Wool For Brains

This is the Spindrift scarf by Lucy Neatby, knitted in some colour of Noro sock yarn. I bought the yarn on a whim whilst in the yarn shop, I would never knit socks with it but I thought I might manage a scarf. I usually go with “never say never” but with this I’ll make an exception. I will say categorically that I am never knitting with Noro Kureyon sock yarn again. If I get shipwrecked with a bale of it and nothing else to knit then I may have to rethink this but as long as there is something else on offer then I’d rather be knitting the alternative. When it first came out I poked at it in the ball, looked at the thick and thin aspect of it and said that I’d never use it for socks. I thought that I might have been mistaken about it, first impressions and all that and anyway, one ball wouldn’t hurt. Besides which it was in colours that said “buy me, buy me”. A ball will get you a longer/wider scarf than this, I worked out that I had enough yarn for at least two more repeats but quite frankly I’d had enough.

I did originally plan to make the Wavelength scarf but a quick reality check lead to the realisation that I need to see to crochet so this would not have been a tv watching project. As this is a four row knitting pattern and I only needed to pay attention on one of the rows this made it a better match of project to available time. I would have been better with a pointy needle, I would have been better with different yarn. Yes, it makes nice stripes but it is still horrible stuff to knit with. I might possibly knit this pattern again, it takes longer than you think to knit a hole but I like the final effect.

Similar colours, different fibre, very much nicer to the touch. This is a 70:30 mix of blue faced leicester and kid mohair dyed in black, purple and green and then carded. Do we see the beginnings of a colour theme? I didn’t realise until after I’d dyed it that the colours were so similar to that of the scarf. This is the first time I’ve made a sideways striped batt and it was fun to do.

I now know why it was that the ball of Noro was so attractive and why I think that black, purple and green are good colours to pour on fibre. This is my winter dog walking attire, black, purple and green again. I’m never going to wear the scarf with it so the camoflage effect doesn’t matter. I’m never going to wear the scarf at all, it will be out of the door so fast it will be just a blur (even more of a blur than this photo).

You can see from the lack of formatting that the technical expert is still in foreign parts but he’s back tomorrow. I think my opening line will be “Hello sweetie, how was your week, can you fix my blog now?”

This week is looking good so far, one thing finished and in use, one blocking, one sooo close to being done (but out of yarn). If I spread these out for long enough then by the time I’ve finished talking about them I might have come to a resolution with the sweater. I’ve had it out of the bag and the last four inches of the sleeve shaping is definitely wrong but I think it might have some a more fundamental issue. I’m still pondering that one. I know there’s something wrong with it but I need another session with the tape measure to work out exactly what it is and the best way of fixing it.

On a happier note this is made from the first yarn I spun on my new wheel. I would have said that it was too soft, too thick and thin and too bumpy except that once I came to knit it it wasn’t. Well it was too soft but not so much of the rest. It made a nice fabric at 5.5 stitches to the inch and there was no sign of the irregularities that screamed at me in the skein. It was much thinner than I had thought because it was a soft fluffy yarn of a type that I never make and I did at first consider using it doubled to make the thick hat that I wanted. I may now be a convert to knitting hats from the top down because it has the same advantage as making socks toe up. You can try it on as you go, stop increasing when it’s big enough and if you start off with the wrong needles then there is only a tiny amount to rip back. I made a reverse stockinette ridge to encourage the brim to turn downwards after I stopped the increases, made a turning row at the bottom, reduced a few stitches to stop the bottom edge flaring out and then knitted my way back up what would be the inside. When I reached the right point I knit shut the bottom of the facing with the row just below the reverse stockinette section. It’s given me a double thickness around the ears where the wind whistles when I’m out with the dog and it is slightly more flattering than a beanie hat. It would have looked better being a little shallower, just perched on the top of my head. This would no doubt have been more flattering but I need my ears covering up for when we are walking on the top of the hill.

Captivity hd

• Irresistible movie full Do the Right Thing full

I’ve used up that soft fluffy yarn and that’s just as well because I’ve made more. This didn’t quite come out as I’d planned, I thought that I was adding big slubs but it turned out that I wasn’t making them big enough. Yet again I’ve spent time on an effect so subtle that I needn’t have bothered. I suspect that this has a future as another top down hat, that would be hat number three because number two is already in progress.

This is the thicker, darker alpaca mix. Again, it’s top down (I may run with this for a while now) but this is going to be more of a beanie. I’m reaching the stage where I need to get out the wonder scales and work out just how many rows I will get from the remaining yarn because I suspect that there might be a need for a contrast stripe. I don’t want to put it right at the bottom because then it looks as if I ran out of yarn.

The good news is that with the new version of Wordpress I’ve worked out how to make the photos click for big. The bad news is that (as you’ve no doubt noticed) I have no idea how to make the words go where I want them. My extensive reading says that this needs something doing to my style sheet but as the in house user support is now on a train to Paris it’s all down to me. You’re doomed to a week of white spaces then because formatting will no doubt not return until the husband does.

Twelve Monkeys rip

Between Love & Goodbye dvd

Nine Tailors sock kit

You could open it and just look at the pattern, looking doesn’t count. It’s in a clear plastic bag, there’s the pattern at the front. I can see enough to know that it’s the right kit and what else would I want to know?

You could check the gauge and see what needles it needs. Nice try but I’ve knitted five socks with that yarn so it’s not a total unknown. I’ve got whatever needles I need and any other supplies I’ll either have or can improvise.

Adam’s Wall ipod

You should look at the pattern because you’ll need to adjust the sizing. Quite right and I will. I’m in between the two sizes with an extra helping of calf. I know this without looking at the pattern because I’ve knitted five socks this year from this designer. It’s unlikely that her definition of medium and large has changed much.

You could wind the wool, just to be ready I know from experience that this is the start of a steep slippery slope so I’m afraid that I will have to decline. Try harder.

The Candy Snatchers movies

My general take on knitting is that if it can be written down then I can knit it. I may not be brimming with self confidence in other areas (parking springs immediately to mind as one of them) but I do genuinely believe that I can knit anything. It all comes down to a variation on two stitches and I mastered both of those some time since. I have an inkling that this might be the pattern that makes my brain ache seeing as there’s cabling and colourwork together and so I have two opportunities in a row to go wrong. Just to top it off there’s lace and beads as well. What more could one want (or get) from a sock? I’ve wanted to knit this since I saw it. I had to wait a year for the sock to be released as a kit (it was originally designed for the Tsock club), then I waited a bit longer to get it as a Christmas present. I’ve waited long enough now that another month or two will make no difference. The thing that’s stopping me from listening to my inner knitter who wants us to have it cast on in the next five minutes is that I already have two socks on the needles with the last club sock still to come. The voice of reason (who doesn’t say a deal and usually speaks so quietly that I find it easy to ignore) is saying that when I’ve finished the last Margarita sock, the Tsuspense sock (and its twin) and the sixth sock then I’ll be focussed enough to start The Nine Tailors.

I’m not listening to my inner knitter, I feel as if there’s no-one listening to me either. If you read this through Bloglines you’ve not been seeing as much of me of late and you’ll probably be reading this three weeks from now. For some reason Bloglines stopped publishing items from one of the feeds in the New Year, there are two more feeds with subscribers that carried on working but the main RSS feed went a bit wobbly. What can I say, it wasn’t me (I think) and I use the Google reader and that’s been just fine. I’m sure at some point it will catch up but until then I’ll just talk to the hand. The wall is a good listener too.

It’s not quite been “all day long” but the drum carder has had a good outing this time. I think I’m finished with it now, at least for a while. It’s not that I’m all carded out but I’ve made over 900g of carded batts and now I’d like to spin something. It all started when the dog went to see the groomer, leaving me home alone. I didn’t pine at all, I ran upstairs and cleaned out the spare bedroom. The fibre needs a good poke through at least twice a year, just because I’ve never seen a moth doesn’t mean that they aren’t lurking there plotting world domination. There was no sign of moths but there was rather a lot of fibre. I suppose that shouldn’t be a surprise, it’s not as if it breeds up there, at some point I have brought it all home in bags. Some of it is lovely, some of it I’d forgotten about, some of it turned out to be a bad purchase.

I identified those bags that would otherwise have had a good chance of living in stash forever, pulled them out and gave them a place in the newly created naughty box. They were mostly things that I’d bought to make a specific project before I’d changed my mind and made something else. There were a few dye jobs that didn’t quite come out the way that I’d imagined, most of them involving red. In the box the reds met up with the brown that was left over from a sweater that I didn’t make and some gold silk. The silk was supposed to go with some kid mohair to make a Kidsilk Hazealike but after I’d made a sample I decided that my life was too short to make more. The red, brown and gold silk together made something that I liked, I ended up making 200g of this because the first one sold before I’d finished admiring it. It has all been highly entertaining, bright and colourful on a succession of grey days, but I listed them all for sale.

All the brightly coloured ones I could part with but these were for me. These were an attempt to recreate the husband’s new car. The first one (left) was 60% black alpaca and 40% grey bfl and silk. The second one would have been 40% black alpaca and 60% bfl/silk except that the percentages went off when I added the tencel. I’d bought that as a sample to see whether I liked it and I didn’t, which is why it was still in the bit box. It was shiny though and shiny was what I was looking for. I’ve spun the first set of Mini batts and I’m about halfway through the second. I was going to make a third set with trilobal nylon for the shiny but I think I’ve finished playing with grey for now. Mini batts are so last week. I’m not sure yet what this week looks like except that it seems to involve a pile of ironing.

Room 6 film

I have decided that Bionicles are the ultimate enemy of carded fibre what with all those pointy sticky bits waiting to snag soft delicate fibre. Unfortunately this one has been sharing the breakfast bar with the carder and sharing is obviously not one of his strengths. It did not work out well, wherever I moved him he was in the right place to catch something fluffy. I would have moved him to the dining table except there was a Lego dock and two ships covering that. I’d like a bit of space to play with my toys but I’m not sure that it’s widely recognised that mummys need playtime too.

The longer I leave it the harder it is to blog. This is because I’ve done so much that I can’t decide what to put into the post and what to leave out. Dyeing, carding, spinning, knitting – I’ve done it all this week.

Once Bitten divx

Bonnie and Clyde

I seem to have got a grip on my startitis. I have three fewer projects in the knitting bag and so far I’ve managed not to cast on for anything new. This is in part because I couldn’t decide whether to start a cowl (left, Twisted Sisters Avarice now less yellow than when I bought it) or a hat (right, handspun merino silk). Both seemed essential the other week when it was -5 and windy but it’s warmer now so I can take my time over the decision. The merino silk was spun and plied on the new wheel so I have proved that does spin as well as ply. It still feels a bit scary so my hands are still working faster than the flyer and I still am in the position of not having enough twist in the single. More practise is needed. For a hat the yarn will do well enough, it’s soft and squishy and will no doubt pill like stink. It’s not bad yarn, just not quite what I was aiming for.

I put all my projects on Ravelry, frogged the Magic Mirror mitten and decided that of the remaining wips the spider would be the fastest thing to finish. That was probably true except that when I found my place in the pattern the stitch count was wrong and I had to rip back four rounds. What can I say? It was black, it’s January and it was no fun. It was just as easy to take it all out, put the yarn away and call it done. That left me with two fewer wips.

This project was the third to move on out but clearly this one was finished rather than ripped. These were fun from the icord start nearly to the finish. The one thing I didn’t enjoy was making the bootstraps. Unfortunately they are functional, they stop the top edge from rolling so I had to grit my teeth and get on with it. I skipped the embroidery outlining the lacework because I’d rather be knitting than sewing, they are for me and they done enough. These are “Golden West”, the sock story and lots of lovely close ups iare here if you want to know why there’s a bead on the top. I will probably use the slip stitch pattern from the foot again, it’s quick to work, easy to follow without a pattern and it would break up a pooling yarn. This was a really entertaining knit (apart from the bootstraps of doom)

This is the skein that I spun before Christmas, all 50g of it. I don’t expect you to remember what it was, that’s why I put little labels on skeins because even I don’t always remember what I’ve made. This is superwash merino and nylon, navajo plied. Having enough yarn for one sock is no good but Christmas intervened before I got to the rest of the fibre. This is really asking for trouble, to spin one skein, put the wheel away for two weeks, and the spin the second. The first skein came in at 1,943 yards per pound, a nice fingering weight for socks. The second skein (roll of drums, opening the golden envelope) came in at 1,943 yards per pound. Yee ha indeed. I’ve tried hard to think of an analogy that would explain why it is that I am so very pleased about this. Imagine that you are a very new knitter and you knitted a dishcloth. Three weeks later you knitted the same pattern with the same needles and yarn and it came out the same size. Whoo hoo. You are beside yourself with joy because you maintained your tension whereas experienced knitters would expect that as a matter of course and non-knitters don’t get why having two dishcloths the same size is important.

I’ll hopefully be back later in the week with the other stuff that I didn’t cram into this post, if not then it means that I’m still playing with the drum carder.

I was going to do the year in review thing but got bogged down in the classification of chicken jumpers, worms and prawns. Although I gave up on that blog post the exercise did serve to tell me that last year I knitted 16 pairs of socks. I didn’t note whose feet they were for but at least a few pairs must have been for me. Why is it then that I can never find a pair to put on my feet? I know that I have far fewer socks than my husband and this is fair enough because he wears them all year and I live in sandals through the summer. It’s only to be expected that in the winter I hit the bottom of my sock basket before he does and as I’m in control of the washing that shouldn’t be a problem but even allowing for this I still seem to be a few pairs short of a sock drawer. The answer lies in the mending pile.

I’ve always said that I’m hard on toes because I don’t look after my toenails as I ought. Faced with the evidence this week I can say that this is a total pile of poop. It is true that I am hard on sock toes but I don’t get holes at the toe, I get holes at the sides. What brought this home to me was seeing the four pairs in the mending pile just after knitting the toe of the Golden West. I was reading through the introduction to the toe and there were two options, one for a pointy toe and one for a square toe. Before I read ahead in the pattern I looked at my foot

and my toes are as square as they come. In a race for longest toe you’d need a photofinish to decide whether my big toe is bigger than my second toe. I am without a doubt square of toe and not in the slightest bit pointy. Having determined this I read on only to find that the pointy toe (finish to 8 stitches top and bottom) is my standard sock toe, the square toe finishes to twice this. You can imagine the moment of revelation, the light bulb over my head illuminating the towering mending pile. Obviously the excessive wear on the sides of my socks is because they are stretched too far as I cram my broad and square toe into a pointy sock. Why have I always made my toes to a 16 stitch finish? Well the pattern for the first pair that I ever made was written that way and they fitted fine so I just carried on forever.

Needless to say I will now be making future socks wider at the toe. I don’t want to think about how long I’ve managed to not think about the cause of the holes that I’ve been mending but it just goes to show how the holes in your socks can tell a story, in my case one of self delusion.

Distaff Day is the 7th, the day after the 12th day of Christmas when all the frivolity has been tidied away and it’s back to business as usual. It was Sunday when the tree team went to work here, when I went out with the dog it was still Christmas and when I came back everything was boxed and ready to be hauled back into the loft. As the tree came down, the wheel went up. I’ve not done anything with it yet mind but at least now I could if I wanted to.

This was the reward for Daniel finishing the Christmas stocking that he was knitting. I promised to knit him something, during the knitting of the stocking the nature of the reward kept changing, at one point it was going to be de Blob (from the Wii game of the same name), later it was destined to be a raving rabbid but ultimately it ended as it started. This is Dan’s penguin from Club Penguin, except that Club Penguin penguins are fatter and have bigger feet. It was close enough and deemed to be “brill”. The pattern is Pasha from Knitty, the yellow at the neck I made as white because that’s what CP penguins look like. This is knitted from left over sock yarn on sock needles and it stands just under 6″ tall. It was a quick knit and much appreciated and that’s all you can ask for really. One wing is slightly higher than the other but we’ll not talk about that.

Fatal Attraction trailer I’m still knitting Tsock 5. I suspect that it’s knitting itself when I’m not looking because I’m well up on the second sock now. The first one needs the bootstrap finishing, the second bootstrap making and some embroidery which is of course why there’s more progress on the second sock than the first. Give me a choice between knitting and finishing and I’ll take knitting all of the time. I’ve tried them on, the foot fits perfectly but I should probably have added some extra stitches in the calf because these are a bit longer than I usually make my socks. I did look at shortening them but by the time I’d taken out a pattern repeat they would have looked a bit stunted.

Bicentennial Man movie download

My Bloody Valentine psp

I feel that I ought to start getting a grip on the number of things I have on the needles but although I’m starting to feel a little bit guilty it’s not a high enough level of guilt to do anything about it. This week I started a scarf and ripped a mitten so overall things are no worse than they were before. My two targets for the month are to get the sweater out of the bag that it’s been living in since June, block the sleeve and assess whether it’s the right shape and to sort out all the projects lurking in various bags and, at the very least, get them listed on Ravelry. They seem like nice attainable targets, all about seeing what the current position is before I think about whether anything needs to change. This does of course give me licence to cast on with gay abandon all through the month before I start to address the state of the knitting bag in February.