I’m passing on Carie’s suggestion of Groundforce blue because I think a full six panels of it might be too overpowering. I did paint all my tatty concrete planters that very colour several years ago and a pot of masonry paint totally transformed them but I don’t think that it’s the answer here. The bucket of “Cedar Red” that was in the garage was given a trial on a corner of a panel and it turned out to be more of a cedar orange so that’s out too. Subject to further consultation with the neighbours on the other side of it the fence is going to be a nice plain not-orange brown. That’s planned for the weekend, weather permitting, so if you’ve nothing better to do you can wander over to the husband’s blog

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and watch the painting action on gardencam. The pile of stone in the bottom corner should be forming itself into a wall and then there may even be some plants in the dust that is masquerading as a border.

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This is what the postman brought, it came flat packed but only needed two screws to reassemble it. The woodwork on this also needs finishing, again I think that blue or cedar orange is out and the solution here is probably some wax. This is an Ashford inkle loom that I’ve rehomed from The Loom Exchange, it’s an older model because the current one has a different arrangement for maintaining the tension and has several more pegs. It will make a shorter length of braid but as I have the attention span of a gnat that isn’t such a big problem. It didn’t have any instructions but once I’d worked out that the warp is a continuous loop and circles around as you work it then it was straightforward. So far I have managed to make heddles, read a pattern, advance the warp and adjust the tension. This is Patons 4 ply cotton in pink and burgundy, I’m working towards handspun silk but I thought I’d better start off with something more utilitarian. The next braid will be wider with some pickup patterns and maybe after that it will be time for the silk.

When you need to constantly reblock to get the desired result because the piece won’t hold its shape you’re obviously looking at a long tern loser of a project. The sensible thing to do is to rip it out and rework it in something more suitable for that use, something that keeps the shape that you want. In this particular case what I would like is something that doesn’t grow over time, knitting usually grows downwards with the weight of the work, my problem project grows upwards.

Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo film You may remember last year’s battle with the hedge. I remember it very well as I woke up the next morning with a burning eye which had a pimple on it where a sliver of hedge had lodged in the white of my eye. It was a frightening moment and it put me off tackling it again. We joke that I don’t get out much and it’s true that I now live a small life, my days are usually well ordered and not packed with upheaval or surprise so this has been a difficult couple of weeks for me. The view from my kitchen window has been shocking, the garden is no longer dog proof and half of it has been out of bounds for puppies and children. It didn’t help that the fence men ripped out half the hedge and then vanished for a week, leaving my garden looking like the photo on the left. I had a day with it being the photo on the right and it was at that very moment that I came across someone selling something I’d been looking at for a while. It gave me something to think about other than the train wreck that was my garden and the timing was perfect so I bought it, despite it not being my birthday, Christmas or any other event. I’m not sure which will come first, the completion of the garden or the postman but I’ll be very glad to see both.

I now have one pink sock, it looks like it did last time except that it is longer with a toe but Ophelia is still in the bag and the lace unblocked. Knitting has not been enough to get me through the upset that is my back garden. If you’ve left me a comment in the last week or so I probably haven’t replied to you, I could blame it on the school holidays but it’s more that I’ve been too thoroughly miserable. I have seen the fence panels, life is about to get better.

There is one positive thing to come out of this which is that the puppy has mastered the art of opening the front door. The back door is not worth the effort because there is no grass out there now and paving slabs just don’t seem to cut it for toilet purposes. He will now sit next to the door and scratch it, bark or throw himself against it to attract attention and as a result he is more or less dry in the house during the day. It might be that this is just co-incidence, that the garden work has just happened to fall at the same time as he has gained control of his bladder but whatever the cause I’m very pleased with the outcome.

Come back next time for (hopefully) the final photo of the garden project redo and a look at what the postman brought. You’ll be waiting a little longer for blocked lace and finished sweaters but they do say that good things come to those who wait. Finally – brown or green for fence panel paint?

There has been a bit of a blog pause because I’ve been sickly. I’m still at the stage of being off my food and not coping well with life (short tempered, miserable, moping) so you can be thankful that you don’t have to live with me and feel sorry for my long suffering husband who does have to live with me.

Sea of Love move The brown lacy thing is waiting blocking, it may well be waiting a while because I can’t manage to co-ordinate having free time at the same time that I have access to my blocking surface. In the end I didn’t block the sleeves on Ophelia for the same reason, I put the sweater on top of a cardigan that I like and patted it a bit. As I suspected, the sleeves were already at the width I wanted them so it will be straight knitting now to the cuff. The sleeves were slightly narrower than those on my blue cardigan but I can’t face ripping it back so it will just have to stay. I will no doubt regret this later but by then I’ll be better able to deal with it.

There was a gap between finishing the lacy thing and resurrecting Ophelia and as I had nothing else that fitted my knitting mood I started some socks. This is a big deal because I’ve been off socks for months. These are for my mother and they are something or other in cotton. The idea is that they are summer socks although that has not really been an issue this year when there have only been a few days that were too hot for wool.

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This is my other little bit of knitting and although it’s small it is complete. I’m not too sure exactly what this is, it might well be a toe. It’s toe shaped and the instructions come in two sizes with the large size being the same number of stitches as a large sock. The argument for it not being a sock is that the bit of patterning is repeated half way around so would fall under the foot. This is a Tsuspense project from the Tsock Flock club, the yarn and instructions arrived out of the blue this week. In real life it is a lovely red, there was no natural light despite it being August so the flash washed out the colour. I should maybe say that the circular needle is just there as a stitch holder because I’ve not been so sick as to have knitted this on a circular.

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This was previously seen as these batts, there were four of them and they would have been for socks if I’d made a better job of blending the nylon in. I spun one of the batts as if for socks but I wasn’t happy with it, the colours were pretty enough but I would never have knitted it because I just wasn’t happy with it. I know that I can make a much better job of incorporating the nylon if I actually think about what I’m doing. I put the other three batts on another bobbin and let it do what it wanted, lumps and all and then plyed it with the thin smooth bobbin. This was the point where it officially became hat yarn.

Hats are fast and that means that they don’t detract too much from other knitting so I didn’t feel too guilty about turning this out. This is Tychus from Knitty, I’ve made about forty of these and I still like them. The short rows add interest to the garter stitch and if you start with a provisional cast on then you can end with either a graft or a three needle bind off and avoid any sewing. They stretch well so fit a multitude of sizes and you don’t have to change to dpns because it’s knit flat. The dark blue is something by King Cole, 70% acrylic, 30% wool (that’s all I remember from the lost label) and I bought it because of its thick and thin construction. It turned out to be a bit thicker than my yarn so I found an odd ball of an appropriate colour to knit along with mine.

D.A.R.Y.L. dvdrip We did have a day out on a narrow boat this week but you’ll have to take my word for it as I took neither camera nor phone. I have had to commission some drawings to give you a flavour of our day out. The puppy and I sat out on the front all day in case of little accidents (totally not needed, he was a perfectly behaved dog all day). You can see that it’s him because of the black nose. We saw several sorts of dragonflies but the majority were huge bronze things. There were some smaller black ones too but you had to look hard to see them. XXx: State of the Union on dvd The weather forecast was dodgy but we were lucky. It threw it down for about ten minutes in the morning and then in the afternoon we were very lucky indeed. Behind us was a cloud straight out of Ghostbusters, “leaden” and “black” don’t begin to do it justice. It would need to have been computer generated or at least drawn on afterwards to be as dark and ominous as it was. The black went straight down to the ground, whoever was underneath that was getting rain by the bucket load. Narrow boats don’t go very fast and it was a matter of some interest as to whether the cloud was going the same way as us. As you can see the houses got the rain, we trundled off through the fields and moored in the dry.

Ophelia is still in the bag but the lace is reaching an end. There’s still plenty of yarn left but it looks to be long enough now. This is the stage where I have to follow a pattern so it’s no longer the mindless knitting that it has been. I’m hoping that next time I’ll be photographing the blocked piece because the end is very much in sight. For those who asked for a tutorial on starting in the middle with a provisional cast on over the cord of a circular needle, here is one. I can’t remember where I first came across the idea of using a cord rather than a piece of waste yarn but I find it much easier. The cord doesn’t try to wrap itself around the working needle in the same way that a piece of yarn does and the stitches are there ready to knit, you don’t risk losing one when you take out the waste yarn. I wound my yarn into two balls starting from each end of the skein so that the two balls were joined. This meant that when I came to work in the reverse direction the tail end of the first side was the working yarn for the second side. I was determined not to break the yarn so I judged the extra messing about to be worth the effort.

I suppose this is a natural progression from the linen string. (That did soften up after washing, developed a nice shine and it has now improved enough to make the grade as dishcloth yarn) In this case I did set out to make rope, I wanted to end up with a thick yarn starting with a short fibre so the only way to go was to spin it thin and then ply it forever. It now resembles the skipping rope of my childhood (as opposed to the plastic, singing, flashing, LED skipping things of today). This is 12 ply alpaca, it was a normal four ply that was then navajo plied. I didn’t mind joining on more single as the balls ran out but I didn’t fancy joining in a new ball of four ply yarn. Navajo plying makes one bobbin of plied yarn from one bobbin of unplied so it was just simpler doing it that way. If I never use the jumbo flyer on my wheel again it doesn’t matter because it has had a really good workout with this. Each skein weighs over 100g and I have 16 of them.

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This is the leg and neck fibre from the two white fleeces that I bought last summer, it was the fibre that doesn’t end up in yarn because it’s short. I’m hoping that the cabled construction is going to reduce the shedding, alpaca doesn’t stick to itself in the same way that wool does and this has been shedding like stink at every stage. It’s better than it was but that isn’t saying a deal. Yes, I did make a sample and that shed too but I couldn’t bear the thought of throwing away potentially useful fibre. It’s taken me a year on and off to deal with the tatty white stuff, I still have the good white and all of the black to see to. I suppose I would have finished it faster if I’d actually been working on it during all of that period but I only have a limited attention span for plain white fibre.

My husband made me the peg loom, neither of us had seen one before but the internet is a nifty thing and came up with the directions. He went into the garage and came back with the wood and it took him next to no time to produce (the key I am told is to make a jig to hold the pegs while you drill them) It seems to be working just fine although I suspect that the telling time will come at the end when I have to pull it all together and tie it off. The warp is real string, I poured boiling water over it so that the first wash doesn’t produce too big a surprise. The weaving is a joint production, my mother has had a go and so have I. I did anticipate using child labour but I don’t think he’d be able to reposition the pegs. I am aiming for something approximating three feet by two feet but I have no idea how much it will pull in once it is done. It doesn’t have to fit anything so the final size doesn’t really matter.

My last post ended somewhat abruptly as the dog left off chewing and wandered off sniffing. This means that he’s asking himself the question “where should I pee?” and as far as I’m concerned the answer to that is “anywhere you like provided it’s the other side of the back door”. My run of bad luck is now hopefully at an end as I’ve had the obligatory three things. The broken blog was fixed by next day delivery of a new power supply, the boiler has proved itself to be sulking rather than broken and is waiting for the arrival of the boiler guru (he is seriously good, he can make a broken boiler work from the other end of a telephone) and the third thing was the dog throwing up on Saturday. Don’t be concerned – he isn’t broken but he was a bit subdued on Sunday. I felt so sorry for him that I gave him chicken for breakfast and let him nap on my knee. It’s not going to happen often because it means that I can’t knit during nap time.

I have to be fast today, I have some computer time while the dog is chewing his blankie and the child is attacking Lego men on the Wii. As an aside, you have no idea how hard it is to resize photos while playing throw and tug with the other hand.

The lacy thing is progressing. It’s making ideal holiday knitting, I can throw it aside at a moment’s notice to rush off after puppies and it doesn’t involve following a pattern so I can knit it and watch tv in the evening. I started with a provisional cast on, the one where you go under and over a piece of waste yarn. If you use the cord from a circular needle instead then it means that you can start knitting in the other direction without having to do anything at all. This has got to be my favourite provisional cast on as it is the one that requires least effort. I had started knitting from the centre of the yarn with a ball wound from each end of the skein so the tail end of the cast on was the working yarn for knitting the second piece of the stole and there are no ends. I did start with a few plain rows but it may turn out that I needed a few more to stop it bobbling in the middle. I’m sure that will block out….

I am avoiding ending up in that dangerous position where you cast off, admire your work and then have to go back and make the second half to match. I worked four repeats on one side, four repeats on the other and then put both sides on the same needle. Both ends will now finish at the same time and there is less chance of me wandering off after the first cast off. The downside of this is that the whole thing looks like a sack, you can’t even stretch it out to see how long it is. At some point there will be a test block so I can see how long a repeat is when it’s blocked to the width I want and then work out how many I have to knit to have it finished. I want to hold off doing that for as long as I can because it’s likely to be a moment of disappointment, you think you must be nearly there and then find that it’s nowhere near as long as it needs to be. I’m also not convinced that this will block to the width that I’d worked out it would and the more length I have before I find this out the better I’ll accept it.

Got to go.

Poor Ophelia has been shut away for a period of quiet contemplation. It’s me that needs the quiet contemplation because I need to work out whether the sleeve shaping that I’ve been blindly following has been producing the shape of sleeve that I want. I’ve been knitting away, happy in the knowledge that this sleeve is enormous and I don’t need to think about the final width anytime soon. What I didn’t think about was that the top of this huge sleeve with its rapid decreases is in the body of the sweater. There’s a fair chance that I’ve already decreased to a width that is less roomy than I need around my upper arm. To know this for sure I need to block the sleeve, baste the seam together and look at the results. I don’t have the opportunity to do that right now and also I don’t want to, if it comes out wrong I’m not prepared for the ripping.

This meant that on Friday afternoon I was facing the prospect of sitting through a swimming lesson with no knitting. I might have had to have listened to the mother from hell and as she’s cornered me twice in the past I’m already word perfect on what an amazing swimmer her son is and the comparative teaching standards at four local swimming pools. I had to take something to knit even if I ended up ripping it out after I got home.

How lucky it was that as a pick me up on a grumpy day I had wound my yarn (I bought this bottle on Thursday evening as it perfectly represented how I was feeling). When I made the yarn I had made an effort to make a single skein out of the yardage so there was no way that I was going to break the yarn for a bit of knitting that started in the middle with a provisional cast on. I wound from each end of the skein and weighed the balls as I went along. The kitchen scales are only good to 2g (the very good scales are packed away in the knitting bag away from chewing puppies) but I imagine that I will run out of patience before I run out of yarn so it won’t matter if the yardage differs slightly. The Adventures Of White Tuft I just had time to note down a revised version of horseshoe lace from Sharon Miller’s Heirloom Knitting and cast on 88 stitches before I set off to the pool. I know it’s not much of a pattern given that I only worked out the first two rows but it should have been enough to get the pattern established and after that it’s plain sailing. With such a beginning you’d expect it to have all gone horribly wrong but so far it hasn’t.

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Vamp rip

I’ve been a single project knitter for over two months and now I’m not. I don’t feel the slightest bit guilty and it feels so good to be working on something small that only has two balls of yarn for the dog to run off with.

I looked at the photo of the sleeve in yesterday’s post and it gives no clue as to what the sleeves actually look like and why it is going to take an unreasonable time to knit them. You can look at the pattern photo and still not have any idea, the model has her elbows tucked in and is sideways on to the camera so you can’t see the sleeve shape at all. I feel I owe it to the internets to show the full picture as it were so here in all its gaping glory is the pre-sleeve sweater.

My son advised me that I could leave it like this and wear it as an apron but that wasn’t the look I was after. You can see the gap in the hip area where the side gusset will go later (when I’ve worked out how big it needs to be) and you can hardly miss the vast acreage of white that is currently being filled with sleeve. The sleeve top is part of the front so as well as being really wide it’s also really long. I picked up 236 stitches which is 60 more than at the start of the front. I usually work both sleeves at once but this time I’ll pass. As well as taking an age to knit a row I’d also be juggling with six balls of yarn and it is just not worth the effort.

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I did have a moment’s bliss yesterday afternoon, a cup of tea, some knitting and total silence. It was so good. No-one was wanting feeding or playing with and I could amuse myself quietly doing whatever I wanted. It didn’t last anywhere near long enough (although there were some words still left in the book). There may well be/have been total silence from the blog, the box that it lives in is feeling a bit unwell at the moment and it seems to be wanting a bit of a break. Did I mention that the boiler has stopped working too? Is all my household equipment going to want a week off in August?

I’d love to be able to display this so that it made sense but I’m constrained by a straight needle and a lack of puppy free space. The body is at the bottom and the cast off at the armhole is going straight up at the bottom left. You can see that the straight part of the sleeve is longer than this cast off, the top of the side gusset will go in that gap. This is the point where you can add extra ease by working the straight section of the sleeve longer and making a wider gusset to match. It does mean that if you wake in the morning and find that you’ve lost two stone and four inches off your bust and hips then you could just reknit the gusset, shorten the straight part of the sleeve with a snip and a graft and have a smaller sweater. It would work the other way as well, because all the body shaping is contained in the separate gusset it makes it easy to alter.

These are the odd bits of blue/green fibre that have been left over from other things. There is still a lot left but less than there was because McKnitty came over and played with the drum carder yesterday. My batts had silk and used very similar colours (no surprises there then) and they would have been lovely had it not been for the nylon. The yarn is hanging up to dry but it might be there a while as I left it outside and it rained overnight. I could make a big list of what I did wrong with these but I learned a lot from it (specifically how not to add nylon to a batt) and the next ones will be better.

I am resisting the urge to wind the brown yarn, I have a pattern for it sorted out but I know that if I cast on then Ophelia will gather dust. This is the first time that I’ve been a single project knitter and it gets results. Even with my very limited knitting time I can see that I’m making progress, especially as I’m still decreasing every other row.

Sometimes it helps to talk, undefined problems become clear and a resolution presents itself. In writing my last post I identified my problem as that of stopping the puppy chewing the wheel when it wasn’t in use. The solution was simple, a heavy ceramic ramekin placed over the irresistible felt pad now serves as an audible warning when someone is trying to do something he shouldn’t be. This meant that I could put the wheel back up and turn the roving that I showed on Thursday into something knittable. I’m not entirely sure how much of this there is because I had to break off while counting for essential puppy maintenance but I think there is 1,150 yards. I’m not sure of the weight either, the kitchen scales say 178g but I suspect that the batteries are on the way out. I’ll settle for it being a bit skinnier than sock weight and there being a lot of it.

When I was first starting to spin I haunted spinning blogs for photos of roving and the yarn that it made so that I could learn what happened when one was spun into the other. It’s not that I don’t like surprises but I don’t like them all of the time. In the interests of giving something back these are the before, during and after shots.

Although I loved the single that resulted from the fibre that I dyed (the bobbin on the left of the two above) I think that a two ply yarn made from this alone would have been an uninteresting brown. The colour changes were so subtle that I think they would have been lost on plying and they were very short so would not have made a long colour run in a chained three ply. The colour changes in the second fibre were much stronger and these are what has given the yarn its stripes.

The Shipping News psp I think this will do very well, the colours are right and there will be enough of a colour change to make for interesting knitting. I’m not looking for patterns just yet, I want to get further down the sleeve on Ophelia before I start frittering my time away on something else. (The yarn’s not quite dry yet anyway) The next post will hopefully be Ophelia sleeve shaping but if I don’t get much knitting done over the next few days then I may have to fall back on cute puppy photos.

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