Wool For Brains

I’ve written four or five blog posts this week and binned them all. This is hopefully the post that will enable me to get out of the corner that I’ve backed myself into. The blog has been keeping a secret this past few weeks. I’ve hurt my hand and my elbow and although it’s minor stuff it’s pretty much knocked on the head any knitting (left hand) or spinning (right elbow). I suppose I could weave but I’ve been too busy moaning and feeling sorry for myself for that. I’ve recovered enough now to be able to lift the teapot so I’m on the mend but it’s not over yet. I’d like to continue pretending that there’s nothing wrong but there has to be a limit to how far I can stretch the little that I’ve done so it’s time to come clean. It’s either that, an unexplained long silence or a succession of cute dog photos.

I have been spinning a little, I can’t do much at a time because of the attention seeking elbow but I’ve been using what time I have to make progress on tidying out the stash. This is the remnants of some chestnut alpaca, I’d carded and spun about half of it and because it didn’t come out that well I put the rest away. I’ve now hand carded the rest and used it for long draw practise. It wasn’t as even as it could have been (that’s why I need the practise) and that’s the reason for the twinkle. The idea is that the eye is so drawn to the sparkle that it misses the lumps. If I’d had more patience on picking out the second cuts there would have been fewer lumps but prep is boring and spinning is fun. That’s not true of course, spinning is less fun when you’ve only half done the fibre preparation. There’s only about a hundred yards of this so its future is as a warp stripe.

This has the same camoflage twinkle although the yarn improved drastically after finishing and could have probably have stood on its own. I am pleased with this, again it’s a bit uneven because my woolen spinning is like that but I’m pleased that I spun it at all. The last time I tried spinning yak I hand carded it into little yak punis (tight rolags) and struggled. This time I dipped my hand in the bag and spun it as it came and all was well. It fluffed up nicely in the finishing which went a long way to disguising the uneven bits. It could have been softer but I was worried about those short hairs pilling out. I’ve struggled with really short and really long fibres but I think I might be on the way to having the short stuff cracked now. There’s 330 yards of this so there is enough to knit a scarf or something.

This means that the stash is at equilibrium with two bags spun up and two new bags added this week (dog included for scale). In my working life I often said that any fool could add numbers up, the skill was in choosing the right numbers to make sure you got the answer you wanted. Clearly the correct unit of measurement in this scenario is “bag” rather than “gram” because if we were using the traditional, boring and totally inappropriate weight measurement then I would have spun an amount equivalent to half of the small bag. In my defence I would say that it was cheap, I bought it out of the shop profits and when I’m miserable I have a tendency towards retail therapy. It did make me feel better and as I can dye now I can lift a pan there’s more enjoyment to come. (Coming to an Etsy shop near you soon – Falkland and Shetland)

According to the blog I haven’t been spinning much. This is not true at all, I’ve been turning out bobbin after bobbin but it’s all been loom fodder. For some reason I don’t take the time to admire the skein in the same way when it’s for weaving, I dry it and throw the skeins in a bag upstairs. I don’t take the braid and bobbin shots, I just make the yarn to weave with. This is the skein that I didn’t put away yet. I started with two 100g braids of bfl that were dusky pinks and pale blues and I plied the two together. This skein I left in the original colours, there’s another upstairs that I was overdyed in navy. I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to do with this but I’m sure in time its true purpose will be revealed (the most likely outcome is bags)

I have no photos of the slightly underweight braid of BFL that I dyed in hot orange, dark grey and red. I set off spinning it with the intention of making a three ply but part way into the bobbin I changed my mind and decided a two ply would be better for what I wanted. At that point it was too late to split the fibre exactly into two so I had a wild guess and as a result ended up with one bobbin being way bigger than the other. There was so much leftover that it would have been a big effort to ply it on itself so I didn’t try, I bought some orange merino (the colour is named “Henna” which wasn’t exactly what I would have expected for that name) to spin and ply with the leftovers. A rummage in the bag of handspun turned up an orange, grey and yellow skein of about the same thickness so then I had three yarns to make a striped warp.

As it turned out I only used two of the three yarns, the one plied with the henna was too bright and I left that for another day. I had a large amount of grey for weft and that toned down the scary yellow. I’ve hemstitched each end so as it stands this could be a scarf or the makings of another bag depending which I need first (it’s not been pressed yet, the creases are not a design feature).

I thought about making a strap in case the strip above wanted to be a bag and my plan was to make an inch and a half warp faced strap on the rigid heddle loom using the orange yarn and the grey. I made about four inches before I decided that fighting with sticky warp was not worth the effort. It was pretty but too much like work. I unpicked it and wove it plain weave using the not-yellow as weft simply because it was sitting there on the loom and I had to do something with it. It wasn’t the slightest bit sticky once the warp threads weren’t jammed on top of each other. I have no idea what I’m going to do with a four inch wide piece of fabric, it will probably be several very small bags. I can’t get over the way that the grey warp stripes appear and disappear depending on the weft colour so I’m glad that my first idea went so badly wrong.

There is still plenty of the three balls of interesting yarn left and about 300g of grey. I could make another length of fabric with what I have or I could extend what I have by adding some more yarn to the mix. I feel in an orange mood at the moment so I’ve dyed some more fibre and found some red yarn and there will be more variations on a red/orange/grey theme next week.

It should be no surprise that the socks of last resort are finished. The scratchy alpaca incident left me suddenly without anything nothing else to knit so the socks were promoted to top knitting project. These are 72 stitch husband socks in virginia creeper colours. The sock on the right is one of a pair I made for Daniel last May and the reason it is there is to illustrate my point that dye is not just for white yarn. I bought two balls of the yarn on the right, I didn’t like the colour that much but it was cheap (probably because no-one else liked the colour either). I bought it with the intention of overdyeing it except that Daniel picked it out for socks before I got to it. I much prefer the second pair, the same yarn overdyed in burgundy and brown (Landscapes dyes Bloodwood and Wallaby). Sometimes coloured yarn is cheaper than white yarn and although you have less flexibility in the colours you can dye it that doesn’t always matter.

This is the next pair of last resort socks. Daniel asked for a blue pair with purple zig zags and I thought that it would be easier to start and finish the zig zag if I had a purple cuff and heel. You will have noticed that there are no zig zags yet, the choice was intarsia lightening bolts or sewing them on afterwards with duplicate stitch and I took the easy option. It may turn out to be even easier than that, once he’d seen them he said that they were perfect just the way that they were and forgot about the zig zags. This decision may not last the length of the second sock (I’m just starting the heel) so I’m not out of the woods yet. The main yarn is that from the “Frenchman’s Creek” Tsock Flock kit, I had three attempts at making a sock that fitted before I gave up and stuck the kit in the sock yarn drawer. The purple is Opal, it started life as a doomed baby jacket, I made a pair of socks from it, it’s been a warp stripe in two scarves and there’s still a fair sized chunk left.

This is my other recent knitting, it needs blocking and buttons before the blog gets the finished photos. It sneaked in to my run of socks between me finishing one pair and starting the next. It’s the Peaks Island Hood and I am hoping that this will get me around my problems with hats. At the moment I’m not totally sold on it because I haven’t fully decided whether it’s right for me or not, hopefully once I have the buttons on and it in use I’ll be able to extol its virtues rather more fully. Don’t hold your breath, based on my track record it could take months for me to sew those three buttons on

It may well be that you didn’t learn about entropy at school, not everyone takes to science and there are perfectly valid career paths that don’t need physics as a base. If this is you, you missed out. The first time I heard the phrase “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum” it was a revelation. It perfectly explained why it is that tidy things mess themselves up whereas nothing ever spontaneously tidies itself. I can try and blame entropy for the state of my dining table (which is a complex system as it is also the model building bench, warping board, drawing station and general heap o’stuff) and use thermodynamics to explain why it’s a waste of effort tidying it all up. I am aware that the second law of thermodynamics does not apply to dining tables but I still use it now and again as an excuse because I do feel that tidying up is a pointless exercise. Like dusting, it is a job that doesn’t stay done for long enough to admire it.

I’ve determined by observation that the cause of heaps of mess is Stuff. I’m forever trying to manage Stuff, force it into good behaviour, pack it into drawers, organise it or throw it away. I don’t know whether there are equations that describe the accumulation of Stuff and how much of it you need before it looks a mess but if anyone is planning research into this area I would suggest that they start with the bedroom of a nine year old boy. The piles of Stuff that need the most effort are Beanos, it’s a weekly comic and he keeps every one. I am not going to shame myself with a photo of the pit of doom, instead this is a photo of the first pile of comics being sorted into order. I pile them up, they fall over. I stand them up and wedge them upright, they fall over. I put them in drawers so they can’t fall over, then they take themselves out and leave themselves all over the bedroom. Disorder rules. .

I now have a winning strategy. Each book is twenty comics bound into one item. I can now stack sixty comics without anything falling off and sliding around the floor and there are now only three things to put away rather than sixty. They stand up without misbehaving and the comics are in the right order so the multipart stories follow on. If you have misbehaving Spin Offs or a slithering collection of Interweave Knits this could be a solution for you too. I bought red card but if you buy cereal in big boxes you might manage to bind your magazines without buying anything at all.

I used crochet cotton to sew them together, a pointed kitchen knife to make the holes to sew through and an ordinary darning needle (one with a point rather than a blunt ended sewing up needle). If you can sew a sleeve into a sweater then sewing together a set of magazines is nothing at all. The tricky bit is if the production style changes and the staples don’t all fall in the same place because that limits where you can place the holes for sewing. You stack them up, mark for the holes (you can use a template if you don’t want to mark the covers), open them up one at a time, stab it through to the centre, stab the covers in the same place and sew it all together (Youtube and “coptic bookbinding” will show you what you need to know)

It almost made up for the scratchy alpaca derailing the whole knitting programme for last week.

Today I had hoped to be unveiling my new winter dog walking wardrobe which was going to be a hat, scarf and glove set but things did not go exactly as I planned. I needed a hat to replace last year’s dog walking hat because I gave it away in the Spring to someone who wanted it very badly. It suited her more than it suited me so it wasn’t a hard decision to make. There’s not a lot that can go wrong with a hat providing that it fits, this does fit  but it is not The One. It’s similar in style to one that is already living in the porch and going walkies so although this came out exactly as I intended it’s going straight into the give away box.

The reason that I’m not keeping the hat is that it was meant to form part of a set. The scarf and gloves would have carried it but on its own it’s just a plain hat. The scarf started well enough, it was a commerical sport weight alpaca that I overdyed from its original mustard yellow. This was going to be the Huckleberry Ascot and I was going to look stunning in it (as I always think I will be until I cast on and reality sets in). It was all going well right up to the minute when I’d cast off and was about to start picking up for the bobbles on the edge. I thought I’d better check that it was about the right length, wrapped it around my neck and, to my horror, discovered that it was prickly. It felt soft enough as I was knitting it but it failed the neck test immediately. I should have done this with the skein before I started but it never occurred to me that alpaca could be itchy. What started of as the key item in the winter accessory collection  ended up as a potential bag.

That rather cast a shadow over the gloves. This hasn’t put a foot wrong yet, it’s angora and lambswool and as far from itchy as you can get. It started out as a pale lemon laceweight that has been in the back of the drawer for a good four years. It’s now a six ply, about double knit weight, and will knit into a stunningly soft something. The only reason I was going to use this yarn is that it went so well with the hat and scarf, if I was just making the gloves alone I would have probably started with something else. It follows that as I am now in the position where I’m just making the gloves alone I probably won’t use this after all.  I started off with a lovely plan and because of the itchy alpaca it’s all gone pear shaped. The moral is of course to test your yarn for itchiness before you start knitting.

It wasn’t a week of total failure, some of my projects came out well enough but they were mostly the ones that aren’t knitted. More on those another time when I’m in a more positive frame of mind.