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.