Wool For Brains

King’s Ransom It’s been half term this week so I should have been leaping about doing stuff. With impeccable timing I have a cold, I’m sick of hearing myself cough and in the evening I just want to go to bed rather than knit. Luckily I finished these before I switched to moping and coughing so there is something to show for a blogless week (there’s also the completion of my tax return and my car being legal for another year but they’re not exactly woolly). These are plain stockinette, toe up with what may become my new favourite toe up flap and gusset heel. They started life somewhat brighter than this, this is the first time that I’ve dyed something after I’ve knitted it and it came out better than I expected. I had my doubts that I’d get an even colour but it looks good enough to me (and think how rarely you hear me say that). I have another skein of yarn that features the same luminous red and that’s going to get the same treatment once I can be bothered.

• D.A.R.Y.L. dvdrip

Over Her Dead Body movies I also finished the long standing black scrap socks, they are finished in that there’s no more knitting but I have still to sew all those ends in so they are not yet fit to be seen. I do feel much better for having them finally done after thirteen months and of course that meant that I could start something else. I should confess that I started this before I got to the toe of the black sock, my excuse is that I’m knitting to a deadline and the sooner I started the more chance I had of finishing in time. It is possible that I’ll have to rip this out and start over because the pattern is worked at 7 stitches to the inch and I’m reworking it to knit it at 4.5 stitches to the inch. I’m not at all convinced that I’m fit to be let loose on number crunching at the moment although it’s just a hat and so there are a limited number of ways in which I can get it wrong. It’s looking as it should so far although it doesn’t look to be as enormous as I had planned it to be so it is possible that I’ve already blown it on getting the width right.

I’ll be back when I can put two words together and be bothered to play with wool again.

Earlier this week I was wondering why it was that I hadn’t posted for six days but had no knitting progress to show. I’d obviously been doing something with my time but I couldn’t work out what it was. I had overlooked that in the week I’d knitted a sock because the second striped sock now is running up to the heel. I’d also created 350 yards(170g) of four ply yarn out of thin air. Admittedly I did cheat a bit with that one, I spun the two lighter plies but the two darker ones came out of the yarn stash. They started off as some laceweight yarn that I bought off the internet, in person I didn’t like the colour and it was a single which is not my favorite thing to knit. I changed the colour easily enough but there was no getting away from its construction. There is now less of it than there was although I have a suspicion that I bought two skeins and the second one is lurking somewhere yet to be found.

• 21 Grams release

I also managed a few rows on Iris while the dog was asleep. I have a four row limit on this, after that I just can’t face the crochet hook any more. Just to add another constraint I can only work on it in daylight because at night I can’t see which side of the hook is which and I merrily pull it through the stitch and drop it straight off the needle. You can see that the heavily beaded bits are moving to the sides, there’s a V in the centre where there is less beading. I love that bit because I can see that I’m placing fewer beads on each row. I’m hoping that as the beading gets less I might yet work up to a knitting session of six rows because I’d love to reach the stage where I could see some actual progress on this.

I also wrangled Ophelia out of the bag. There are no photos of that because it looks just the same as before owing to the fact that the sleeve has not got any longer during the time it’s been packed away. I think I need to add another six inches to the sleeve before blocking it, basting the sleeve seam (my inner knitter has concerns about the sleeve being a bit skinny) and checking for length. It’s a big project to work on now with half a sleeve, a back, a front and three balls of yarn and this makes it easy pickings for dog play. In future I will be making sweaters one piece at a time because they are much easier to keep out of tooth range. As if this wasn’t enough I’ve also resurrected my oldest WIP, the black scrap socks, and the second one now has the start of a heel. These have been on the needles since September 2007 and really need to be finished so I’ve told myself that there are to be no new starts until they are done. I’ve also washed just over half of Melka who is far too pretty to be living in a pillowcase in the garage. If you put it all together then it was a productive week even though the bits don’t add up to a whole lot of anything.

The other time suck is this, I just sit down for one row and then decide to knit until the next colour change, then the next segment. It is easy knitting, in the way that Iris and Ophelia aren’t and that means that it’s getting done. It’s not black so I can work on it at night and it doesn’t need a pattern. I suspect that this may be the first thing finished even though it was the last thing started.

Starting Out in the Evening dvdrip

This is a tale of two heels. The sock on the right has the heel that should have gone on the sock on the left. They are both toe up with a flap and gusset construction but they are very different. The white sock has exactly the same flap and gusset heel that is worked on a cuff down sock but worked in the other direction so the flap ends up being under the heel. This meant that the patterning on the heel was worked at the same time as the rest of the sock, making it really easy and that is of course why I did it. This would be an ideal heel for my mother as she wears holes under the heel and that’s where the back and forth section is. If it comes to reknitting it this section could be remade without affecting the rest of the sock. For me this would be not so good because I wear the back of the heel and that area is worked in rounds. If I reknit the heel then it’s going to show in a stripe around the front.

The striped sock has the heel from the latest Tsock Flock Club sock. There are some gusset increases before the heel, a heel turn and then a flap that is worked back and forth whilst joining it to the rest of the sock with decreases at each edge. The back and forth section is on the back of the heel where I need it and it doesn’t have that odd round that works across the instep that the Widdershins heel does. This means that if and when the heel needs to be replaced the remainder of the sock would be undisturbed. The only thing that I can say against it is that I really dislike purling back in the round. I’m still deciding which is most important to me, ease of knitting or ease of mending. If you bin your socks at the first sign of a hole then your priorities are different but I expect my socks to keep on going until they can be mended no more.

That would be this pair then. These are made in Cherry Tree Hill sock yarn from before the days when their sock yarn had nylon and when I was so new a sock knitter to be clueless enough to buy it. They have not worn well. The toes have been darned, the heels have been darned but this is a first for me. This is not usually where I run through them, I am generally a toe and heel holer. After examination the only part of the sock that is sound is the top part of the cuff. After that comes the heel darns, then the sole holes then the toe darns. I did briefly consider cutting the cuff off and using that as the start of a striped sock but then decided that these could yet have a useful life as bedsocks. I was going to knit a pair as my feet are always cold but it looks as if I have saved myself a job. Even better, I have a contract sock mender who is visiting this weekend. I knit her socks, she darns mine. It works out well but I think with these she’ll have her work cut out.

Blast! movie download

I have so much trouble with red. My camera will not photograph the colours that I see. I have failed on so many occasions to dye the red that I wanted, coral and pink are just not the same. I should just give up now that I’ve failed so many times except that the colour schemes are everywhere at this time of year. I’ve tried dyeing fibre in a red/gold/brown and the red was pants (I put that one through the drum carder with some brown). I tried for a fibre in red/gold/green and the red was pants (that’s still waiting for me to mend it in some way). Unpleasantly dyed fibre is so much easier to turn around than unpleasantly dyed yarn because if all else fails you can pull off the offending bits.

This has been malingering in the yarn drawer since I dyed it. It’s another shop reject, firstly because of the colour but also because it had a little accident with the gas flame. Whoops. It’s obviously not going to get any prettier with extended storage so my cunning plan is to knit it up and then see what the leftovers look like when they are dyed brown. If it’s a vast improvement then I’ll dye the finished socks. These are toe up for a reason, I want to try out the flap and gusset heel that was part of the latest Tsock Flock club sock. I substituted another heel when I knitted the sock because at the time

Adventures of Johnny Tao full

• The Andromeda Strain full

I reached the heel I was in need of no brain knitting. It may well be that this is the toe up heel, the one that surpasses all others and I won’t know that until I’ve knitted it.

Pollyanna release This is the first of the York and Lancaster socks, with the alternate heel. When I’d worked the first rose I held the sock against the sock I was wearing and calculated where I’d be ending up if I followed the pattern and worked a second rose on the other side. Where I’d be ending is in the realms of calf shaping, there’s a reason that I wear short socks. There is potentially a problem here in that without the second rose to balance it I’ve made a sock that will wear best (that sounds so much better than “show off”) on one foot rather than the other. This would mean that there would be uneven wear at the toe but given the speed with which I throw myself into my clothes it’s as likely that the roses will be on the inside of my ankle as the outside. I don’t wear fancy socks to show off, I wear them because they are fun to knit. This is not finished yet, there’s a bit of grafting on the cuff, the addition of the green to the rose, some sewing in of ends and then an attempt to smooth out that rose with a bit of a block. It fits and the cabling is very pretty. I may take off the crenellated top, rip back and add a few more pattern rows above the rose because it looks to me as if it needs a bit more white above to frame it. I’ll sit and look at it a bit while I decide just how much it is bugging me.

This was something else that started with something that failed the grade for sale. It didn’t have a good start, the dog managed to get into the 500g of bfl I brought home from Iknit and by the time he was discovered he’d made a lovely nest in it. Most of it was fine but bits of it were shredded. I dyed some of it in red, gold and brown and yet again I blew it with the red. I should just give up with dyeing red because it is never a fulfilling experience for me. Instead of the rich vibrant colour that I’d imagined I got something more of a sorbet pink. Having failed on two counts it would have been doomed to a life in the stash except that I’m trying to reduce that not add to it. I ran it through the drum carder with some brown merino that I once bought for a sweater that I never made and the end result was a brown/ orange combination (the colour in the photo on the right is true). I don’t love it with a burning passion but it will do. I nearly ripped it because of the construction, I can now say that I don’t care for things where I have to swap between using yarn doubled and single while using needles in different sizes. If it was a choice between moths in my stash or making another I’d have to stop and think which was the least worst option.

This is some more of the shredded bfl, this is now a bfl/Wensleydale blend after it was dyed a few different colours of blue and run through the drum carder. This is a genuine three ply as opposed to a navajo three ply because with this I wanted something that was heathered rather than stripey. This is roughly double knitting weight and I was intending to make a pair of cabled mittens from it although it is sitting in a ball on the kitchen counter with no sign of spontaneous mitten generation. Last week I was all about mittens and the perfect mitten yarn but I’ve moved on. As always my favorite yarn is the last one I made and mittens are so last week.

Life or Something Like It buy

Doogal video

This is possibly the scabbiest looking fibre that I’ve ever dyed. Surprisingly I meant it to come out like this, I wanted the white patches in there so that they would spin to light sections and make plenty of barberpoling in the plied yarn (2 ply, 430 yards, 98g). The resident adult is out of the country and unavailable for yarn appreciation but this is waiting for him as soon as he gets back. Mittens can wait, this week I’m thinking about short row ruffled edge scarves. This may change depending on whether I manage to cast on before the next roving is dry.

The chillies are easy to pick and store, this is the start of the string and once dried they will keep until the next season’s crop is ready. Other fruit take more effort. There is an advert showing on television at the moment that gets a reaction from me every time I see it. “British apples are in season and ripe for picking”…..”I like mine in a Bramley apple pie” They then show a tiny pie that would fit on the palm of my hand – someone is just not eating their share. My conversational opening at the moment is “Hello, could you use some cooking apples?” I have two trees of eating apples but they are only small trees and although they crop well we don’t have a problem keeping up with them. The two Bramley apple trees are a different matter. I’ve made three batches of apple jelly (using up last year’s dried chillies) and two batches of chutney and I’m nearly at the end of my supply of jars. My mother has been wrapping apples in newspaper to see us through the winter but the trees are still full of apples. I’ve been picking them by the bucket but I haven’t got to the point where they are all out of reach. I did start with the motto of “none shall fall” but that was overly optimistic although more catchy than the alternative of “I’m going to give away as many of these apples as possible”. On a good day I can give away half a bucketful between my plot and the car park.

My allotment hut does have some knitting content. This is the closest you want to be to this pair of socks, they get washed once a year at the end of the season and they are very definitely foot shaped. They are not filthy-stinky, rather filthy-covered in dirt. These are my first pair of handspun socks, they are a bit chunky so are ideal for wearing in my boots. I could spin before I could dye so the colour changes here are made from switching between two colours of merino. Before making these my joins were not very good but that improved with a vengeance.

The final count on the buttercup squash was twelve squash from three plants. The smaller fruit all vanished, I suspect that they were too thin skinned to survive the hungry slugs but that just meant that they were self pruning. We’ve eaten one of them, it weighed 4.5lb and would serve eight. It was delicious with much more flavour than the butternut that I usually buy. My neighbour grew butternut that was really butternut rather than buttercup and she had a grand total of one fruit so either I’m better at growing squash than she is or the buttercup is better suited to our growing conditions. The pumpkin didn’t do so well, it was overrun by the squash and I ended up with just this one but it will serve well for carving at the end of the month. The two marrows were courgettes that got away but it looks as if they are going to store successfully. One may be destined for yet more chutney when I can come up with some more jars.

I like apples, it’s a good job really isn’t it?

I was hoping that the sock would have had a rose by now but over the weekend I went one better than losing my place in the chart, I lost the chart itself. I knew that it wasn’t lost-lost, it was in the house in a dog-proof place but as my definition of dog-proof is changing by the week that didn’t give me a lot to go on. The pattern vanished on Friday and turned up on Monday on the staircase. I’m not at all sure why I thought that was a good place to put it especially as the knitting was on the dining table and I don’t want to think about the number of times that I walked past it over the weekend without seeing it. I do now have the start of a rose, at some point in the past I’ve done intarsia in the round before but for the life of me I cannot think on what. If I can’t remember where I put a knitting pattern the day before then there’s little chance that I’ll dredge up a memory of something I knitted decades ago.

The key thing about that photo from yesterday is that the chart was dangling from my hand and yet the place marker was still where it should be. It remains in place even when stuffed in a carrier bag with the yarn (what a great idea, storing the pattern and the yarn together, why didn’t I think of that?). Of course the magic is done with magnets, you need a piece of card twice the size of your chart, fold it in half and apply self adhesive magnetic tape to the inside (£3 for 3m, ebay). When you do yours you’ll make sure that the edges of the card are straight (my card was a leftover and is rather wavy) and that you get the tape lined up nicely. I shall now be raiding my son’s craft supplies for the pretty holographic card that I know he has somewhere so that I can make multiple sizes before I lose the tape.

Mission: Impossible movies

I spent all day yesterday trying to come up with some sort of theme that would link together all the things I wanted to blog. I thought about it while digging on the allotment, I thought about it while walking the dog, I thought about it while getting the dinner ready. I couldn’t come up with any sort of thread that would link everything together so I didn’t post at all. It struck me this morning that life doesn’t usually work like that, there is no scriptwriter working in the background ready to pull all the random pieces together with a cunning plot twist at the end. I’m not saying that it’s always that way, there have been a few instances in my life where many very seemingly disparate things have fallen into place in a very spooky manner but mostly, life just happens.

• Fear House the movie

A Simple Plan movie full

The Adventures of Huck Finn dvdrip

I have now given up on the idea of trying to come up with a single blog post that links all these diverse things together, I’m going to be sensible and split them up. This means that if anything of interest happens to me this week then you’ll never get to know the significance of the photos (except for the one on the left because I’m pleased with that one and want to share it) We all know that I don’t get out much and the chance of me having an exciting event in my week is slim at the best so in all probability you will be seeing these photos again.

• Final Analysis dvd

It’s seems to have been an age since I finished anything. In part that’s because I’m not knitting while walking the dog and playing “fetch” but it’s also because the dog has impacted on my knitting in less obvious ways. I used to knit a few stitches here and there, leaving my knitting on the back of the settee or the floor in between times. I can’t do that now, the back of the settee is now accessible to the wool monster and the floor is obviously a no-knit zone. My knitting has to be put away whenever I put it down and it means that I’m not doing as much of it because it’s just not worth the effort of getting it out. I’m hoping that as he grows up he’ll lose his fascination with wool in the same way as he’s lost all interest in the spinning wheel.

I have finished something, these are the Rolling Thunder socks from Knitty with some slight variations on the pattern. I didn’t use the provisional cast on and knit shut facing, just sewed the cast on down with the tail end of the yarn. I reduced to 68 stitches after the cuff because that’s what fits me and then worked my usual sock from there on. We will not be looking too closely at the socks because I wore them yesterday and they’ve been down to the allotment. They aren’t going to be my favourite pair because I don’t like the fit of the cuff but I knew when I cast on that I was sacrificing functionality for fun.

Coming next time – something from the photographs above (or not, as the fancy takes me)

It’s been a week of worry so mindless knitting was in order except that I was already on the second sock of my mindless knitting project. That needed to be rationed so that it would see me through the wait at the dentist and all those other places where I needed to be but didn’t want to be at all. The War of the Roses sock had to step up to the mark for evening knitting, don’t ask me how following a thirty two row charted pattern could possibly qualify as mindless knitting but it did the trick. The only problem I had was when I got cocky and thought I could manage without putting a marker on the chart. Once I’d ripped back twice I decided that it wasn’t cheating in any way to use a place marker and in fact was the sensible thing to do.

It failed as mindless knitting when it came to the heel, there was too much thinking involved for me to start the pattern on the heel on the right row to have it match the remaining pattern once the heel was complete. It should have been simple enough as there was a straightforward walk through in the pattern except that I’d added an extra four stitches in the foot. This meant that I needed to think the heel through rather than follow the instructions blindly. It would probably have taken me five minutes of thought (I just did it, I’m adding four stitches, so therefore working four less decreases on the heel, how hard was that?) but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for that so I swapped the heel for a no brainer which would give me a simple transition from the 68 stitches in the foot to the 72 stitches of the cuff and enabled me to work the pattern on the heel at the same time as the rest of the sock. It also meant that I could measure up against a sock I’d made before and get the heel in the right place first time. The heel in the pattern will wait for the next pair of plain socks that I make because for all I know that could become my new favourite toe up gusset heel. I just had the suspicion that I was setting myself up for failure with this and it was not a good week to be doing that.

One of the minor worries this week was how my son would react to the sight of the new dog that I brought home from the groomers. He feels like a plush toy so this is a vast improvement to an eight year old. He looks like a proper dog now, he has legs and everything and I don’t like it at all, I want my walking fluff ball back. Although he looks cute enough in this picture I know that he’s working out whether he can climb up onto the shelf under the coffee table to chew the bone that he found under the settee last night. He fell asleep still trying to work it out, you can see the bone under the right paw.

My actual mindless knitting project turned out not to be so mindless after all. I was knitting the heel flap of the Rolling Thunder sock on my way back from the hospital and when I picked it up later that night it was fully an inch longer than that on the first sock. At least I noticed before I turned the heel so that’s something. My usual prescription for mindless knitting is garter stitch on big needles so it should come as no surprise that there’s something along those lines on the needles too. It’s not my favourite thing in the world ever so I obviously picked the wrong project for my mood. More on that another time maybe because I still haven’t decided whether I’m going to rip it.