Wool For Brains

It was one of the better bank holiday weekends, not only was it not raining it went so far as to be actually sunny. My usual rule is to stay home on bank holidays so as to avoid being kicked to death/unable to park/in a queue for everything but there had to be an exception made for this weekend. It was the weekend of the Canal Festival at Kiveton (the 2009 Inland Waterways Association Campaign Rally if you want to be picky) and as the husband is one of the Chesterfield Canal Trust trip boat skippers there was always destined to be a day out regardless of the weather.

On the Sunday Daniel helped serve drinks on the boat, found a nice lady who showed him how to paint the roses that decorate traditional canal ware and had a go at a spot of stone carving with the masons from Hardwick Hall. The mason would much rather he had gone for a design with straight lines but he was adamant he was doing his initials and would not be moved.

Aenigma rip

I did my bit on Monday by filling a corner next to the beer tent and demonstrating spinning. I was surprised to find that I could cover a table in handspun things just by walking around the house. As well as talking about rooing in primitive sheep over the day I wandered though what the Romans did for us, how to dye roving, the opening hours at Winghams, making a yarn fit for its purpose, the ethics of spinning possum, how to scour fleece, why alpacas don’t like the rain and finding uses for those itchy shetland jumpers we wore as children. If I had to summerize all that yakking it boiled down to “it’s not just wool”. My favorite moment of the day was provided by a very small boy who was feeling the different wools. This one is from a goat (cashmere darlink but let’s not confuse him yet), this one is from a sheep, and this one is really really soft, what might this be from? He was a bright lad, he’d spotted the farming link and confidently proclaimed it to be from a pig. I was hoping for rabbit but pig was more memorable.

Porky’s This is my festival wool, I didn’t get a lot spun at the festival itself, maybe half a bobbin, because I spent too much time on my feet talking and spindling. I suppose I should have been industriously hand carding fleece and then showing the lichens that I’d painstakingly gathered and the final naturally dyed yarn but that isn’t me at all. Instead I was spinning the little known purple sheep. This was a shop reject because the magenta didn’t exhaust and by the time I’d finished rinsing it the fibre wasn’t as open as I would have liked. It turns out that I am far too picky, it’s spinning up beautifully.

• America video

Next time – knitting because I have some at last.

You might be assuming that I’ve been quiet this week because I have nothing to show but that’s not the case at all. I have plenty of content, it’s computer time that I’ve been short on.

These will be Dan’s new socks, using up a ball of Opal that I’ve considered to be the most boring yarn in the drawer. That’s why I’ve kept passing it over, it’s just Opal, and I can always find something more interesting to knit. As I’ve been sorting through the stash I’ve picked out the oldest balls so that they can to be the first on the needles or the loom. This particular ball turned out to be more fun that I expected, it’s been a while since I knitted with self patterning yarn and it made a pleasant change. There have been no knots so far, if I come across one between now and the toe then I might love it less.

There are no prizes for guessing that this is yet another scarf, the main feature about this one is that it has a hemstitched edge and a twisted fringe rather than knots. I also ignored the instructions that came with the loom and lashed on the warp rather than tying it to the front bar. This is so much faster and reduces loom waste to next to nothing so this is the way to go in future. This is a mixture of handspun silk and handspun yak/silk. It failed to meet expectations (not enough contrast in the colours and I think I prefer wool) so this is all the blog will be seeing of it.

America movie This is the swatch from the yarn from the great big batt I showed last time. It knits nicely to 4 stitches to the inch and I have 990 yards of it. I am ignoring the little voice that is trying to tell me that it wants to be the start of an adult surprise jacket, if there ever was a time to have a big heap of wool on your lap (and I’m not certain that there is ever a right time for that) then it’s not at the start of the summer. At the moment I’m still pondering what it wants to be but it’s very nice to knit with and I’m pleased with how it’s come out.

This is where my time has gone over the last two weeks, I’ve been helping paint a wall, or two walls to be precise. My son’s school has been working over the last few months with a community artist who we shall call Sue seeing as that is her name. She’s taken each class to the country park that runs near the back of the school and they’ve done collages, prints and drawings of the landscape around them. This has all come together in a two wall landscape mural that brings together elements from the children’s artwork. The weather recently has been poor, it’s rained just about every day and this is the last week of school so the paint needed to go on quickly. Some of the parents helped, we painted the walls white, Sue sketched the outline on the wall and then we helped fill in the blocks of colour.

• Black Narcissus rip
  • Boa vs. Python video

  Fright Night buy

Go movie

My main contribution to this (other than my amazing wall whitening skills) was painting the river. I did have a bit part on duck’s eyes but as I did most of that after I’d taken the photo you’ll just have to take my word for that. (Click for bigger pictures) Driven to Kill the movie When I took these photos the mural was about three hours away from being finished, the ducks were still mostly featureless and there was a lot of outlining to do. In time there will be a proper photo with massed children but of course you’ll not be seeing that here.

Mail Order Bride video

Porky’s dvd

• Unknown movies

I think I put about eight hours into this, it was totally worth it for the moment when a boy rounded the corner and exclaimed “That’s my tree! Wicked”. I’m told there are half a dozen owners of the yellow tree but he thought that it was his and that’s what mattered.

I’m having such a good time, I’m having a ball

Well I was until the sixth bobbin after which I’d had about enough of the monster batt. I did know how big it was when I started but I didn’t stop to consider how big a spinning project it would turn out to be. I do have one more bobbin that I could have used but it has some rather nice silk on it and I didn’t want to wind that off to free it up. As you can see the bobbins aren’t close to full, I usually make thin and twisty yarn and my wheel is set up to not pull in overmuch, my brake band is thin cotton and that’s ideal for what I usually make. For this I could have done with finding something thicker for the brake band and if I’d sorted myself out at the start then I might not have run out of bobbins yet. I’m so close to the end now (I do keep telling myself that but I’m not sure that I believe me) that it hardly seems worth the effort of finding a suitable bit of string.

It was not such a bad thing having to make balls to empty the bobbins because it meant that I came up with a solution that I can use again in future. I wanted something to put in the middle of the ball so that it would spin freely on the lazy kate for plying. Toilet roll middles are too big, straws are too small. Driven to Kill divx I was considering setting off for the local DIY place to check out plastic piping when I looked on the dining table and saw that I had the solution all along. It would appear that sewing thread reels are just the right size and they don’t need to be empty either.

There’s a small voice telling me that if I start plying now it will free up the bobbins that I need to finish the spinning and I can always finish the rest of the spinning later. I am ignoring it because I know that if I stop now then I’ll not want to start again. I think that I may have proved that is possible to have too much exposure to your favorite colour. Hopefully I’ll finish this up over the weekend and then next week I can start the plying, estimate the yardage and decide what this will be. It is likely that I will be so sick of the sight of it by then that it will need to spend some time in storage until the time when these are my favourite colours again.

This should not be confused with a sock knitting emergency which is a different beast altogether. That’s the one where you make the second sock inches longer than the other or work the gusset without turning the heel. This was the other sort of emergency, the one where you go on holiday for three nights with only the socks you are wearing and the pair on the needles. When I unpacked I had a blinding flash of memory, I could see myself piling up the clothes next to the case, my tops, Dan’s tops, my trousers, Dan’s trousers, my undies, Dan’s undies. He keeps his socks and underwear together so I brought back his socks and then continued with my nightie, his pjs. My socks simply missed their place in the packing order. I suppose I could have bought some but I haven’t worn a pair of shop socks in years and I have no intention of starting. I could have blagged a pair from the more prepared husband (he had three pairs of socks for three nights away) but instead I buckled down and finished the pair that I had on the needles.

I was prepared for finishing them while I was away, I’d taken another ball of sock yarn but I never got to that because I’d also packed the wheel. If you have a folding wheel it seems silly not to fold it from time to time, the boys were planning to go fishing on Sunday so I knew that I would have a spot of free time over the weekend. I packed the niddy noddy, oil can, three bobbins, the ball winder (just in case three bobbins wasn’t enough), two orifice hooks (in case I lost one) and a 590g batt of merino silk that I got for Christmas. See, I can pack sensibly when I think about it. You can get an idea of the size of the batt from seeing it lounging around on the sofa. It’s mostly blue and purple but there’s odd spots of red and lime green, navy and hunter green too.

The dog is usually the one lounging around, he is given to dozing in the sun like a cat. At home he comes back from his morning walk and has a two hour snooze and then after his afternoon walk it’s back to the basket for another little nap. This weekend he was a different dog, transformed from Sofadog into Pebble the Mighty Hunter. This was the view from the living room window, you can see the little head at the bottom. He couldn’t sleep at all during the day because there was always something out there, dancing about just outside the window and if it wasn’t there now then it might be there in a minute. The squirrels were a particular burden because they sat on the table and baited him. The spots on the window say “there is open water close to your villa” which accounted for the procession of ducks and moorhens that would trigger another volley of excited barks. I tried taking him on really long walks but that just made him tired and excited, he would not sleep while there was the chance of something walking past the window. I’m not sure that he found the weekend very relaxing at all but we did.

It was finished a bit earlier in the week but I’ve lost many hours this week to painting a wall and then recovering from the mad arm waving. This is the Zetor scarf except that I think it is big enough to qualify as a shawl. It came off the needles a shrunken wrinkled blob and then did the magic thing where it hits the water, suddenly expands and becomes something worth the effort. One day I’ll have a wrinkled mess that’s not redeemed by blocking and you’ll hear me crying from there.

I changed to garter stitch on the last rows of the edging, my excuse being that this would give a nice stable edge. I’d also had enough of the long purl rows. It came out a bit bigger than I expected at 72″ across with a 36″ drop. It was bigger than the space I’d made for it and one edge was blocked at 90 degrees to the body because it hung down over the side of the bed I was blocking it on. In part that accounts for the not-pointy points but of course the real reason, as ever, is that I didn’t cast off loosely enough. I don’t do loose knitting, it’s just who I am and that’s all there is to it. I have previously tried the suspended bind off (as recommended by Marjorie), but my final thought on that was “I won’t be doing THAT again”. It also didn’t get me the result I needed. This time I did what I always do, use a huge needle (as recommended by Clarabelle) and think loose thoughts. I got the same result that I always do, a cast off edge that’s not loose enough.

This is the second time that I’ve made this pattern, it makes for good tv knitting because it’s the same pattern all the time right up to the edging. The downside to it being all the same all of the time is that there’s nothing to look forward to, no counting down until a change in the pattern, just another long row very similar to the last long row. This saw me through most of series four of Dr Who with a bit of Torchwood for the edging but although there was still more to watch on the planner I’d had enough of the pattern.

The fleece came home with me from Woolfest last year, there is 44g of yarn left over which will no doubt find itself as a woven stripe at some point. The shading in the yarn comes from the black of the legs, I threw most of the leg away but carded some of it in with the silver grey just to add a bit of depth. I do like coloured fleece because it’s rarely a solid colour such as you get from dyeing and it gives the yarn a bit of interest.

For anyone who is counting, that leaves me with exactly one project on the needles, I’m a single sock away from having an empty knitting bag again.

I’ve been hoping that this post would have been “look what I finished” but I totally underestimated how long it would take to finish knitting this shawl. I’ve knitted for hours in the evening in the hope that the next day I’d be calling it done but the rows are long and despite all the time I’ve thrown at it I still haven’t reached the cast off. I did try a different edging, a traditional sideways knitted one, to avoid the issue I always have with the cast off. To get the lovely swooping points you need to cast off loosely and I never manage it, the knitted on edging would have avoided this but it didn’t do anything for me so in order to avoid thinking at all I returned to the pattern.

It’s not all been knitting, there’s been a lot of spinning too. I’ve been through the fibre bag and pulled out the odd bits of fluff that have been lingering about because they weren’t really big enough for anything. I have a use now for an odd 200 yards of yarn, it’s clearly destined for yet another scarf. I found an odd bit of superwash merino fibre, the 160 yards I got from it (top left) wasn’t anything like enough so my cunning plan was to spin a solid merino to go with it (bottom left). I spun this as a single and it was a lot better than the last one that I made which was pleasing in the extreme. After both yarns had dried and I sat to think about it I had to accept that I still didn’t have enough yardage for what I wanted to do so there had to be a major compromise in terms of length. Out went the scarf, in came the sample. After I warped the loom I was forced to admit that even with the shortened length there STILL wasn’t going to be enough of the yarn left for weft. Luckily the stash came to the rescue with a skein of superwash sock yarn that just happened to be the right colour.

Off the loom it measured 64″ long and fell into the “alright but not stunning” camp. The merino single was fine as warp, nothing frayed or broke and I’d certainly use it again. It’s really fast yarn to make and although I like plying I think I could live without it. If I’d left it here then it would have been just another scarf but that wasn’t what I’d planned for it at all.

This was what I’d planned for it, after a hot wash the turquoise warp shrunk and the superwash didn’t. I love those ruffles, they are just so adorable, exactly what I wanted. If you want to end up with a scarf you need to start with a scarf and a third. This went into the washer 64″ long and came out 42″ long. As it stands I think this will ultimately become lined patch pockets on a large bag, the ends are too close together for this to have a life as a scarf. For a scarf I’d have probably had the superwash on the edges to get the ruffle on the edge but that’s a bit limiting if you want to use the fabric as yardage. As it is I have something with nice flat and boring edges which is what you want for sewing it down.

Live Animals on dvd

Next time, finished shawl, definitely.