Wool For Brains

I can’t quite bring my thoughts to bear on a blog post at the moment because my brain is fully occupied by weaving so I’ll show you some photos and come back another time with carefully thought out words. There are no photos of the weaving that is filling my mind because I’m still at the planning stage and my thinking is along the lines of “if there are 600m on a cone and I’m using a 10 dent heddle and a 15″ width then what warp length will I get in inches?” “No wait, I’m using two colours so it’s twice that” “Hold on a minute, I’m using it doubled so it is what I thought it was originally”. I then started down the path of “how much yardage will there be after I’ve dyed it?” and the only answer I have to that is to dye it and then measure it. I’m still trundling through the calculations though, I’ve made so many simple errors already that I’m sure there’s another one ready to bite me.

The number of times that I’ve knitted this pattern is two. It’s possible that I might yet knit it again because it is straightforward enough and it’s a fun knit. Adding the beads prevents the repetition in the leg from becoming boring. The heel is not fun, it’s knit back and forward and some of the beaded rows are purl rows but on the plus side the heel isn’t that big. Last time I moaned about the length of the boring white bit on the foot, this time I flew through it while watching the Olympics.

This is the Victorian Christmas Stocking and I used 104g of the main colour and less than 50g of the contrast. The white is undyed bfl sock yarn and the contrast is a superwash merino and nylon sock yarn that I dyed. I’m fairly confident that if I’d only had a single 100g ball of the white I could have made it to the toe by knitting the 3″ facing in the contrast colour. (Do your own maths on that one, I’m still doing warp calculations) I know there’s an odd stitch on the toe that is the wrong colour and I’m going to hunt it down and eliminate it with duplicate stitch, the heel veered away from the chart too but I caught it early enough to make it consistently wrong so I’m leaving that.

The number of times I will be knitting this again is zero (which is equal to the number of times I will be wearing it). This is the Helianthe hat and it was lovely to knit but it does nothing for me at all. I wasn’t sure that I had enough yardage, there was probably enough but it was cutting it a bit fine, so I started above the ribbing with a provisional cast on. After I’d worked the crown of the hat I recovered the cast on stitches and worked downwards. You wouldn’t notice if the ribbing was a couple of rows short (especially not in this photo because you can’t see it at all) but you would notice if I ran out of yarn before I’d finished the crown shaping. Although it doesn’t suit me it does deserve a better photo but this was as far as I got when the camera battery died. Luckily the calculator is solar powered so it’s unlikely to fail on me before I’ve satisfied myself that my warp calculations are right.

That’s all for now, I’m off to research shrinkeage and factor that into my never ending calculations.

I do sometimes have three hands when it comes to carding, child labour is very useful but the problem with it is that he does disappear off to school during daylight hours. When I have an assistant he turns the handle and I feed the fibre in and occasionally run the brush over the main drum. Using the brush means that you get more fibre on the drum and it encourages those fly away bits to go where they should. When I only have my own two hands then I use the brush less because I still have to feed the fibre in and turn the handle and I can’t do everything.

Those clever people at Ashford have eliminated the need for the third hand because if you buy a drum carder now they come with a packer brush fitted. For those of us with older models you can buy it as an accessory to retro fit. This comes in a small box that is identical to the one on top of the heap of stuff in my last post. It comes with a spanner to loosen the two bolts on the carder that are already there (the ones that alter the drum spacing), then the brackets slip under the bolts and the brush sits on the bracket. Even if you are hopeless with a spanner it still takes only a few minutes to fit.

Do you get the impression that I like it? The brush sits against the drum all of the time without me needing to hold it and the result is that my batts are bigger and they take less time to make. It is a big improvement over the wallpaper brush and I wish I’d had one sooner. What am I going to do with all those batts? Some I sell, some I swap and some I spin. The latter might come as a surprise because the blog certainly hasn’t been seeing much in the way of spinning recently but that doesn’t mean that it’s not been happening. I dye something or card it then spin it and never think of photographing it at any stage. I think the group shot is proof that I’m not quite over my orange period yet. I thought I’d moved on but after a brief diversion into blue and grey I slipped back to orange again. I think this also demonstrates that I will be needing to get a grip on the yarn stash during the course of the year.

It would appear that I have discovered the secrets of making finishing palatable. This is the totally finished Polar chullo, complete with the second ear flap, icord and tassels and with a total absence of ends. For me this is a major achievement and I promise to reveal my solution to tedious finishing after my thoughts on the hat. If I were knitting this again I’d start the ear flaps in the same way as a toe up sock and I’d knit them in the round with a simple pattern on the inside. This would mean that I could knot the ends together, tuck them inside the doubled flap and forget all about them. I suspect that I’d make them smaller too but I might change my views on that after I’ve worn it a while. Another time I’d take more care on the bears. The rows where I expected to have problems with the floats were the ones at the top of the bears but I took more care there and they are fine. The rows where the floats are puckering the work are on the legs of the bears. I should have had no problems at all there and I knew this so rattled through them without much thought. Maybe another time I’ll remember that lesson.

I will admit that I had anticipated that the icord would be dropping out of the icord mill. It’s just not suited to yarn this fine, the result looks as you would expect if you’d knitted sock yarn on a 5mm needle, loose floppy and unattractive so I had to knit it properly. The last time I made a chullo (predating the blog, the Cross Country chullo from Knitty) I followed the instructions and finished with applied icord. This time I knitted the icord and sewed it on because it made for more of a portable project (and also I’ve gone off applied icord recently). It did the trick and stopped the rolling on the ear flaps, there was still a bit of a roll on the front but that was persuaded to stop after a good steaming.

I’m sure you’re dying to know (humour me and pretend you are) – how did I make sewing in ends (a lot of ends) and knitting icord not be toe curlingly tedious?

Step one – arrange for any other knitting to be boring or even more tedious than sewing in ends. This is a sock that’s been in progress since September (boring) and the Christmas stocking has now reached the heel. This means working the pattern from the wrong side and beading from the wrong side and it is currently ticking all the boxes marked “tedious” and “no fun”. There’s a small element of excitement because the ball of beaded yarn is looking very small and there might be enough to finish the heel. Or not.

Step two – increase the need for the finished product by having two days with a forecast of snow. It’s forecast as “light snow” rather than “apocalyptic dump of epic proportions” for which I am heartily grateful. This was about the total of it this morning although the sky is turning that odd brown colour that means more is on the way. We have longer dog walks when it’s frosty because some of the more interesting paths are off limits until the mud freezes so when it’s cold we’re out for longer.

Step three – explore alternative finishing options. Would you have guessed from the second photo that this is what the backs of the flaps looked like? One has all the ends lovingly woven in one by one, the other has them braided along the edge on the wrong side. I didn’t much like doing the braiding either but it was certainly fast. It would have been easier if the item had been larger because I found that I needed something to tug against when I was making the braid. I don’t get much practise as I have short hair and a boy child. On the whole I think I prefer sewing the ends in but you have to try these things.

Step four – provide a distraction from the monotony. This should really be step one because it was the main reason for me finishing quickly but if I’d put the link in at step one you’d have wandered off and never returned. I’ve been listening to A History of The World in 100 Objects and it is an ideal accompaniment for tedious needlework. Each episode is under twenty minutes long, just long enough to sit down with a cup of tea for a nice relaxing session of sewing in ends. Hearing about King Den’s sandal label (carved on hippo ivory) got me through most of the icord at the top of the hat. If you don’t have a mound of boring knitting to trudge through you could download them to your phone or mp3 player and listen to them while walking the dog or sitting on the bus. You can listen to them wherever you are because although iplayer won’t let you watch BBC television from overseas you can still listen to BBC radio. This week is week four (the beginning of science and literature) but it’s not as if you’ve missed anything, you can still start at week one with the stone axe.

The next post will probably relate in some way to this little lot – the post man just called. The good side is that I don’t have to troop to the sorting office over and over again but I would have liked them to have been spaced out more because I don’t know what to open first. Anyone like to take a stab at guessing what’s in the big white thing or the small brown box? There’s no skill in guessing that the big black bag and the blue bag are fibre but the other two are more entertaining.

There’s a bit of work still to do on the hat: icord, tassels, a second ear flap, duplicate stitch noses and the elimination of that mane down the back (weaving ends in as I knit gives me a pain in the back of the hand with the tendon issues so I no longer weave as I go). I would no doubt be further along except the hat has spent two days in the naughty corner while I addressed the problem of the white yarn. I knew from the start that there probably wouldn’t be enough, it was the one that I made first and it was a bit thicker than it should have been with correspondingly less yardage. After the first round of polar bears the ball of white was looking very small. Before I could knit any further I had to decide whether to start another set of bears with the remaining yarn and then have to risk starting another ball of white part way through a bear or whether to leave the rest of the white for the ear flap and start the bears with a fresh ball. The deciding factor was that I didn’t have another ball of white so (after two days consideration) I went for broke and started the bears. It would have been quicker just to make the next ball of yarn, I could have had it spun and plied in an afternoon and dried overnight.

While the bears were in time out I found something else to occupy my knitting time. This is the start of the Victorian Christmas stocking, I’ve made it before and I always intended to make another. Dan gave me a box to “keep stuff in” and I went through all the various places that I keep beads and brought them all together. That was an interesting exercise, I have no idea what I ever intended some of them for but I certainly have enough to keep me going for a while. One set of mystery beads were prestrung so I’ve come close to casting on with them at some point although I can’t recall ever seeing them before. I could see they would work with some sock yarn that had come to the end of its time in the shop. (You might need to click for the big photo to see the beads) It’s a long winded way of tidying up the beads but it works. I’d like to say that I’m hiding another five inches of work off the bottom of the photo but that is all there is at the moment.

I’d already started knitting the second set of bears with the ever decreasing ball of yarn when I realised that the undyed sock yarn I was using on the stocking was about the same shade and thickness as the yarn that was living in the other bag with the hat. As it happened that small ball of yarn was enough for the bears and the three rounds with white in the next chart too. The remaining work on the hat is not exactly exciting but I still have some pressure to finish it seeing as it snowed again last night. When the choice is between knitting with beads or sewing in ends it’s hard to work up any enthusiasm for the needle with the eye so being cold keeps my mind on the need for the finished product. (Did that sound as if I was trying to talk myself into spending some time with the hat?)