Wool For Brains

The long battle with the sock yarn drawer is finally over, I can now shut it without the use of profanity or a yarn ram. All it took was the right tool, a ten dent heddle. This is the right size for weaving with sock yarn and I’ve been ripping through the sock yarn scraps. There were some full balls that met their end in weaving, skeins that had their chance and pooled horribly and the merino “sock yarn” that I bought before I knew better. I was never going to make socks from them so now they’ve moved along to make room for something else. I haven’t used up all of the scraps, not by a long way, but enough has gone now to make a visible difference in the drawer. That’s not surprising as there is a pound of yarn here, the equivalent of four and a half full skeins of yarn moved out of the drawer, and these aren’t the first sock yarn scarves that I’ve made.

The New York Ripper move

The stripes in the warp are an easy way of using up small bits of yarn, the blue on the left was something that I threw in a dye bath once, it wasn’t a full 50g and was good for nothing really. The weft is handspun merino

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Erin Brockovich film

, it was a very pretty yarn but it wasn’t right for socks. I did try it with a lace pattern at one time but that didn’t work well either. It was in the drawer for close to two years before I found something that it was right for. There’s still half of it left so sometime in the future I’ll make another one of these but not with these warp stripes because there’s now none of those yarns left.

The thin blue stripe on the left edge was all that remained from a ball of Kaffe Fasset Regia sock yarn. There was only about five yards left but that was enough to make something of it. The warp included a bit of handspun merino, a bit of Koigu and the majority is Cherry Tree Hill merino sock yarn from the days before they added nylon to it. The weft here is Fleece Artist merino something or other that I got in a swap. It pooled horribly, you can see the regular horizontal stripes that it’s making, the red and blue are very prominent. I’ve used about half of it so there is probably another similar scarf in the future. I don’t like this one so much, I tried to pick the warp colours based on what was in the weft yarn and that didn’t work as well as my other method of ignoring the weft and picking warp colours that looked good together. It’s another lesson learned.

• Armageddon move

This one is a different beast and a real yarn eater because it used sock yarn doubled in a five dent heddle. The original plan was to make fabric for cushion covers but that went awry when the huge ball of pink ran out some 2″ short of where I would have liked to finish warping. It probably should have occurred to me sooner that using doubled yarn meant that I was going to use more of it and it would have been a good idea to work out whether I had enough before I started. Instead of working out how much I needed what I actually did was to pick out the biggest ball of pink that I had and set off. Plan B is to use it for a bag or bags but that is some time in the future when I’ll probably find that I’m five inches short of the length that I need. I now have no pink scraps left in the drawer, I used all that I had in this. You can’t believe how good that feels. The way that you make the mountain ranges (usually called icicles but mine didn’t look at all like that) is really easy and I’ll probably do it again. If you want to make one at home it’s called “clasped weft” and the internet will show you how it’s done. You can do clasped warp as well and if I’d done that I would have managed to get cushion covers after all.

Someone asked me what I’m doing with all these scarves, the answer I gave her is that I’m sticking them all in a drawer and when I start to have problems closing it I’ll think about what to do with them. I’m still a long way away from that. This one isn’t in the drawer at all, it’s waiting for me to get the scissors and make it into something, I keep putting it off in case I get it wrong and wreck my precious fabric. Hopefully the next time we see this it will have been transformed, either that or we shall not speak of it again.

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No Reservations release

I thought you might like to join us on our morning walk today, it was bright and sunny without being too warm. There has been no rain for weeks so all the muddy places are now dusty. Even the places in the road that are always boggy are dry enough to walk on so if you wanted to wear your flip flops that’s ok. We won’t be out long, an hour at the most, because after half an hour if the dog hasn’t seen signs of turning for home he starts sitting down and looking back. If the silly owner doesn’t get the message he soon escalates to lying down with his head on his paws (known as the “drag me, I dare you” pose).

We don’t trek across fields and hills, partly because I have a naturally indolent dog but also because long hair picks up burrs very well indeed. That doesn’t stop us getting out because we have a number of places within a short walk that are perfectly suited to short legged dogs and their owners. Today we are on well maintained paths, mostly gravelled. This used to be part of Westthorpe Colliery (some photos here

) so the planting is relatively recent but the trees have grown enough to make a pleasant setting for a walk. There are supposedly 38 species of birds that nest here and I can well believe it because every one of them was singing this morning.

The bluebells are just coming into flower, there are none in the new wood but plenty on the land adjacent to it and they border the road home. You may imagine me crawling about to get this shot but if you were there you’d see that the flowers are on a bank and naturally at eye level.

The silly dog knows that we are nearly home now, this is the stage of the walk where he leaps about and grabs hold of the lead. Once he’s killed it enough he will usually settle down and plod along for the last five minutes. Occasionally he will pretend to be too tired to walk another step and lie down then sprint ahead and fling himself down again. Sometimes he spots a squirrel up a tree and has to be dragged away. What with the squirrels, low flying blackbirds, chickens wandering in the road and cats sitting on fences there’s no wonder that it takes us an hour to do a forty minute walk.

• Hellraiser: Bloodline dvdrip

Yesterday this was a longer sock. I was on the second repeat of the lace pattern when I found myself measuring how few repeats I could manage to get away with before starting the heel and stopping the pattern entirely. It doesn’t bode well does it, even if I slog through the first sock there is still the second one to come. It was an easy decision to pull the needles out and rip it back to the ribbing.

It was a harder decision to make with Iris because I’d invested so much more time in it. It was the same scenario though, there was still a lot to slog through on the first half and then I had to do it all over again for the second half. I love the yarn, like the pattern and the beads are ok but I just don’t have the lifestyle to sit with a crochet hook and a bag of beads. I never get into the flow of the knitting, knit, knit, fish about for a bead, knit, mess with bead, knit. If there were a few beads every eight rows or so it would be worth the interruption but as every right side row is beaded I didn’t feel like there was enough actual knitting in it. There was always something better to knit, even if there had been no other knitting in the house then there I would have found something else to do.

Once Upon a Forest move It was lovely but it was never going to get any longer. I waited until Lent was over to do the deed so that there was never the thought that I’d ripped it in order to start something new and shiny. If you knit for fun and it stops being fun then it’s time to stop the knitting. I should have done this before Christmas and then I wouldn’t have felt guilty every time I saw it in the knitting bag. My top hint is if you have to rip beaded knitting then choose a sunny day, it makes it so much easier to pick up stray beads when they are sparkling in the sun.

Blade Runner rip

It’s been a lovely weekend, by the afternoon it was warm enough to sit outside in just a T shirt providing you were in the sun and out of the wind. It’s quite possible that my nose might be a little bit pink tomorrow because I sat out in the sun with my knitting and listened to the birds. The mornings have been much more seasonal, grey and cool and you really needed a sweater. Daniel has a new one and he’s very pleased with it because it is his favourite colour.

It is a little long in the sleeves for him, this week at least, and we have the cuffs rolled up by an inch. I’m certain that it’s not going to ride up at all in the wash so the sleeves will stay long until he grows longer arms. This does not matter because it’s his favourite colour (I may tell you this again because this is really very important when you are nine) and it fits well everywhere else. He’s very pleased with it and so am I.

You may be thinking that this is the reason that you haven’t been seeing much knitting recently and that I’ve whipped this out in secret in total breach of my Lenten resolutions. You would be wrong, the reason that there’s not been much knitting of late is that I’ve fallen down the weaving rabbit hole, I have three lengths of fabric to show when I get round to it and still not a deal on the needles.

Hello, Dolly! psp

I did knit this but not for Daniel and not recently. This was my favourite sweater when I was about 16, maybe a bit younger than that, so this is a 30 year old knit reborn. It had a lot of wear but apart from a little fading around the neck and cuffs you can’t tell. I can’t begin to tell you how pleased I am to see my favourite sweater again, I was nearly as pleased to see it as he was.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon buy Thanks mum, saver of old sweaters.

Adventures of Johnny Tao dvdrip

I don’t spin singles (unplied yarn) because I don’t like to knit with them. I like to see those regular bumps of plied yarn passing across my fingers and besides which plying goes a long way to make indifferent spinning look good. I have a long held belief that if I were to spin a singles yarn it would be overtwisted, unintentionally thick and thin and I wouldn’t like it overmuch. Earlier this year I made a scarf from Noro Kureyon sock yarn and that went a long way to confirm my prejudice against knitting with singles. The yarn was indeed overtwisted, thick and thin and (even worse) had a knot in it. As a knitter I hated it, as a spinner it made me think that I could do better because whatever other faults my yarn has at least it doesn’t have knots in.

I’ve seen several woven scarves that use Noro sock yarn as either the warp or the weft and it started me thinking that perhaps I wouldn’t object to singles for weaving in the same way that I dislike them for knitting. I thought that this combination of leftovers would work as a scarf, the brown is a full ball that I bought for a colourwork project but ripped after it looked dire. Life is too short for knitting solid brown socks so it has lurked in the yarn drawer ever since. This would be the first time that I’ve spun something to weave with and I thought that I’d have a go at making a single.

I now find that there’s a lot to be said for making singles rather than plied yarn. To end up with a yarn of a certain thickness if you are going to ply it then you need to spin finer (so that it ends up the right thickness when doubled) and add more twist (because plying removes twist). These both take time. If it’s a single you’re making then its thicker to start with, needs less twist because you’re not plying it and when you’ve filled the bobbin you are done, there’s no second step.

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It looked good when it was under tension on the niddy noddy but once it was released I had a particularly scary moment when the skein transformed itself into a scrunchie. It was not looking promising and I didn’t really think that soaking the yarn was going to redeem it this time. It didn’t really matter though because I don’t think that unbalanced yarn affects weaving as it does knitting. Provided I could wrestle it onto the shuttle I thought I’d be ok.

I was amazed to find that once it had been left to soak and hung to dry, no weights or other blocking aides, it hung reasonably straight. I never would have thought that the twisty mess that went into the water would emerge looking like yarn. Who knew? According to the books this has so little twist that it would knit without skewing the stitches but it was soft and fuzzy and not my idea of a knitting yarn. If it wasn’t a weaving yarn then it was a waste of time.

It turns out that although I can eyeball the single for a two ply or three ply sock yarn I can’t immediately see what a one ply should look like. It was too thin but I used it anyway. It wasn’t particularly even either, I’m putting that down to all my attention being on the amount of twist I was adding although it is possible that all my singles are equally as dire but get evened out in the plying. I can live with the rustic look this time around mostly because I have to.

Wedlock download The verdict – well no doubt I would have liked it more had it had more twist and been more even. I’d had enough of it by the time I used the first 50g which is why there’s so much fringe on this, I could have carried on weaving but I stopped when the shuttle was empty. I do like the effect though and I will probably use singles for weft again but try to make a better job of it. It shows that you can get a decent sized scarf (8″ by 56″ excluding the indecently long fringe) out of 50g of weft. I am a little confused as to where all the yellow has come from, there wasn’t that much in the socks that I knitted from the warp yarn and there didn’t look to be that much in the fibre that I started with. I was expecting it to be overall more brown and the results came as a surprise.

Lent was over, the brakes were off and then I could knit whatever I wanted. I didn’t know what would happen next. Would I fill every set of needles with all those projects that I’ve been stockpiling since Ash Wednesday? Would I continue down the two project path? By Tuesday morning I was down to one project, I’ve been so good at stopping new knitting that I can’t think what to knit next.

I finished my socks, these are the first pair that I’ve made with a round toe rather than the wedge toe that I’ve been knitting for years. I’m not entirely sold on the toe but we’ll see how they wear. They fit, I like them and they’ve created some red leftovers for a warp stripe. I gradually eliminated the pattern on the foot starting from one side, too fast as it happens because the overall effect is “chopped off” rather than “sloping”.

I originally thought that my first project would be a short sleeved top in the grey shetland that I spun recently. It did knit to the tension I wanted, bang on 21 stitches to 4″ with no cheating at all, but it wasn’t right. The yarn is really soft and cuddly and I couldn’t see it lasting the distance as a garment. There was the small matter of yardage too. I estimated that I’d have some serious yardage but that didn’t happen. I had 890 yards, just about enough for a short sleeved top. Probably just about enough, maybe. It wasn’t worth it to cast on and end up one sleeve short of a sweater so plan B was a lacey something, knit until you drop.

That wasn’t the first thing I cast on but the second. My first project after escaping from my Lenten doom was a fast knit for my son. When people ask “what can I make from my first handspun?” the answer, clearly, is a sock puppet. You can see the improvement in the skein (I used all but a few feet so this is all of the skein), big bobbles at the cuff and smoother yarn at the nose. This is Dan’s first handspun, he spun one of the plies, I made the other and plied it together.

Storm Watch film We had the traditional egg hunt on Sunday morning, this year we opted for coded clues in an attempt to stop Dan finding all the eggs in a fraction of the time it took us to write the clues. This worked well and we’ll be doing it again in future years. Next year we might even remember not to hide eggs withing reaching distance of a dog’s nose or at least to have them at the beginning of the hunt. There is no point hiding things and writing clues in code when you have a dog eager to show the world exactly where they are.

I promise not to moan on about how long these took except to say that I could have knitted knee highs for an octopus in the time it has taken me to finish these. The final straw was the series of knots and twisty yarn that appeared just after the heel of the second sock. I would have ripped them at that point if they had been for me but that was not an option. The result was that they ended up with the colours matching at the toe even though they didn’t start that way at the cuff. The recipient is pleased with them and that’s what matters most. Specs: 64 stitches, 2.75mm needles, Schoppel-Wolle Aquarell yarn and some sort of slip stitch pattern that I made up and disliked almost immediately. This is the second ball of this yarn that I’ve knitted, the first had a major fault in the pattern (a big white patch) and this had a section of about six yards where there had been some problem in production that resulted in hard twisty yarn and multiple knots. I’m now looking at the other two balls I have with less enthusiasm than I had before.

I did finally work out why it was that these have taken so long (apart from the fact that I really disliked the pattern). The odd minutes that I have during the day have not been spent knitting but instead I’ve been spinning small bits of fibre. There was not enough of the red/black/yellow on the left for a pair of socks but there’s plenty for the weft for a scarf. I’ve spun the yarn for the weft of the bottom scarf and a green yarn for some fabric that will be a bag if it comes out right. I’ve been spinning big bits of fibre too, the bobbins on the right come from a pile of black alpaca that I’ve carded with some brown wool and if I stick with it this will be a throw for the dog’s settee. My knitting time has been relegated to the end of the day by which point I am in no mood to knit something that is no fun.

What to knit next? It’s not such a big issue now with the end of Lent just around the corner, come Sunday I can cast on whatever I want. I am still spring cleaning the yarn drawer and it’s more than likely that whatever comes next is something that’s been in there for too long. That makes it something that I should knit rather than something that I love with a burning passion and now that I write that down it sounds like a recipe for another tedious project. I want a fun knit – anyone care to suggest something?

Glory Road video

Ooh, shiny. The general idea is that you are so taken looking at the beads that the bag’s major failings pass unnoticed. The first failing is that this is not a scarf. There’s not much that can go wrong with a scarf, you start at one end, go straight on until the other end and then finish. If I’d used different yarn in the warp it would have been all right, if I’d warped the yarn I used more evenly it would have been all right and the main thing, if I hadn’t wandered away and left it in the washer it would have been all right.

The clue is in the fringe. What happened was that I warped this with three left over sock yarns, two of which ran out by the time I got to the middle. The purple yarn was superwash, the others weren’t and the unplanned extreme finishing that it endured in the washer meant that the warp shrunk unevenly. You can aim for this on purpose and I would like to experiment with differential shrinkeage but then I’d design for it to happen and balance the different yarns across the width of the warp. The scarf curved like a banana, after applying brute force and a steam iron it was still two inches longer on one side than the other. As a scarf it was a failure, over shorter lengths I thought that the bend would be less noticeable.

The wonky scarf is now a perfectly acceptable bag for the spare heddles for the loom. It’s 18″ long and 7″ wide with a patch pocket to hold the reed and heddle hooks. I used every inch of the fabric and threw nothing away. The beads and pointy flap are just there to hide what would otherwise be a wonky edge, now it’s wonky by design. The selvedges weren’t really good enough to sew together but I managed, I didn’t really have much choice other than to manage.

I’ll show you the beads again to stop you wondering about why there are still no finished socks. It’s a mystery to me too, I keep knitting and knitting and they still aren’t done. It’s been a while since I made socks but I don’t remember that they took this much work.

Amusement the movie

I am sticking with it and only have two knitting projects on the go. Iris is hiding right at the bottom of the knitting bag and doesn’t count, it’s slowly inching across the scale from “no fun to knit” to “waste of good yarn” and at some point I’ll make the decision to rip it. When I finished Ophelia I immediately pulled out the interesting yarn that I’d made. I’d planned for this to be a scarf, knitted in three panels with the colours slowly changing along the length. After I’d had three attempts at finding suitable patterns for it I gave up, ripped it back for the last time and started a sock instead.

I will admit that the main reason for picking this particular yarn out of the drawer is that I want the leftovers to go with a bag of scrap yarn that needs a little red to lift it. It’s been in the drawer a long time, it was a dyeing reject because it was the wrong colours. Looking at it now I can’t remember what the right colours would have been, I just look at it and remember the feeling of failure. It’s knitting up without any nasty spiralling (no surprises there, I try very hard to not make swirly yarn) and although I know that this combination of colours isn’t what I wanted it’s not that bad. I still have the option of overdying the finished socks if I decide that they are too bright but I don’t think that I’ll bother.

Police Academy 3: Back in Training download The other socks are getting there, slowly. The first sock zipped along but the second is making for tedious knitting. This is mainly because the first one was such a quick knit. If I’d watched what I was doing then the movement on the pattern would have been more regular. Once I came to copy it on the second sock I discovered that the pattern didn’t step across every eight rows as I thought, sometimes it was eight, sometimes it was six. I suspect that this had a lot to do with what I was watching and drinking at the time. The pattern did end where I wanted it to so I got the result that I wanted but the manner in which I did it has made it harder to replicate on the second sock. It turns out that I can’t drink wine and watch tv and reliably decipher my knitting. This is why the last week has seen this pair advance by two inches in the same time that the red socks have knitted themselves to the heel. Twice.

If it were after Easter this would have been swatched and cast on immediately but as it is I have to look at it for a little longer. This is the Shetland that I started spinning a while ago, it’s all finished now and I rather like it. When I’ve cleared some socks out of the way this is up next providing that it behaves itself and knits to 21 stitches to 4″. If not it can go and sit in the naughty corner with the other yarn that has failed to live up to my expectations.

The Howling release In my last post I said that after turning out a scarf in a day I was suffering from weaving burn out. It turned out that it only took a day for me to recover enough to warp the loom with more sock yarn left overs. I like this one, I learned from the two blue scarves (one of which is now a bag, details another time) that I like plenty of contrast in warp stripes. I particularly like the way that the orange pops out and brings out the odd burnt orange stripe in the handspun yarn. This has been weaving itself because the husband has been adding the odd foot to it now and again. There’s no wonder that they finish up so quickly.