Wool For Brains

I’ve had a long spell where although I’ve still been knitting it’s been on the back burner a bit. I didn’t start anything new because I couldn’t think what to knit despite having a drawer full of yarn and a well stocked Ravelry queue. I’ve been there often enough to know that it’s nothing to worry about, it passes in time and I return to having dreamed up a dozen new projects before I’ve finished washing the pots. The signs of recovery are there now, I made some yarn with a purpose in mind and I got as far as picking out a pattern for a simple scarf with interesting yarn when the recovery train was derailed by an eight year old.

It was Shrove Tuesday and my son and I were talking about why Pancake Day was always on a Tuesday and why people made pancakes just before Lent. This naturally lead onto a discussion of what one would give up for Lent if one did that sort of thing. Then he decided that he would make a sacrifice and give up gingerbread for Lent. That was a bit of a token effort really because if you can swap to Jammie Dodgers for supper then it’s not really hurting is it? I thought the honorable thing to do was to match it at the same token level so I offered to give up buying yarn for Lent. That sounds dramatic (it certainly got an “Oooh” when I recounted this to my knitting group) but the reality is that this would be no hardship at all, I couldn’t knit through the stash during Lent if I worked at it full time and if I had a need for a yarn that I don’t already have then I could spin it. He thought about it for a moment and said that he didn’t think that would do at all. This is where I made my big mistake. I thought it would be interesting to see how his mind was working so I asked what he thought I should give up for Lent. My advice is to not try this at home but to dash straight into the kitchen and fetch a can of pop and whatever unhealthy snacks are to hand and hope that this proves enough of a distraction to get you off the hook. He fished around a bit for the right words (his vocabulary not extending as far as “wip” and “startitis”) and then came out with the stunning comment that he thought that I should give up starting knitting something without finishing something else. I may have momentarily done an impression of a goldfish, I was certainly lost for words and rational thought too because I agreed.

In the Cut

• The Business ipod

I can tell you now that there is no better cure for not knowing what to knit than being told you can’t start anything. There I am, all set to go with the new yarn that I made and now I have to finish a sweater first. I’ve seen two other patterns that I Must Knit Now (if not sooner) and they’ll have to wait too. My get out of jail free card was handed to me on Wednesday night when more devout knitters told me that Sundays are feast days and don’t count. I shall now be having SSK (special Sunday knitting) until Easter with a matching Sunday gingerbread man for junior. I will certainly be making sure that whatever I cast on will stay the course because if it’s ripped on Monday then I’ve blown it for the week.

I know that I don’t get out much but life certainly isn’t dull.

Narc movie full It’s clear that although February isn’t over yet I have very little chance of meeting the knitting target that I set myself. I’d aimed to have one sleeve of Ophelia completed to the cuff and a side gusset made. With three days to go I’m still a good three inches shy of the cuff and the gusset is designed but not yet cast on. What I did manage to do was to take off the sleeve from the body, I need to add an inch at the body side before grafting the sleeve back on (needless to say, I haven’t done that either). I’ve been knitting this so long that I’ve lost the notes that I made on the adjustments I planned to make to the gusset. This wasn’t a great loss because my big measuring operation has shown me that I’ve ended up with a 38″ size even though I was aiming for the 44″ size. There is no mystery in this, my tension is off. I’ve blocked the body but I suspect that there has been some major relaxation over time. It’s not as catastrophic as it might seem, or at least I don’t think it is, it just means that I need that extra inch at the top of the sleeves (giving me 4″ extra around the bust) and a bit extra in the gusset. I’m confident that it will all be fine when it’s done. (If that isn’t a sentence that will come back and haunt me later then I don’t know what is)

This is my excuse for slacking on Ophelia and the reason why the gusset and remaining sleeve won’t be done this week. I have the last sleeve and the button bands to do but it’s obvious that this is where my knitting time has been spent this month. I don’t remember knitting that much of it, the back took no time at all and the fronts were just as quick. I don’t know whether it is because this was mostly tv knitting so I didn’t pay much attention to what I was doing but this does seem to have knitted itself.

Strangers with Candy trailer

I realise now that I always linked to the tsock story when starting the sock, because the last one started before we knew what it was I never did that. For those who would like to know why it looks like it does and why a monochrome colourway is never going to be an option the story is here.

Jesse Stone: Death in Paradise trailer

According to my original plan I should be all set now to start the Nine Tailors but although I’ve had the pattern out of the bag it’s not calling to me at the moment. Socks in general are “meh” just now, I’d go so far as to say that there’s little that is calling me to knit it. I have recognised that my knitting runs in cycles, I have a phase where I have great ideas left, right and centre, followed by huge startitis and then the associated guilt, a finishing spree and then being off knitting. It soon passes and the cycle starts again. It does mean that I am currently a two project knitter (Iris does not count as I am currently ignoring it and may even rip all that lovely beadwork soon). One of those projects hasn’t been out of the bag this week so progress on the remaining one has been good.

The last time the blog saw this project, a lace top for my mother, it looked like the photo on the left. The sleeve never got any longer than this before I ripped it. There was nothing wrong with it but when I came to pick it up again I found that the papers that I had assumed to be the pattern were in reality some sheet music for carols. I blame the disappearance on the big tidy up over Christmas, although I’ve been waiting patiently for the pattern to turn up it’s clear that if it was going to magically appear it would have done so by now. It wasn’t a hard decision to make, there was hardly anything there to rip and the loss of a pattern is fairly terminal.

This is the mark II sleeve, I confessed my pattern loss to my mother who promptly produced a second lace pattern that worked with the yarn I already had. My inner knitter has some doubts about the sizing but has been told to shut up and knit. I like this pattern better than the first one because it meets the requirements for tv knitting. It’s a four row pattern of which two rows are knit the knits and purl the purls and there are vast stretches with no shaping so I can just trundle along and knit. The first version was a sixteen row repeat with the pattern worked on the return row as well as on the public side. I don’t much like p2togtbl in such large quantities so the loss of the pattern has probably been for the best. Not only do I now have a sleeve, I have the best part of two fronts as well.

My Bloody Valentine the movie This is the other grey in my life. I think that this is about a third of the fleece that I bought at Woolfest last year. I’m guessing that I will end up with about 1000 -1200 yards of three ply yarn but it is just a guess until I’ve done some plying. My wild guess yardage calculation is based on me weighing just one of the 12 batts (30g) and as the single looks vaguely like it should for sock yarn that would give me roughly 300 yards of three ply from three batts, 1200 yards from the lot. It’s all a bit vague because some of the batts look to be bigger than others so I don’t really know how much fibre I have in total. The sensible thing to do would be to weigh it all but where would be the fun in that? It would eliminate the element of suspense and surprise and seeing as I’m planning on something lacey and top down it doesn’t matter overmuch what the yardage turns out to be providing that it’s more than “not enough”. I made a small sample and tried this as a two ply and a three ply, it has a few nepps (it had loads but my mother, the fibre prep queen, has picked most of them out) and they looked better in the three ply yarn. I like the colour too, yes  it’s grey but it’s a grey made of light grey and black so the three plies should have some colour variation without the yarn being striped.

The Third Wheel film

Strangers with Candy movies

It is half term this week so I may not be about much. I’m planning some educational activities with wool and there may be some junior dyeing sessions so perhaps next week there may be colour photos.

Sublime buy These are the completed Tsuspense socks, Tsock six in disguise. I have to admit that if I had known what they were going to look like before I’d started them then I wouldn’t have started them at all. They are a bit bright (you may have noticed that already) and there were rather a lot of ends to sew in. These were released in instalments throughout the year starting with the red heel and working both ways from there. Now that I’ve finished them I’ve found that I do actually like them, I was a bit worried about the fit because I would normally have worked the foot on a few less stitches but although they are not as snug as my others they do fit. I had thought that I’d worked the foot on a size smaller needle, I certainly intended to, but when I idly ran my new Knitpicks dpns through the needle sizer the other night it would appear that they are 2.75mm and not the 2.5mm it said on the packet.

For me the neatest thing about these is the heel and gusset. I thought the short row construction of the diamond shaped gusset was really clever and the extra stitches are eliminated as part of the pattern in the yellow section so there’s no gusset decreases as such.  I’ve never started a sock from the tip of the heel so that was a new experience too. I can say without fear of contradicting myself that I will never knit these again but I’m glad that I did it the once.

These were the last sock in the Tsock Flock Club for 2008. I haven’t rejoined for 2009, the movement in the exchange rate in the last twelve months has made the increase in the pound cost jump through the roof. Hopefully 2010 will look more reasonable. I was going to line all the Tsocks up and do the year in review except that it’s already been done so I shall show you my club soap instead and return you to your regularly scheduled knitting.

Plunkett & Macleane film

• Trainwreck: My Life as an Idiot on dvd
  
  The Caretaker buy

• Sydney aka Hard Eight psp

These have been finished for a while but I was so busy trotting out other finished objects that I forgot all about them.  These are the fourth sock from the 2008 Tsock Flock club, the Margarita sock. I messed up the lace cuff on the first (on the left) by misreading the directions and using the laceweight doubled. My original idea was to unpick it and reknit it properly, thereby giving myself enough yarn for the second cuff. That would have worked well except for the fact that I couldn’t find the graft to unpick it. That cuff was obviously meant to be so I went with option two which was to leave it alone and beg for more yarn for the second. The second cuff has the laceweight used singly, I had enough to use it doubled and make it match but I wanted to see what the difference was.

These socks were good for me, the lime slices are made with short rows so I finally overcame my dislike for purling back on dpns. I gritted my teeth and avoided having the placement of the slices match on each socks, it was hard but I managed it. The lace cuff mishap meant that there was quite a delay between the second sock and the first, not enough for me to forget how to make a lime slice but long enough for me to forget some other mission critical data.  I was merrily knitting away, adding slices here and there, and it wasn’t until I turned the heel that I needed to look at the pattern to see how the cactus was made. Oops. I’d forgotten that the cactus needs a gusset starting an inch and a bit before the heel. I overcame my dislike of mismatched socks too, faced with ripping a perfectly good sock I chose to sacrifice the cactus instead. As a result of making these I can now purl back on dpns without whining and also live with socks that don’t match.

Know Thy Enemy movie

Transformers movie download I haven’t worn them yet, what I want most from socks at the moment is coverage. I’m still looking at the snow that fell last Monday, it’s had a week of freeze-thaw and compaction so now it’s all ice. So far I’ve not fallen over whilst walking the dog but I’ve come close on a couple of occasions. I’m trying to pick routes that are on the flat and where the sun has cleared the pavements. Living on the top of a hill does not help this overmuch.

Youngblood video

Next time, yet another finished thing..

• Big Jake dvdrip

  Hot Shots! Part Deux download

It was all my fault. I should know by now that if I have an idea I should keep quiet about it because there is no possibility of delayed gratification with young children. We must do it NOW even if we don’t have everything we need. Thinking aloud is not allowed. My plan was for a bit of creativity at half term, which is a whole week and a bit away but instead of a period of planning it became a rush job on Friday night.

I thought it would be a neat idea to make Dan’s teacher a hat with her name in it so we did. It does look rather like “Miss A” rather than Miss D but the edge of the fibre came up all too soon. She’ll not be able to see the difference in the finished item anyway. This was the second 50g where I poured the dye directly onto the fibre beacause in the absence of any squirting tools (see “rush job” above) we settled on using a water pistol for the first 50g.  No photos of that, it was as bad as you’re imagining it to be. What we learned from this is that water pistols are totally useless for calligraphy – who knew? This is superwash bfl l that I’d previously dyed in colours that I liked. Once it had been written on with blue and green food dye (black would have been better but that would have meant buying it thereby adding a terrible delay to the whole process) the resulting fibre was absolutely the worst looking thing I’ve ever seen. It always looks better spun – this didn’t. It was still ghastly on the bobbin which is why I flung it on any old how.

I regretted this once it was plied because it did look a whole lot better then. I wouldn’t go as far as to say I liked it but it is a vast improvement on the fibre. It’s soft and squishy but not too soft and it knitted up beautifully. Believers dvd

I did use the scales yet again when I got near the end, I had a couple of feet left over on this one. This is top down (again, yes), increasing until it was a few inches bigger than my head circumference, knit a few inches straight, some decrease rows until it fitted and then an inch or so of rib. I finished with a rolled stockinette edge because I like that better than ending with rib on a hat. I still think the colours leave a lot to be desired but I like the idea of creating colours in the yarn by drawing on the fibre again. I have no end of ideas stacked up and ready to go but as we’re set for our second snow day this week I shall just have to wait. I can manage delayed gratification as I’m not eight.

This is another top down hat, squeezed out of 76 yards of chunky alpaca/bfl. I had just enough yarn left to thread a needle and sew in the end, I got it wrong the first time I cast off and ran out of yarn with 20 stitches left so I did have to have a bit of a do over to get it right. As you can see I did manage without a stripe, I weighed the yarn, knit a round, worked out how many rounds were left in the ball, tried it on and imagined it being that many rounds longer. There was just enough to make a hat without a turn over hem. It does make it easier to estimate if you are working top down because you’re past any shaping by the time you start worrying about being short of yarn (if you’re worrying about running out before you end the shaping, well it’s easy, you don’t have enough).

Trainwreck: My Life as an Idiot divx Life or Something Like It release Irresistible

Intervention psp

This came from the 40% alpaca batt, the one with the shiny tencel. Again this needed the scales before I was done because there was never going to be a deal left over. I couldn’t really see any point in doing much of a pattern, the yarn is so dark that it’s a waste of time unless you have white hair.  If you click the photo for the bigger version you can see that this would bend any stripes in the yarn, you can just see that the shiny bits in the yarn wave up and down. This is the Japanese Waves scarf, it’s a multiple of 11 stitches, cast on enough to go around your face, knit until you run out of yarn. It’s a really easy pattern but needless to say I messed it up, the central repeat of the five is five holes deep rather than the three it should be. I didn’t spot it until after it was blocked and the ends sewn in but at least with it being in the middle it could conceivably be a design feature. This is what you get for knitting while drinking wine and watching decent TV. I’d like to say that I’ve learned my lesson but this would be a big fat lie. It’s a rare occasion to have the three coincide (decent tv being the factor most often missing from the line up) and I do usually find any mistakes the next day. This was so simple – what could possibly go wrong?

I just need to find the address now, I said that I felt bad about picking up the fleece for a song so these are going back to the owner of the black alpaca. Hopefully they are suitably his and hers, one size fits all. There may be another hat for tomorrow, I think that this will be the last one for a while. I think I’m over hats now because I have a new obsession to get all intense about, for as long as it lasts anyway. That’s in tomorrow’s post too.

Once upon a time, last August to be precise, I wrote:
Hook movie full

Miller’s Crossing full

“In the end I didn’t block the sleeves on Ophelia ……, 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 are no prizes for working out that “later” has become “now” and now I am regretting that I didn’t do what needed to be done back in August. I blocked the sleeve and basted the seam and it is indeed ever so slightly too narrow just above the elbow. It was fine at the marker, the last swooping decrease is not in the same place as my flesh and blood arm decreases. If I left it as it is then I’d never wear it so it does need to be fixed. The reason that it was so difficult to work out whether it was right or not was because I couldn’t see where the start of the sleeve really was, it starts out as being part of the fronts and backs so it isn’t a matter of measuring along the sleeve seam to compare it with a sleeve you already own and like. That’s an excuse of course, I knew really that it was wrong, that’s why it has sat in a bag for six months while I avoided dealing with it.

Lean on Me on dvd

The sleeves are not all that’s wrong. I’ve tried it on and as well as poking at the sleeve I was also poking at the underarm.  If we’re not talking negative ease then we’re certainly in the realms of less ease than I like. It is supposed to be 44″ across at this point and it’s nowhere even close to that. Fortunately there is a relatively simple solution that will fix both the sleeve shaping and the lack of width at the same time. I need to add an inch right up there at the top of the sleeve, because this is constructed with side gussets that will add four inches to the chest measurement and at the same time move the shaping an inch down the arm, giving me a bit more room at the top. I have the choice of ripping back all that perfectly good sleeve or steeling myself and doing a cut and paste up there at the top. It’s a good job that I like grafting.

I set myself two targets for January, firstly to put all my projects on Ravely and then to assess whether the sweater sleeve was the right shape. As I expected,  coming clean with the number of things I had on the needles resulted in a number of them being ripped or finished so I’m happy that I’ve now got my startitis under control.  For February I’d like to get one sleeve of the sweater as far as the cuff and a side gusset made because I would like to get this finished now.