Wool For Brains

I remembered the advice that they gave you in school, always read to the end of the paper before making a decision. Admittedly that applied to choosing exam questions rather than making a knit/rip decision but looking ahead was still the right thing to do. The combination of colours that failed in the ear flap was the mid and dark grey and there was very little of that combination in the next chart. The next chart related to a 192  stitch round rather than a piddling little 41 stitch ear flap so the motifs were chunkier and would likely stand out better. After due consideration and a cup of tea I came to the decision that the ear flap was going to be the worst bit and everything would then get better. It helped that the bit I’d done felt soft and warm and there’s been a cold wind these last few days, a warm hat is welcome even when there’s not enough contrast in the greys.

Don’t you love it when you’re proved right? I like it now, I’ll even forgive it for the white being not exactly the same grist as the other yarns. I bought the pattern because of the bears although I hadn’t realised when I did that the bears are walking, in the first repeat there are two different bear patterns.  When I bought it I also managed to also overlook that my favourite stranded work features small repeating patterns so that I don’t have to read a chart or catch floats. I refuse to carry a colour all the way around just to knit the occasional bear’s nose, that’s going in later in duplicate stitch. (For anyone who thinks that this looks really even and that I must be a fantastically awesome knitter I should say that I am an average knitter in possession of a steam iron. This is sitting on the end of my ironing board having had a quick steam so that I can check that my tension in the round resembles my tension on the flat ear flap)

The pattern calls for five 25g balls of Shetland Spindrift which would come to £12.50 plus shipping. It’s not that I mind paying that much for a hat but spinners have other alternatives. World of Wool sell a pack of four different colours of shetland roving for £7 plus shipping which becomes even cheaper when you factor in that you get 400g of fibre for that £7. Spinning doesn’t take that much time so the choice between 400g for £7 and 125g for £12.50 wa’t exactly taxing. I made the white yarn first, it was a little too soft and a little too thick so that skein was a different beast to the others. I’m calling that one the sample but using it anyway. The light grey and darker grey were a mixture of the original grey (the middle skein) with white and black, hopefully they are repeatable colours because I weighed everything and wrote it down rather than relying on memory. I made 30g of each colour, I suspect that I’ll run out of the white because there was markedly less yardage in that ball but what I have will see me through the next chart.

At the moment it’s a hat for a person with only one ear, I really disliked knitting the earflap and couldn’t face a second one straight away. My excuse is that until I’d started into the hat I didn’t know whether I’d be knitting or ripping and there was no point in making two earflap swatches. The cast on row for the hat has some waste yarn where the second flap should be, that one will be knitted downwards rather than upwards. No-one will ever know unless I tell them. At the moment my main concern is that the icord edging isn’t going to control that wayward rolling edge, it’s been a pain because it made the first inch or so really difficult to knit – you can’t see the way that the pattern is developing because you can’t see the previous rows.

I caught the wonder dog in the act. He ran into that corner after his ball and then he found something small, wooden and tasty to play with.  It was so attractive that he went back to  it after he’d been a Good Dog and done DropIt and then he tried to run off with it so he could pretend that he couldn’t hear me say DropIt again.  That was the point where he found that the tasty wooden tension knob was fastened to a piece of string that was fastened to a lazy kate that was just too wide to go down the gap between the wheel and the toy box.

Usually when I say that something “just needs blocking”, what I really mean is “all the interesting knitting is done, it needs blocking, sewing up and the boring bits knitting on it and so I’ve buried it behind the settee in a carrier bag until I feel guilty enough to get on with it”. To avoid the carrier bag mummification phase I blocked the mittens straight away before I lost interest in them, they needed it to eliminate the line on the palm where the needle join was. You can see it on the right hand mitten, there wasn’t much of a line on the left mitten because that was the second one that I made. I can learn quickly when I put my mind to it.

These are my second pair of Anemoi mittens, made because my aunt lost one of the original pair that I made. My notes were patchy on the first pair, I know that the one I started with 2.5mm needles was too small but I don’t know whether I ended up on 2.75mm or 3mm. With these I got 9 stitches per inch with 2.75mm needles, it’s a lovely fabric but they wouldn’t have wanted to be any smaller. They fit, they’d still fit with an extra four stitches but they’d be too small with four stitches less. I didn’t do the tubular cast on, I couldn’t get the mitten on when I tried that last time around so this time I didn’t even try.

This has been more or less finished since Christmas Eve, that was when I stuffed it behind the settee to see whether it would block itself and sew itself together. I’ve made this pattern before in grey, this is the same yarn dyed brown so it was a no brainer to knit it again, same yarn, same needles. This time I eliminated the side seam because we all know how much I love sewing up and I changed the shaping on the sleeves to two decreases on alternate rows rather than one decrease every row. I dug it out last week, blocked it and delegated sewing up to my mother. It turns out that I’d knitted one of the button bands before succumbing to terminal boredom so there was less boring knitting to do than I’d expected. I didn’t knit buttonholes in the bands, when I knitted this pattern before my mother created two extra buttonholes with a needle and thread. As I don’t know what buttons she’s got stashed for this I decided that she could add buttonholes wherever she wanted them. The pattern calls for two rows of crochet around the neck and I wasn’t sold on the result the last time I did it. This time I picked up stitches around the neck and cast them off on the next row. It’s finished the edge without adding any width and there isn’t the bulk of a facing to deal with. It had the added benefit that I didn’t have to dredge through the bottom of the needle bag looking for a crochet hook.

When I block things while they are still on the needles it’s usually a sign that there’s something wrong. Blocking is the last chance for it to prove itself to be worthy of my knitting time. I’m not fully committed to this, partly because it involves purling with two colours, partly because there are more ends than I care to deal with but I could forgive it for both of those sins if it looked good. There’s not enough contrast,  the two dark greys vanish into each other and the brown could have been more black. The fabric feels lovely, the tension is right but the end result is less than stellar. I’m trying to decide whether it’s worth carrying on into the hat or whether I should call this earflap a swatch and be done with it. I’m still undecided, this might need a spell of confinement down the back of the settee while I make my mind up.

I’ve had my Ashford drum carder since May 2007. Recently it’s been not behaving as it should, sometimes the licker in (front drum) doesn’t turn because the drive band scoots along without turning the wheel on the side that turns the drum. My diagnosis was that the drive band had stretched which didn’t surprise me because I don’t take it off when I put the carder away. I know that I should but because I struggle to get the thing back on again I decided long ago that I’d leave it on all the time and just replace it when the time came. When I was using it last week I could hear that the teeth on the two drums were just catching at one point so it was time for some adjustment.

The Ashford web site has copies of the assembly instructions for all of their products which is useful for those of us that don’t keep hold of pieces of paper for more than two minutes together. While I was fiddling with the licker in to get it aligned properly, it struck me that maybe the reason the drive band wasn’t turning the front drum was that the front drum was not exactly spinning freely, probably as a result of the fluff I could see jammed around the axle. It was clear that what was needed here was a proper clean, the sort that starts with a screwdriver and moves on to partial disassembly. Happily the last part of the instructions show you how to do it and I can report that it is quite straightforward, especially when you get someone else to do it for you (I knit his socks, it’s a two way thing).

The part that I could never have managed myself was getting the handle off, I couldn’t remember how it went on and the instructions didn’t spell out that it was screwed on. Once we’d managed to get that off everything else was straightforward, it’s not the sort of disassembly where small parts fly off around the room. After taking out all five screws the side of the carder that has the handle on comes off and then you can prise off both drums and get to any fibre that’s accumulated there. This pile was off one side of the axle of the front drum, the other side was not quite as fluffy but still nothing to be proud of. Even with long tweezers it is really difficult to remove stray fibres that get wrapped around the axle, it’s much easier to do it when the drum is out of the way.

The carder instructions also show you where you should be oiling it. It’s clearly been a while since I oiled mine, the black line on the left is where the oil hole is jam packed with the lint slug on the right. I’m planning on making 2010 the year of frequent oiling, I suspect that if  I oil it twice it will be more frequent than it has been getting. In future we’ll be taking this apart more often than every two and a half years. Now that I’ve seen it done I’d have no fears about doing it myself, I was worried that I’d get the drums on back to front (they will only go on one way) and that when it came apart there would be a shower of washers that I’d never manage to get back. When it comes apart nothing moves, the drums hang there and have to be prised off with the handle.

When we got it back together (with no spare parts left over) it was better but the licker in still wasn’t turning properly. Then the split in the drive band became so big that the band broke, once it was rejoined with a sliver taken out the whole thing was perfect. My original diagnosis may have been right after all but there’s no disputing that it did need a proper clean.

I’ve learned a few things over the last two weeks. I found that I have anti lock brakes on my car, I’ve had the car for nine years without discovering this but it was a pleasant surprise to find them when I needed to brake to avoid an accident going downhill in the snow. I found that wearing socks over your boots is just as good for avoiding slips on ice and snow as it was forty years ago (although still not good enough to cope with the freezing rain that coated the floor as well as the side of the car). I now know that the thermometer on my car goes down at least as far as minus six and that it takes an hour to walk to school and back in four inches of snow. When shovelling snow my thoughts were of ear flaps and stranded knitting rather than of beaded straps and bag construction because this last two weeks has really brought home to me that wool is what you want to be wearing when it’s cold outside.

The ice has nearly all gone now thanks to raised temperatures and heavy rain but I’m still holding onto that thought that warmth is good. In general I don’t knit the same pattern twice although exceptions can be made for things that are intriguingly constructed such as the BSJ There are so many really good mitten patterns out there that I see no reason to repeat myself but as this is a replacement ?I thought that it should be the same pattern as the original. I finished the first pair of Anemoi mittens in March 2007 and they found their way into my aunt’s Christmas stocking later that year. She loved them, they were the warmest mittens she’d ever had and she wore them all of that winter.She was wearing them all of this winter too, right up to the moment when she lost one of them on a shopping trip before Christmas. She retraced her steps in an effort to find the missing mitt but it was gone for good.

The original yarn went into a woven scarf so I didn’t try to match the colour, grey goes with everything after all. I bought this yarn once upon a time for making a pair of stranded gloves. I messed the pattern up in the same place that I’d messed it up the first time I’d started knitting it, ripped the lot and stuck the yarn back in the drawer. Both the dark and the light are Araucania Ranco Multy and I thought that they had enough contrast to carry the pattern. You can see in the cuff that the light yarn has one length of darker grey, where this runs against a lighter grey in the darker yarn then the pattern vanishes. It’s infrequent enough that I can live with it, the end result will be as warm as the original and my aunt will be pleased to have a new pair of mittens.

This is my next project, the cold snap has reawakened my love of knitting to the extent that I’m queuing up warm woolly accessories. I’m pleased with this one so far, although having said that, until I cast on there’s not that much that can go wrong.

From time to time I look at the site analytics for the blog and this time I was shocked to see that the top search that is bringing people here is “lap inkle loom”. How do they know? Is my home bugged or something? What you don’t know, because I never told you, is that just before Christmas I bought another inkle loom, I wanted something that was small enough to go on my lap so I could use it sat watching tv at night. That is usually my prime knitting time except that I’m not doing that much of it right now and black penguins don’t come out at night anyway. My existing inkle loom was too long front to back to successfully go on my knee and I can’t think what else I could be doing to keep my hands busy in front of the tv. As it turned out one top evening activity for the future could well be stringing beads onto thread.

This is the Ashford Inklette, it manages as a lap loom if you sit it on a cushion but if you were serious about it then you’d screw it to a wider base because it’s not exactly stable. That would make it less portable though and I imagine that would be why most people would buy it anyway, it’s only 3.5″ by 14″ so it’s a dinky little thing to carry around but I can make a 59″ braid from it. This has a flap for adjusting the tension rather than a sliding peg and I’m sure that I will stop hating it in time. When I’m moving the completed braid around the pegs the end warps have a nasty habit of sliding off the edge of the flap and getting wedged between it and the body of the loom. They can slide off the pegs as well because they are straight rather than having a bump on the end so I have been grumbling my way along the learning curve.

I’m a long way off using it while watching tv. I can knit without really looking at my work but my woven edges need constant vigilance if they are not to wander all over the place. The piece on the top was me watching what I was doing, the piece on the bottom (sadly it is part of the same braid) was me watching Doctor Who. Wool is a pig to unpick, I did try to unweave this section once John Barrowman had put his clothes back on but the weft was so caught up on the warp that it would have needed scissors.

I’m sure that I’ll be making another beaded braid at some point because when I mentioned that I had a thousand gold beads left from Iris, well I was wrong and it’s five thousand less the few hundred that I’ve used already. When I come to make another I will have forgotten what I learned this time unless I write it down so to save reinventing the wheel this is my how to on beaded edges. The tutorial is here, I used crochet cotton for the bead warps but in future I’d use the warp yarn if it was thin enough to pass through the beads. I wound two lengths of cotton roughly twice the length I was going to need (cotton is cheap and I didn’t want the worry of running out) and threaded beads on to each until I got bored with it. I wound the cotton onto card bobbins and weighted each with a handy Goodgrips peg (”Oxo Goodgrips magnetic all purpose clips” if you want to go looking). These are useful for no end of things, they have a rubber edge so will happily hang from a piece of yarn. They have a magnet on the back and a hanging hole, they are sold in the kitchen section but I use them whenever I want a spare hand for holding a piece of yarn. They have just enough weight to tension the cotton. I also use them for pinning the end of the yarn to the base of the loom when I’m warping it, it’s a continuous warp so when you are done you tie the two ends of the yarn together. If you are me and you knotted the start to the woodwork the chances are that you will be unable to unknot it when done.

The two cotton warps are treated just the same as the others, if the first wool warp went up then the cotton on the outside of it goes down. This meant making another heddle for one side that would open enough for the beads to pass through it. I started off with a floating warp thread where you pass the weft around it the way that it should go but I had to think what I was doing with that. Once the supplementary warp threads passed through heddles (or not) the same as the others there was no thinking involved because they all go up or down together.

When the beads ran out I unwound the cotton from the bobbin and threaded on some more until I was bored with it. Threading beads is much less interesting than weaving so my boredom threshold was pretty low, I had to rethread four times in all. I used about five per inch on each side so my braid used approximately 570 beads. I love the final effect but there’s nothing difficult about it at all which is why I suspect that I’ll be making more of these until the gold beads are all used up. I did hope that the colours would even out along the length but that didn’t happen, it stayed resolutely red on one side only. That’s what you get for using a self striping yarn rather than forcing it to stripe by changing colours.

The beaded band is going to be a bag strap, the other one is not uniform enough for that and I’ll need to get inventive to find a use for it. I suspect that scissors may be involved. This will be another bag strap because it is going to be straight. This is the one where I finally admit that a positive mental attitude is not enough to generate a straight band and I’ve started using a high tech weaving aid. It might look like a recycled Christmas card with lines on but this is what is going to keep me on the straight and narrow even when faced with interesting tv. I also got lucky with the striping on this one, it’s all one yarn but I managed to get it to begin and end with grey. I’m pleased with it already, let us hope that it continues for the next 50″.

I did suggest posing the as yet unnamed penguin in the snow but this was totally unacceptable to the junior penguin owner who offered to hold him in front of the window instead. It came out well in the end, I set off with no idea about how I was going to do the head but when I got to it I made it as simple as it could be and that was good enough. There was quite a bit of the skein of black Cascade 220 left, the white was yet another skein of the miserable woollen practise yarn last used for the brain hat. The orange was the leftovers of the white yarn dyed, I was snowed in ten miles from my dyes so I used a combination of procion dye in yellow, Supercook red food dye and some vinegar. The colour didn’t fall off when I fulled it which proves that it was a winning combination.

The feet were originally much wider and were just plain wrong looking, once one segment at each side was folded under the shape was about right. This is based on the shell pattern from the ends of the Peaks Island hooded scarf, I’d imagined it being more pointy but once felted it didn’t want to block out that much. The feet and beak were sewn on by my mother while I was frantically knitting flippers before the school run in a desperate attempt to avoid having to explain why the penguin wasn’t finished. I’d frittered my time away shovelling snow and packing away Christmas decorations when I should have been knitting. Mummies shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver.

I went for a three button fastening, the side flaps are a continuation of the fronts and will be useful if we ever need to take the hot water bottle out. That’s probably overkill and I could have just sewed the shoulders down. I had some concerns that the head wouldn’t go over the neck of the bottle because the opening is mrch wider than the base but that worked out well too. I made the beak separately and sewed it on after felting and did the same with the flippers. The beak looks fine, the flippers look exactly as if they’ve been made separately and stuck on afterwards. The flippers are the one thing that I’d change if I were to make another because they are rather lame.

For the last phase of shrinking I sewed the tabs down with the hot water bottle inside and put the lot in the washer. To get it dry I filled it with hot water and kept turning it on a towel. I’ve mentioned before that if I put something on the floor then I can find a dog sitting on it the next time I turn around, this was no exception.

We’re having a bit of a cold snap at the moment. It snowed all day yesterday and as the temperatures are predicted to stay below freezing all day all week I can rely on it being white to the weekend even if it doesn’t snow again. The negatives are fairly obvious, yesterday I spent two hours walking to school and back which I wouldn’t have minded so much if there had been more than an hour between me getting home and setting out again. At least today school was closed so we didn’t have to make the effort to get there and maybe we’ll get through some of the films that we recorded over Christmas.

On the plus side, the light is good and there’s plenty of it. I can knit in black right up to about half past three when it starts to get dark, snow or no snow. This is handy because my new knitting is black. I know what you’re thinking (doesn’t she know better by now, what is she thinking of) but I have an excuse, it was supposed to be red. I know that penguins are usually black and white but when you live with children of a certain age then they come in a multitude of other colours too. When I offered to knit a penguin hot water bottle cover I was confident that it would be his favourite Club Penguin colours, red and white. I even had the cherry red Cascade 220 in my hand when I was struck speechless to find that he wanted a traditional black and white production. It was a good thing that I was speechless because the alternative would have been colourful profanity.

I originally intended to make Mr Popper’s penguin from the current issue of Knitty except that I hadn’t read the pattern. When I came to look at it (after I’d bought the yarn) I decided that it wasn’t fulled as much as I’d like so I started from scratch. I made my swatch and mistreated it in the sink until I ended up with the fabric I wanted then came up with the relevant numbers for stitches and rows and drafted out the white bib. The knitting will look more elongated than the sketch because as I knit I’m adding one extra row for every three drawn on paper (I’d like to say “for every three charted” but I think it’s clear that “charted” is overstating it a bit). I could have started with a figure of eight cast on like an enormous toe up sock and knitted it in the round but because I dislike purling on the wrong side of a tube I elected for flat knitting with a seam. I don’t like seaming either but I only have to do that once, unlike purling back which goes on forever. I’m good until I get to the shoulders, at which point I have to work out what to do about the head. By then I will be committed so I’ll have to knuckle down and sort out a beak of some sort because there will be no other choice.

I’ve just looked at the weather forecast for the week, I really think we ought to buy a shovel.

The fridge is cleared of Christmas leftovers now so let’s start on the camera card. On New Year’s Eve I decided to see off the last of the cashmere. I’ve been spinning it on and off since July, five minutes here. ten minutes there, and after all that time I’d reached the point where I wanted it to be finished. I finished the last little bit of fluff in the morning and plied it in the afternoon. In the end, after all that time I ended up with just under 350 yards which I was totally disappointed with. I’d been expecting much more because it had looked to be fine enough but what I hadn’t taken into account was that there was only 36g in total. I don’t think that I ever weighed the bag of cashmere, if I had then I’d probably have bought a bit more to eke it out.

This is a caterpillar that slipped onto the needles just before Christmas. He’s legless at the moment because I packed the yarn away during the great festive clear up and I haven’t worked up the courage to start unpacking the bags of yarn. The purple is an odd bit of Falkland from the big bag I had, it is lovely and soft and I was pleased with it. I was pleased with the orange too, that was a random assortment of similar coloured fibre from the bit box. The idea was that I started with a provisional cast on and worked the head, then Daniel knitted down the neck until it was long enough or he ran out of yarn. The reality was that he knitted one stripe and I made the rest. The bit he did was very good, his tension has much improved.

I finished off the inkle braid and then another and this is the next. They don’t have much impact on the yarn stash but this one should make a dent in that thousand gold beads that I have.  I’m still playing with variegated yarn, the grey is a solid but the other is a yellow/grey/orange handspun with a long colour run. As it happens I’ve ended up with something that just looks unbalanced but there’s some hope that the colours change along the length of the braid. Even if they don’t it will still make a strap for a bag made from this fabric and I will have learned something about floating selvedges.

The dog had only one present in his stocking but it was exactly what he wanted. He showed no interest in other people’s presents because there was nothing to compare to his squeaky burger. He did have a bit of trouble getting to his usual snoozing spot under the tree given that someone had stuffed the space with gifts but he did the best that he could.