Wool For Brains

At some point I will need to buy yarn to weave with. That day is still a long way off because I am working my way through bags of leftover knitting yarn with no end in sight. This used two bags of yarn bits, the leftovers from my blue V necked cardigan and the dyed leftovers from Agatha. I was not very far into warping when I realised that the big bag of blue leftovers wasn’t going to be big enough and I had to dip into the other bag for the green and gold stripes. I’d dyed the grey yarn left over from knitting Agatha but never started the project I’d planned for it, there were small balls of gold and green and three larger balls in blue and purples.

I used all of the cardi leftovers in the warp and all of the gold and green. The weft ate up all of the blue (right), all of the dark purple (with added nasty arty yarn) but I’d only just started the dusky purple (left) when I ran out of warp. There’s no point wishing that I’d made the warp longer because I used all the yarn that there was, the odd ball of purple will have to go into a bag with some other leftovers and emerge another day as a warp stripe. You can see the difference in the close up between the shiny blue faced leicester warp running vertically and the matt merino weft, you can also see the colour changes in the blues. It would have been easier to have a single colour weft, it would certainly give me less hassle when it comes to cutting it up and making things, but my leftovers tend to come in small amounts, not enough for all of the weft. I see this as bags with zips (note to self – buy a zip) with a rectangular base and top and a small wrist strap at one side. This is in part because small wrist straps need less yardage, I have looked for alternative handles for bags but not found anything that I really like.

This is also part of the great stash clearout of 2009. The warp is made mostly from the odd bits of fibre that have been lurking in bags. The yellows come from a project I made the yarn for but never started (I imagine that I will be saying that again and again as I work my way through the bags of yarn). I did, shock horror, buy the yarn for the weft. The reason is that this is a quarter of a throw for the back of the settee that the dog is allowed on and my leftovers don’t come in big enough quantities to make the weft for one wide scarf never mind four. I may have changed my mind about the most ugly yarn I have ever made, the odd combination of green and brown looks just fine when woven. It’s the stripe in the middle between the two yellows and it doesn’t look foul at all now.

This just goes to show that it doesn’t matter how deeply asleep the dog is, if you put a piece of fabric on the floor he will plonk himself down on it in the time it takes to find the camera. There is a large amount of knitting there but you can see that there was a lot still to do to close the gap in the middle. The eagle eyed will see that there is no needle in this which tells you what happened next to Maplewing. I could have stuck it in a bag for a year and then ripped it but if I’m going to do it then it might as well be sooner rather than later, that way I get my hands on the yarn that much earlier.

Nightstalker psp If I want to see summer colour then the best way is to dye it, it has been raining all week and grey seems to be the colour of the moment. The oranges are odd bits of fibre that are moving their way through the stash, these are the very last of the odd white bits that have been hiding in bags. They both came out of the same pan, the one in the middle was white, the one on the far left was oatmeal I do like the colour from orange dye on oatmeal fibre, I might spin that on its own but the bright orange is definitely for blending. The viscose on the far right is also for the drum carder, my monitor shows the colour I wanted, the reality has less blue and is more yellow than green. No doubt the colours would be better if there was some actual sunshine instead of grey skies and rain.

Maplewing has spent some time in the naughty corner for failure to achieve a smooth transition from one chart to the next. I’m over it now and progressing at four decreases every other row but it looks more or less the same as when it was here last. Its spell in time out left me with no knitting so the result is a new sock. I dyed this ages ago and I didn’t like the colours so it has been living in the back of the sock drawer ever since. It is no surprise to find that the colours haven’t changed at all, I still don’t like them, but once I’ve knitted it I can always overdye it in navy.

The batts from the fibre shown in my last post came out somewhat lighter than the colour of a tropical lagoon and although they are shiny and twinkly they are indeed plain.

The Book of Swords release

• The Sicilian rip

One day I will learn that a little contrast is a good thing and when carding more is even better. They are going to go back through the carder with something else, certainly a purple something else but I’m not so sure about the orange. I am not sure that I trust the colour wheel that far. Fortunately I only used half of the fibre in making these three batts so if I mess it up I can make more and pretend that it never happened.

My target for Maplewing of four rows a day is self imposed, there’s no deadline coming up by when it must be finished. The only reason that I’ve been whipping myself to knit it is that I know if I don’t complete the boring bit quickly it will drag on for months. After the first 20 rows it seemed to move a lot faster, whether it really did or whether it was just my perception I’ll never know. I told myself that it was because I was knitting faster and then I made sure that I didn’t check the clock to see if that was the case. I think it helped that I was prepared to abandon it mid row, I always stopped at the same point in the pattern (there’s a single purl every 39 stitches) so it was easy to pick up and set off again. I’m not there yet, there are three more rows until the decreases, but it’s been less of a slog than I was anticipating.

In Good Company video Although I could have another week with the drum carder (this is the last week of term) I’ve decided to call it a day for now. I’ll bash the stash again in September when the schools go back. I made four sets of batts last week and I’ve spun three. The brown ones used up a fair bit of mohair and various odd bits of wool, there was a green and brown one too which didn’t deserve a photograph. It was not one of my better creations and the resulting yarn may yet see a brown dye bath before becoming a warp. It might surprise me once it’s dry and earn a reprive but it is currently in the running for the most ugly yarn I’ve ever made.

Shine a Light on dvd The two shiny sets of batts were much more successful. I had two 50g pieces of pink corriedale, the magenta and violet tencel from the last post, some green and purple trilobal nylon and various lengths of purple wool. I ended up with two sets of shiny batts, one pinkish and one purplish. The pinkish one is hanging about waiting for its turn on the wheel or an appearance in the shop, the purple one is now on the loom. The warp is handspun bfl that I was spinning at the canal festival, it’s made long stripes and by some fluke they are perfectly spaced across the width of the warp. I wanted some texture in the weft, I like the effect of weaving lumpy yarn whereas I’m not too taken with it in knitting. I like the twinkly, sparkly yarn although I think I’d like it better if it were more shiny so there will be even more tencel/viscose/bamboo going into the next batts that I make.

Class of 1984 the movie

The Invisible Circus movie full

This week’s dyeing – trilobal nylon on the left, bamboo on the right. For anything other than wool I’m still at the newbie dyer stage of being blissfully happy that the colour doesn’t fall off when I rinse it so I’m pleased with both of these. Now that I see the two together I have a suspicion that I’m traveling down the road of “so subtle I needn’t have bothered” again and that I’ll end up here putting a lot of work into something that makes plain blue yarn. If it’s twinkly and shiny is it still “plain blue”?

Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium dvdrip I’m still working through the stash, I’ve been dyeing some odd lengths of roving with the intention of carding, spinning and weaving it. I found that I can dye cellulose so the white shiny stuff I added to the stash the week before is becoming coloured shiny stuff. Towards the end of the week I ventured into two colour shiny (tencel in this case). This means that I can now make shiny batts but as yet I haven’t got as far as making shiny yarn because the wheel was busy making sensible boring yarn. None of the yarn was quite right for the Maplewing shawl that I wanted it to be. In the end I realised that what was wrong was me, I didn’t want to sit and spin a thousand yards of laceweight yarn when I could be playing with those shiny batts I’ve been making.

The solution was simple – buy the yarn. It isn’t quite as fine as I would have liked but it will do. It looks like string at the moment but when the spinning oil is washed out it fills in nicely. I would normally have used a bigger needle but I’m worried about ending up with something huge, Maplewing is worked with a reducing number of stitches so once you’ve cast on you are committed to the final size. I have cast on, I am committed, even though at the moment it looks like I am knitting a ribbon. The idea was a good one, cast on a zillion stitches and decrease them away. All the long rows are at the start when you are full of enthusiasm. By the time boredom sets in the rows are shorter and you can see the end. This is a brilliant idea except the reality is that the first 39 rows have no decreases. That’s 39 rows of 522 stitches with shaping on the purl row too and I’m not sure that enthusiasm will see me through the uphill start. I made the mistake of timing a row so I know that a knit row takes me 19 minutes which means there is a solid 13 hours of knitting before I hit the decreases. I am hoping to get there sometime in the middle of next week with a target of four rows a day.

The jade yarn that kicked off the U turn on the stash is now fabric (although it’s not wet finished yet as I’m planning on washing it with the next load of socks). I ran out of weft very early on because I’d never considered that I was weaving a width half as wide again as for scarves. If you’re weaving one and a half times the usual width then clearly you will need one and a half times the usual yardage to get to the end. I chose to look on this as an ideal stashbusting exercise rather than a disaster and I did use two balls of leftovers. The bags are on hold at the moment, I like making the fabric and then seeing them take shape but I’m not keen on weaving the inkle braid for the straps. I have to warp and weave three times, once for each bag, and I’m not finding it fun. I need to have a trip to a haberdashery department in search of braid or cord that would make acceptable handles, until I’ve done that the fabric will just have to pile up.

The Las Vegas Abductions divx

On a brighter note, these are the most recent pair of socks. They are the same yarn as the last pair of small boy socks so I’m hoping that I will remember that the red tops and heels are the big pair. They are the standard husband-sock, 72 stitches with a gusset heel. There will be another pair of socks cast on immediately because there is a limit to how many 522 stitch rows I can tolerate in a day (|I suspect that it may well be less than four)

Clerks. movie download

Superman II: Director’s cut move

I don’t know whether to spin this or buy it a box frame. Isn’t it a pretty thing? This is not root ginger but line flax from Sweden. As well as the thing of beauty I have a bag of bits too so I have the opportunity to spin those before I have to decide whether to destroy the other. This is an allowable stash addition as it needs no preparation, I don’t already have any and anyway I swapped for it rather than buying it and that should count for something. If you are a Scrabble player I give you the work strick. You can have the verbs ret and scutch also just in case they ever come in handy. There will no doubt be more flaxen words when I come to spin this rather than to stash it but first to be spun are the things that need to leave the stash and I’ll be at that for a while longer (although probably for not as long as I’ll be knitting Maplewing)

• Newcastle download

A quick FO to start. I did set out for it to be small so as to not swamp the very small teacher I was thinking of giving it to but it came out the perfect size for a neck draping accessory thingy so with a quick change of plan she’ll get a bottle of wine and I’ll be keeping the shawlette. As it’s now raining there’s no chance of replacing the photo with one that doesn’t have me sniffing for a bad smell. This is Aquila,

Newcastle movie

it’s a free pattern and I may well knit it again another time because the pattern was so easily established that it made for good tv knitting. I used 50g of the 96g that I started with which means that there’s exactly not enough to knit another the same.

download K-9 This is what I’ve been spending my time on, ten days ago this was 900g of fibre. This was fibre that doesn’t have a place in the new improved stash of the future. I have been saying for a while that I have too much fibre. It’s a bit of a shock then to find that I’ve had a total change of heart and I now love my stash just the way it is, or just the way it is going to be very soon. It’s true that I have too much of some things but on the other hand I have not enough of other fibres. I do now see why having a well balanced stash is important, especially if you are of the “want it now” mentality.

This is what brought about the U turn. This was going to be my last Woolfest consolation purchase, I bought it because it was cheap and I liked the colours. These are Zebisis batts in corriedale, bamboo, angelina and firestar (this translates to “wool and shiny stuff”). When they arrived I thought that they would make the feature yarn on a woven bag (no surprises there then) and I pulled out some odds and ends that would work with it. I had jade silk, some jade and purple bfl, turquoise alpaca, an odd bit of blue Wensleydale and some blue angelina. I made three yarns from the two sets of batts and then went on to ply the leftovers with some dark purple that was left on a bobbin.

It didn’t hit me straight away, only later, that I wouldn’t have been able to do this without a stash stocked with odd bits and pieces. If what you want to do is play with colour and texture then that is what you need in your stash, not bags of fleece waiting to be washed and carded. The resulting yarn lead to my second U turn. I have no bamboo, tencel or other form of mucked about with cellulose and this is because I don’t like knitting with it. It looks fantastic, I can imagine the yarn reclining on a chaise longue in a heavily beaded dress and a Marcel wave sipping a cocktail. Looking good isn’t everything though, I want to knit things that wear well and hold their shape and a pretty yarn is less important than a functional yarn. The languorous flapper is nice to look at but she’ll be no good at mucking out the cows. Weaving is a different beast to knitting, it doesn’t need a yarn with elasticity so the yarn can just lay there and look glamorous. Sheen is now in. This lead to definitely the last Woolfest consolation purchase, a bag from World of Wool full of shine and glitter and absolutely no wool. It is currently shiny and white and visually uninteresting but I’m working on that.

Push buy Darby O’Gill and the Little People move I now have a vision for the stash, I want a play stash full of variety and anything that fails to fit in with this is to be shown the door. The stuff I pulled out fell into three categories, raw fleece, odd blends and bad purchases. I’m still working on the fleece but I’ve spun all of the two carrier bags that were stuffed with black alpaca. I washed it, carded it, blended it with some sparkly stuff (trilobal nylon or Firestar depending on who you buy it from) and made a two ply twinkly yarn. I still have some suri alpaca (drying) and some Gotland fleece (already dry) to move along but there are limits to what I can achieve in a week.

This is 50/50 yak and merino that I bought to see what it was like. The 50/50 camel and merino I dyed and stuck in the shop, the 50/50 camel and silk is going there too. They are all very nice and one day I’ll get to spin them as a fine two ply but I have no immediate plans for them. The silk and angora will be dyed and shop bound just as soon as I find where I put it.

The last category is duff purchases. It’s not so much that they were bad purchases but they were cheap. I’ve bought the odd kilo of assorted fibre now and again and while most of it was excellent some of it came from itchy sheep. Bags are not generally worn next to skin so the itchy sheep wool will be fine for weaving. The blue in this was not as soft as it could have been but the final yarn is actually quite pleasant because all the pinks were much softer. The second blend saw off most of the remaining mohair, this was going to be for bags too but Daniel had a hand in the making of it and he wants it for a scarf. He maintains that it is not the least bit itchy and it will make a perfect scarf. You can see he helped, I went outside to hang out the washing and when I came back he’d been in the wool box and decided that what it needed most was purple. He was right as it happens.

I’m still sorting through what I have and deciding the best way to turn it into what I want but that is so much easier now that I have a plan. I need to be finished in the next two weeks when term ends and my carding assistant will have his own ideas on what we should be making.