Wool For Brains

When it comes to buying a piece of gammon to cook at Christmas there are three things on my mind. The first consideration is that I don’t like turkey overmuch, the second is that I have to be able to lift it and the third is that it has to fit in my big pan. This year the two constraints went out of the window, I’ve got a bigger pan and I don’t have to lift it because when I was at the hospital yesterday (ETA – routine visit) I promised solemnly not to attempt any heavy lifting. Cooking the turkey isn’t going to be a problem tomorrow because we’ve got a smallish turkey crown, handling the full gammon pan today is going to be a husband job. The pan on the left is an early Christmas present, my previous very large pan that I used for dyeing has sprung a leak and this will be its replacement once I’ve done with the gammon.

I do have knitting (in reality it’s more in focus and not quite that colour), these are the sleeves and as I’ve already done the back and fronts as one piece up to the divide this should be finished next week. The braid is a potential bag handle, I’m not sold on it as it’s narrower than I’d planned (except of course I didn’t plan, I just set off with it) and as a result there might need to be a plan B at some stage. I can’t give much thought to any of this as at the moment as all my thinking is directed to the one list that rules them all, the one that culminates in twelve items of food ending up on the table tomorrow, all cooked, all at the same time.

I was very surprised when Daniel came downstairs on Monday because he’d searched for the Christmas sweater that he’d rescued earlier in the year. I couldn’t believe that he’d even remembered that he’d got it, never mind that he’d taken the time to look for it. I still plan on turning it into Christmas stockings when he’s grown out of it, looking at it he might get another year out of it at most.

Just in case you’ve ever wondered what happens if you leave a wet skein of yarn hanging outside overnight at -5C I can report that it freezes hard enough to stand up by itself. The top of the skein was as floppy as you would expect because it had dried enough not to freeze, the bottom was another story. It was frozen stiff enough to stand up when I held it at the bottom. This is the yarn from the batts in this post, there’s 440 yards-ish, I have the yardage written down somewhere on a gift tag.

Merry Christmas to one and all, to those who keep different holidays then I hope you have a lovely weekend. I’m off now to calculate the cooking time on the gammon and start it off on its bath. See you on the other side.

This lead to the best line I’ve had in ages, one I will treasure for some time to come. “Mom, can you get your brain out of the bath please?” So that’s where I left it. This was a three man effort, I knitted the under hat, David made the icord (using the super duper icord mill that Santa will be bringing me next week) and my mother sewed the lot together. This is made from the uneven fluffy long draw practise yarn, there’s still some left but there’s less than there was. I wouldn’t have started this without an icord mill, this used something like fifteen yards of icord which would have been exceptionally tedious to knit on needles but took no time at all with the widget. I dyed it after it was all sewn up because I had no idea how much of the yarn it was going to eat and I would rather be left with white yarn than pink yarn.

The idea was simple enough, knit a hat and sew icord on it so that it looked like a brain. What it actually looked like was a frisbee, it needed extreme blocking over a basin to get it back into a hat shape (this was the point where it was lurking in the bath when my son wanted to get in it). Even after that it was floppy around the edges but that was easily cured by round elastic. It’s simple enough, the elasticity in the knitting goes out of the window when it’s sewn to the icord, unless you are fanatical about keeping the shape correct then it’s going to be distorted. In the end it came out looking enough like a brain and it fitted the zombie’s head so I’ll count it as a success.

I had a lovely surprise yesterday, it just goes to show that sometimes the stinky jobs have an unexpected benefit. Now and again the sock yarn drawer in the bed base won’t close properly, I have a quick fix for it which involves sticking my hand in the back and shuffling everything around. Yesterday I did the job right and took the drawer all the way out and off the runners and looked to see what was stopping the drawer from shutting. It wasn’t a mountain of yarn that was back there but it was enough to be exciting. I was really pleased to discover a bag of yarn that I’ve been looking for since I got my loom. I’ve looked in all the places I ever put yarn, I’ve been back through the blog to see if I’ve knitted it up and forgotten about it but I could not trace what had happened to that thousand yards of yarn. At some point it’s been pushed over the back of the drawer and it’s sat there ever since. Even better, back there in those plastic bags was a skein of black alpaca and bfl. I made this for a woven blanket but when I gathered all the skeins together I didn’t have enough and I made the blanket out of something else. I went back over my calculations several times because I had worked out that I would have enough with the ten skeins except that I ended up with only nine skeins. I know now where I went wrong with that one.

Why are hats like buses? You spend ages waiting to see one and then two come along together. First let me say that the colours weren’t my choice, the request was for an orange fish with yellow stripes and blue fins. The orange is merino, the leftovers of the “henna” I bought to ply with some multicoloured single and the yellow is the poorly spun white stuff that resulted from my woollen spinning practise. It did come in for something after all and I suspect that the hat will be lost before that yarn has had a chance to pill. The other bits are from the odd ball bag, the reddish brown is the very last of the Rowan Magpie that I fulled into my first knitting bag and the lips and tail are the leftovers from Rogue dyed blue. I like revisiting my past projects but on the other hand I’m glad that this is the very last of both those leftovers.

This is my fourth fish hat. This is a little smaller than the others because it’s going on a smaller head. This time I at last remembered to start the colours where the lips were deepest rather than at the beginning of a round then they end up under the belly of the fish where the jog is less visible. The one thing all the hats have had in common is that I made the first stripe 6″ from the start. This means that when I came to place the fins I didn’t need to measure again, the fins start where the stripe starts.

I was panicking this morning when the bright hat could not be found. I knew that I’d taken it to school yesterday afternoon and I was sort of sure that I’d brought it back with me when I found that the recipient was off sick. You would think that an orange and yellow hat would be easy to find even on a dark morning but it had vanished. I had visions of setting to and knitting another over the weekend, hoping that the recipient wouldn’t spot that it wasn’t quite the same as the one that he’d seen in progress. I stood outside school this afternoon and saw the missing hat come out on the right head. I can’t begin to tell you how relieved I was, I really didn’t want to start another fish hat right now. I had looked in the school bag this morning but for some reason I’d managed to overlook the screaming orange and yellow creation.

I didn’t cast on for a replacement this morning because I was trusting that it would magically turn up during the day. After a thorough search had come up blank I tried to distract myself from the missing hat mystery with a spot of dusting. In my defence, this place is usually hidden by two photographs so unless you pick them up you’d never see the dust. I think it’s obvious enough that no-one ever moves the photos and the last time I did would have been this time last year when I went around with the duster. I’m not sure that I could have written my name in it, maybe it would have fitted on the diagonal.

What could it be that would make me pick up the needles after eleven knitting-free days? You might think that it would be a new and stunning pattern or a drop dead gorgeous yarn and you’d be wrong on both counts. It was the result of a genuine knitting emergency and by that I don’t mean the usual seasonal lack-of-planning emergency (I don’t have those because I’ve realised that December follows November every year). My son came out of school in tears because he’d lost Fishie, he’d searched the cloakroom, his bag and complied a list of likely hat-nappers. I did a mental stock take and thought that I could whip up a look alike with what was in the house without waiting for anything to be dyed and dried.

This then is the stand in Fishie, he’s been waiting for his eyes for a week or so because I couldn’t put my hand on the felt. It’s the Dead or Alive hat from Knitty, as with all striped hats it is a fantastic way of using up odd bits of yarn leftovers. I messed with the shaping a little, it’s the same length as Fishie but narrows earlier. This wasn’t a design choice so much as a necessity caused by running out of yarn.

As it turned out I didn’t have to knit all night to replace the hat. I’d managed not to notice that I’d put the green yarn for the new hat down on top of the old hat. It wasn’t lost at all, it had never gone to school in the first place and beloved Fishie had been in a safe place all along. I made the hat anyway because it’s possible that Fishie might be lost before he’s tired of wearing it so now I have a spare.

I had the carder out this weekend, I fished around in the fibre bit box and now the lid fits on it. The blue is mostly merino with about 20% blue bamboo rayon, the orange brown has everything in it. There was no alpaca but there was camel, silk, kid mohair, merino, angelina and blue faced leicester. They were all odd bits leftover from other things but together there’s enough to make something. Overall I think it’s lacking a bit of contrast but I’ll probably spin it up anyway.

Totally unconnected – hands up all those who have seen one of the Liptons tea adverts. I was fascinated by this and because I live under a rock I’d never heard of sand art. One thing lead to another and then I was watching the winner of Ukraine’s Got Talent. The funny thing about that is that I’ve never watched Britain’s Got Talent – do we have artists too?

That last post worked so effectively as an icebreaker didn’t it? It was supposed to be the post that eased me back into the blog and well, it more sort of didn’t.  I’ve now found that the longer I’m away then the easier it is to stay away. Part of the reason for my absence is down to the time of year and some of it was due to the eleven day knitting stoppage which I just possibly might have neglected to mention in my last post. It was simple enough, my hand hurt so I didn’t want to knit. You don’t need to feel sorry for me, I’m knitting again although there is nothing to show today given that things are in their usual state of off the needles but not actually finished.

I have some finished spinning though. This is 628 yards of sparkly twinkly yarn. It used to look like this, I forgot all about carding it with something else to give it a bit more zing and just spun it as it was. This is a mixture of bfl, bamboo rayon, trilobal nylon and silk, they are all shiny but in different ways. I have absolutely no idea what I’ll do with it, I don’t even know whether there’s enough wool in it for it to have any sort of memory. It’s pretty though and sooner or later it will come in for something. It would have been headed to Etsy except that I have no idea of the percentages of each fibre, of course I wrote it down at the time but I’m not sure where. I’ve looked in all the usual places and come up blank so the composition will have to remain something of a mystery.

This is more functional than pretty. It’s gotland and I think it has a future as woven cushion covers. I thought it had a future as a scarf but it feels rather more hardwearing than scarf yarn should and I’d need to be very cold before I cuddled up in it. The first skein is 300 yards, there’s lots left still to card and spin so there should be enough, especially as I have another bag of less-nice gotland still in the wardrobe. I’ve also managed to see off the raw suri alpaca that I decided had no place in my new vision for the stash, I sold it to someone who might actually use it.

There is also some dyeing because I can now pick up a pan. Clearly I haven’t dyed all 1.4kg yet, that would be silly. If I go off on a green kick next week then I need to have something in reserve to dye green. At the moment I’m still on a phase of “black plus something”, I’m putting my fascination with grey down to it being dark by four o’clock every afternoon.

Next time (and I’ll try not to leave it so long this time) there will be some finished knitting, until then here is the current cute dog shot. This is his favourite place to hang out, this year I didn’t even manage to get the tree skirt down before he’d started moving his toys in.