This has not been one of my better weeks. I have weeks where I fly through my to do list and then others where I don’t seem to accomplish anything at all. Last week was definitely one of the latter. I abandoned the last box bag after I’d done the hard work of sandwiching together the zip and both layers of fabric. I’ll finish that one when I pull out the next length of fabric and start on the next set of not-box bags. I will then be muttering about the inefficiency of working with two colours of thread and wishing I’d done all the turquoise things at the same time. I’m surprised that I managed to get as far as ten bags before being bored with the shape, I didn’t think that I had as much staying power as that.

I managed to sort out the warp where I ran out of yarn. The lack of focus in the photo is down to me having one hand for the camera with the other one fending off the dog who seemed determined to have his toy in this photo. This was originally planned to be a 16″ wide twill sett at 16 epi but my plan didn’t take any account of the yarn that I had and I ran out half way through winding the warp. What can I say, I started with a big pile of yarn and I thought that there would be that magical quantity of “enough”. I thought about it for a while, rummaged through the boxes of yarn for some other candidates and changed tack. It’s now 16″ wide, plain weave, 12 epi and on the rigid heddle loom. At some point I may encounter a new challenge, this was planned for the floor loom and it’s a five yard warp. I can report that you can get a five yard warp onto the back beam of an Ashford rigid heddle loom, whether you can get that amount of fabric onto the front beam remains to be seen. It’s no big deal, I’ll weave until I can wind no more on and then I’ll look the scissors out.

Mr Fluffy helped me to warp it one morning, you can see that he is carefully holding down that piece of paper for me. How do I manage without him? The warp is going from the back of the photo and doubling around the long wooden stretcher under the settee so that I can tension it and inch the loom forward as I wind on. In the afternoon, tired from all that helping, he had a little snooze on the window sill, rolled over, fell off and landed on an instrument case. He managed to rip a claw which needed two trips to the vet and anaesthesia. He’s all mended now but he has learned nothing from his experience because that’s still his favourite snoozing spot.

Even the plain Jane socks tripped me up. I’d grafted the toe on one and was about to start the second when I noticed that it was an inch longer than the first. It was exactly ten rounds longer so it was obviously a counting error but of course I didn’t know whether the first one was too short or the second one too long until the matching feet came home from school. These are the prototype new and improved bigger socks, I only gave him an extra four stitches around because I can’t believe that his feet are really this big. I’m dealing with the recent outbreak of sock hijacking by labelling all future socks, I might go through the older pairs (and I’m using the word “pair” very loosely here) and mark those up too. As he has two out of three initials in common with his father I’ve settled for using the one that is different although they could also stand for “junior”.

The sweater sleeves turned out to be about the right length, I think they are fractionally too long but they are close enough to do. I managed to avoid obvious joins in the yarn right up to the last ball. It wasn’t so much that the colour was darker but there were no light flashes in the last ball of yarn so it is more solid. I decided to live with it because the alternative was to pull back four inches of both fronts and the back to have enough yarn to alternate rows all the way to the end . I felt better about it after seeing the recent Knitty, I will just take photos under a tree and let the dappled light hide the colour jump seeing as that’s what the professionals do. I’m picking up for the collar now, the zip is on order so it’s nearly done.

It was Whit Friday this week which is probably of no significance unless you live in Tameside or Saddleworth or play in a brass band.  In an attempt to be educational I’ve found you a video (here), I know without looking that I have no family lurking in the background (as much as you can lurk whilst playing a brass instrument) because they didn’t get to Delph until after dark. Can you imagine seeing one band every six minutes for eight and a half hours? I am glad that the classic Monday morning school exercise of “what I did at the weekend” is long gone because it would no doubt result in an eyebrows-into-the-hairline moment.