There’s been a lot finished this week and a bit of knitting started. Item one – one pair of socks. They need the toes grafting but that’s a tv watching job. I tend to put it off until I need the needles for something else and as I’m not feeling the need to knit socks at the minute they could be hanging around on the coffee table for some time. These are Opal with bamboo/tencel/viscose of some description, intended for summer socks for the husband-feet. It’s cold enough to still be wearing wool so that could also be the reason I don’t feel inclined to get on with finishing them. The colours weren’t particularly inspiring and the remnants will be hitting the dye bath before going into the bit bag.

I have photos of two baby jackets using the same yarn, very literally. The one on the left used the leftovers from my Nine Tailors socks together with odd balls from the sock yarn bit bag. I got nearly to the centre back before deciding that I didn’t really like it and ripping it back. I like version two much more, I took the light yarn out altogether, that will heading to a dye bath before going back in the bag. It’s all crammed onto a small circular needle so I can’t spread it out to show you that there are two matching sleeves, two backs and part of two fronts on the go. It’s another two piece jacket like this one but as the last one got boring before the end this time I’m knitting the smallest size. It’s not quite that simple, I’m using the lengths of the smallest size and the stitch count for two sizes bigger because my tension is 7 spi rather than the 6 the pattern calls for.

For the number three I’m trebling up with three bags, three scarves and three blog posts. The bags have been waiting to be sewn and lined for a while (two years in one case) and I had plenty of time this week to set up the ironing board and the sewing machine and get on with it. This time I even remembered to slip the plastic stopper onto the cords before adding the tassel. The two scarves at the bottom (eyes right) are the rainbow stash wool again, this time paired with some form of Noro as weft. It changed colour in a pleasing manner and pleased me more by changing from two big balls to one small one. The top scarf is some pink yarn whose crime was not changing colour as I thought it would paired with some grey polwarth/tencel handspun that happened to fall into my hand. The grey yarn was lovely, the pink will probably be overdyed before hitting the bit bag (can you see a recurring theme here?)

I seem to have got a lot done this week and that’s because I did get a lot done this week. It’s been the first week of the school holidays and also a week of actual holidays although we’ve all been sleeping at home. I hosted my own personal wool retreat while the rest of the household went off each day to a brass summer school. They left immediately after breakfast and didn’t come home until 9pm. This meant that I had no meals to get ready (mine doesn’t count because I’ve been eating salad+something or forageing in the freezer), which meant no grocery shopping, no need to put my stuff away and I had great big swathes of time to play with. I did wonder if I might get bored with playing with wool all day but to be honest a week wasn’t long enough.

This week has been special, I have had a couple of full days on my own with plenty of thinking time so it was a good time to turn a piece of weaving into a piano cover. I knew that I had yards and yards of black that I’d woven last summer to make into cushion covers so I already had what I needed to frame the piano keyboard I wove in May. Once I started I realised that the thick double weave keyboard was not going to sit nicely with the other fabric, one was dense and plushy and the other one wasn’t. Sadly I didn’t work this out until after the first long seam so there was an unplanned halt for a cup of tea and a yard and a half of unpicking. I was really impressed with the strength of that seam, it took me an age to unpick and it did not want to come apart.

The solution to the difference in the thickness of the fabric was simple – use the plain black doubled so it felt like the double weave section. I’m not entirely stupid and I did stop and consider the implications of this but after a quick measure I decided that there would be just enough of the black. I’m glad that I doubled it, it was the right thing to do and although it feels wasteful it’s no more wasteful than weaving two layers of fabric. Framing the keyboard was the easy part, the seams were long but straight. The next stage was to add the ends and make sure that it was the right size to slip on rather than be eased on with a shoehorn. At this point I drew out the shape of the end pieces, I worked out that I’d need a doubled piece of fabric 12″ by 10.5″. What I had to work with was a doubled piece of fabric 13″ by 10.75″. When I thought there would be “just enough” fabric I hadn’t reckoned on it being that close. That little strip on the right was all that there was left over. There was a bit of room for error, I could have always made the ends from single thickness fabric and backed them with something else but really I needed to get this right at the first attempt.

That meant it was time to switch the thread in the machine and practise with the lining fabric because I had a bolt of that, enough to cut as many end pieces as I needed. It took me three attempts to get the first end right, it would have helped if I’d written down what seam allowance I allowed for when I cut it. The second end of the lining and both ends of the wool were straightforward because by then I’d worked out the best way to attack it. The perimeter of the end section has to be the same as the long piece I was fitting it into but it was slightly complicated by there not being a right angle in it. Finally I gave up with attempting to get the grain perfectly straight and was satisfied with something that fitted.

Once both ends were on and it was fitting correctly the next stage was to cut a big hole in it so that it fitted around the music rest. The tablecloth that has been serving as a dust cover fits around the music stand so the new improved cover needed to do that too. I cut into the lining first because if I cut that in the wrong place I could simply make another. I was concerned that once the back was removed that section of keyboard might slump forward, I had a carefully thought out contingency plan involving a black thread around the base of the stand and a black button in the middle of the cover but it seems to be very well behaved. I declare the piano cover to be well and truly finished, the plain black fabric sat around a year but the keyboard made it from the loom to finished object in under two months. For me, that’s speedy.

The weather picked up and Thursday afternoon looked as if it was going to be sunny. I had a quick sample, decided that green was the way to go and dyed all of one of the cones of yellow. The more golden one went back into storage, the two greens didn’t play nicely together and I think the other cone might end up as red. I’ve played around with my weaving software to find something that will work with the threading I have now, I thought I wanted something simple but I didn’t like that once I’d done it. This is going to be a three panel blanket and will follow the teatowels onto the loom, I’m planning on a bit of light treadling tomorrow which should see the first one finished and then I can change to a pattern that only needs four treadles and one leg.

I’m still attempting to weave big holes in my stash. This week I opened a bag of clown coloured yarn. I bought it for something specific but the vendor didn’t mention that it was superwash and I hadn’t asked so I ended up with a bag of yarn that was totally unsuitable for the project I had planned for it. I had intended dyeing it but that’s not going to make it any less superwash so I never got as far as that step. There’s now less of it than there was because so far I’ve made four scarves with it.

The first one (on the left of the photo above) is the one I like the least, it uses the same yarn for warp and weft and it’s just too bright and jumpy for my liking. It’s thick, springy and superwash, it will make someone a lovely scarf but I don’t like it. There’s too much going on with those vertical and horizontal colour changes.

I like this one more, it’s got the bright yarn in the warp and a nice boring grey in the weft. The grey dulls the colours in the warp and it doesn’t have the colours jumping about horizontally.

This was what I bought the yarn for originally, I planned to have the colours line up in the warp and weave it warp faced with a fine black weft, full it and sew it into bags. That idea bombed when the yarn turned out to be superwash and incapable of fulling. I learned a lot with this. What I should have done is leave a marker thread on the warping board so that I could match up successive bouts. I didn’t realise that I wouldn’t be able to wind the whole lot at once so I didn’t see the need for a guide thread which meant that once I’d crammed on as much warp as I could, I was done. My cunning plan was to add a plain dark stripe in the middle and at each side to frame the piece and make it wide enough. This would have worked except the ball I pulled out of the leftover bag was only long enough to make a centre stripe. It looked big enough but I had forgotten that I had a double length warp for two scarves so the reasonably sized ball of brown needed to be twice as big. I made two passable children’s scarves, if I was making them for adults I’d want them to be either wider or longer.

I’m beginning to think that if I stick with it I might succeed in pruning the stash. I’m starting to be able to see where I’ve been although it didn’t help that the clown yarn was never in the stash boxes to begin with. I’ve found some really lovely yarn while I’ve been poking through the boxes, if I weed out those things I don’t love I should have more chance of finding and using the others.

It’s not you, it’s me. Now you’ve had your edges fixed there’s nothing wrong with you at all. You’re good looking in an elegant understated sort of way. It is true that I’d rather spend my time with something that’s a bit more lively, even (dare I say it?) “stripey” but that’s down to me being a shallow weaver with a short attention span. We’re going to have to be apart for a little while, please don’t listen to the whispers because whatever they say this has nothing at all to do with the more interesting yarn that I bought at Fibre East at the weekend. There’s nothing between us at all and it’s not true that I was sketching out jazzy striped tea towels as soon as I got home. I am true to you right to the end of this warp and I’m sure that I’ll be more in love with your plain elegant lines after a week apart.

Seriously, it is down to me. I’ve been nursing a dodgy knee for weeks and I’ve decided that it’s time to try giving it a rest with a complete absence of treadling (both loom and wheel) for a week. If it’s better after that then I might stretch to another week, if it’s the same then it’s clear that treadling isn’t part of the problem. This means that the teatowel will be hanging around for a bit longer. It has a wobbly thread on the left that needs fixing and a couple of loose threads that are making weaving a pain (not just in the knee) but once they are fixed it should be a relatively quick job to get the rest of the warp woven off. I have six inches to go before the pattern change for the next towel and I’m ready for it already.

There’s still plenty of weaving about, just without treadles and not in cotton. I’ve been pulling yarn out of the odd ball bag in an attempt to make it go away or at least fit into a smaller bag. The first scarf (on the left of the photo) used the leftovers from the last scarf together with a few odds and ends, the second one was all the leftovers from that with a few more odd balls thrown in. The grey weft really calms the whole thing down which was what I wanted because I’m aiming for plainish, unisex easy to wear items. The third piece was neither plainish nor unisex because I found the ball of sequinned yarn that I made back in 2007. I’m undecided whether that will be a scarf or three bags, I need to see what it looks like after a wash and whether those sequins are too itchy to be worn. It currently has the drape of a cardboard box but that’s because it’s not had its beauty bath yet. The bag that keeps on giving has less choice than it did but it’s still a long way from empty. At some point I’ll need to go looking for some more yarn to pull the random leftovers together but I’m still a couple of scarves away from that yet.

I’m planning the next project to go on the floor loom after the teatowels but the weather needs to co-operate as it involves dyeing which necessitates drying. It’s summer and getting dripping wool dry should be as simple as hanging it outside then bringing it in a couple of hours later but that’s not the sort of summer we’ve been having. As soon as the weather forecast promises a few days of warmth I’ll be dyeing, in the meantime I’ll be skeining in readiness. The yarn crept into the previous two photos, it was holding the scarves up off the slightly damp wooden table. Here it is revealed in all its glory. You may well be asking why I bought such unlovely yarn. Yellow yarn is usually cheap because no-one wants it, it’s often much cheaper than white yarn. If you look on this as 2kg of dyeable wool then the original colour doesn’t matter as long as it’s light enough to overdye. This could be red, brown or green without trying too hard. I bought these last summer, I was already paying for the postage by buying some other reasonably coloured yarn so I got 2kg of pure wool for peanuts. My current plan involves blue dye but I might try red and brown too, there will be samples before I start for real because it’s not as if I’m afraid that sampling will run me short in any way.

It turns out that there was a Scouting badge for cheering on the Olympic torch, who knew? It’s the same badge you get if you were a scout (or even Chief Scout) who was actually carrying a torch. Although it’s not my badge (I am resisting the call to uniform) I feel suitably rewarded for writing the absence letter to school, standing in the rain and trekking backwards and forwards four times across a village I’ve never been to before. There would have been less trekking if I’d realised that I was walking along three sides of a square to get to where I wanted to be but then I was unprepared and didn’t have a map (see, totally unfit for the uniform).

There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the fingertip towel, the sett was right, it was exactly the finished measurements given in the pattern (=tiny) and it seemed to be suitably absorbent. I liked the colours together, the lighter warp yarn (the one I’m still not confessing to buying) was lovely and the green was acceptable. As a sample it was fine but one fingertip towel was enough. It was just so small that I couldn’t see a use for it but my mother could and it is now the smallest table runner in the world. The remaining warp had more potential as a dummy warp than as another mini towel so that’s what it is now.

I decided to upscale the fingertip towel into something more functional by using bigger thread and adding a pattern repeat at each side. It was a good idea which I managed to mess up at the last stage through lack of planning. I resleyed from 30epi to 24 epi, tied the new warp onto the old warp, wound the new warp onto the back beam and then added the end pieces. My cunning plan was to weight these sections of warp and skip the beaming altogether mostly in order to see if I could. I have an idea for something that needs a supplemental warp and now seemed to be as good a time as any to see whether I could weight sections of warp and have them weave the same as the warp on the back beam. That seemed to work well enough, at least in the inch that I managed before I spotted my howling error.

I’ve always had a problem with mirror images, I can make sixty four quilt blocks and not have enough for an eight by eight layout because if it’s possible to make one the wrong way round I’ll do it and then go on to make the remaining blocks randomly in clockwise and anticlockwise formats. I can’t see that they are different in the same way that I’m never sure that I’m knitting one mitten for each hand. I made life difficult for myself in that I threaded the fingertip teatowel sitting at the back of the loom and sat at the front to thread the two edge sections. The result is that I very carefully and with much attention to detail threaded according to the directions I’d written out which were the reverse of what they should have been. Instead of having sets of three diamonds all the way across my edges finish with one diamond on the left and five on the right. I keep looking at it but there is no alternative other than to take it out and do it again. Ideally that would mean doing it again but not exactly the same as I did it last time.

I made a scarf that came out right, this is the shetland and silk yarn from last time paired with some handspun from the odd ball box that was the right colour. I warped it before I set off for a craft fair and was done (including twisting the fringe) with two hours to spare. This wasn’t the crisis it might have been because this time I was prepared and I’d taken a ball of sock yarn and some needles just in case I ran out of warp. This is 61″ long and 7 3/4″ wide, I like the way that the slubs of silk jump out of the fabric. I might make another one because I have more of the silk and more of the black shetland and I’m sure that there will be something suitable to pair with it in the bag that keeps on giving.

I knitted a headscarf this week, two balls of alpaca boucle in garter, knitted from both ends with lots of increases along the way and a three needle cast off in the middle. I did seriously consider doing a proper job and grafting the join but then recovered my senses. It’s boucle with enough texture to hide the join. The request was that it be long enough to tie so that the wearer’s hair didn’t get blown around when walking the dog. I made it wide enough to either wrap around the neck or fold back across the head with narrow ends so that it would tie easily. I’m not sure what the bits are sticking up at the back there but seeing as it’s already left the house I can’t investigate further.

I’ve been spinning too, this was a tidying up exercise rather than me looking for something that I really wanted to spin or spinning for a project. The two and a bit braids I started with have been hanging around far too long, their time had come. The yarn hasn’t been finished because I think I’ll dye it and I can’t see the point of wetting it and drying it to then wet it and dry it all over again. The weather continues to be wet and cool and getting things dry (shoes, me, laundry, the dog) has been an issue of late. I’d like it to brighten up now because it’s Fibre East this weekend and I’m hoping that next week will be the start of the 2012 fleece washing season. I’m planning for that, I’ve looked at the list of vendors and I’m working on a shopping list now.

I was expecting to have a nicely hemmed tiny teatowel today but that isn’t happening. When I anticipated that I would get it finished in a week I hadn’t allowed for two Olympic torch processions or foreseen two days lost to a streaming cold. The cold was particularly trying, it was impossible to get under the loom to tie up the treadles because whenever I looked down I thought my face would fall off. I was fit enough to face the world on Friday and to go and stand in the rain to see the torch pass by. Having negotiated for junior to have the day off school he was going even if I had to lay down under a hedge when I got there. It rained, then the sun came out just in time to dry everything off before the torchbearer appeared. I did not have to lay under the hedge but I was in bed before 9pm.

I couldn’t set the loom up to weave due to the likelihood of my face dropping off into the treadles so there was more time for knitting. This is a shop sample, it shows what you could make with the three colour Shetland blend that I’ve been carding. I started with just over 600 yards of yarn which is my default spinning for three ply sock yarn made into a two ply. There was enough left for another few rows but the edging was so mind numbingly boring that I couldn’t bring myself to knit another row. I told myself that the leftovers would come in for something and cast off. It started and ended as a Zetor but I changed to leaves in the middle. It came out just as I thought it would, the colours merge one into another without a hard line and I’m pleased with the result. I know, it’s not often I say that but just for once I got exactly what I wanted. Maybe the transition between the white and grey could have been softer but that would be nit picking of the highest order.

This is Shetland too aklthough I can’t say that it was what I wanted because what I set out to spin was a laceweight silk. I sat down with a bag of silk brick that I’d bought some time ago but it was hard to draft, I had to wrench it apart. That makes for an uneven yarn and a pain in my thumb, both of which were good reasons to pack it away. The reason I bought it rather than dyeing it for myself is that the last one I dyed had spots that were hard and wouldn’t easily pull apart. I thought I’d buy one from another dyer and see how far I was off the mark in terms of the condition of the silk. It appears that my dyeing is no worse than other people’s, there was nothing to chose between them in terms of hard spots. This gave me over 200g of lovely unspinneable silk, I could make silk paper with it but I don’t have that much need for it (although the end of term is coming..new school, new teachers who don’t have silk paper pen holders already)

I found some black Shetland which was genuine black rather than the usual dark brown and carded that with the naughty silk. I spun it worsted with no attempt to take out the silk chunks, this is going to be a weft yarn and the lumps will add interest to plain weave. I now have just over 210 yards of interesting yarn and 30g less silk. More importantly the rest of the silk just escaped from the “useless” category. I have enough of the Shetland to make another skein the same and by then I’ll have woven it to see if it looks like I imagine. If it turns out to be a thing of beauty then I can buy black merino and make as much as I like.

Next time I’ll have hemmed the teatowel and have had time to decide why it is that it’s failed to meet expectations.