Yee ha
The longer I leave it the harder it is to blog. This is because I’ve done so much that I can’t decide what to put into the post and what to leave out. Dyeing, carding, spinning, knitting – I’ve done it all this week.
I seem to have got a grip on my startitis. I have three fewer projects in the knitting bag and so far I’ve managed not to cast on for anything new. This is in part because I couldn’t decide whether to start a cowl (left, Twisted Sisters Avarice now less yellow than when I bought it) or a hat (right, handspun merino silk). Both seemed essential the other week when it was -5 and windy but it’s warmer now so I can take my time over the decision. The merino silk was spun and plied on the new wheel so I have proved that does spin as well as ply. It still feels a bit scary so my hands are still working faster than the flyer and I still am in the position of not having enough twist in the single. More practise is needed. For a hat the yarn will do well enough, it’s soft and squishy and will no doubt pill like stink. It’s not bad yarn, just not quite what I was aiming for.
I put all my projects on Ravelry, frogged the Magic Mirror mitten and decided that of the remaining wips the spider would be the fastest thing to finish. That was probably true except that when I found my place in the pattern the stitch count was wrong and I had to rip back four rounds. What can I say? It was black, it’s January and it was no fun. It was just as easy to take it all out, put the yarn away and call it done. That left me with two fewer wips.
This project was the third to move on out but clearly this one was finished rather than ripped. These were fun from the icord start nearly to the finish. The one thing I didn’t enjoy was making the bootstraps. Unfortunately they are functional, they stop the top edge from rolling so I had to grit my teeth and get on with it. I skipped the embroidery outlining the lacework because I’d rather be knitting than sewing, they are for me and they done enough. These are “Golden West”, the sock story and lots of lovely close ups iare here if you want to know why there’s a bead on the top. I will probably use the slip stitch pattern from the foot again, it’s quick to work, easy to follow without a pattern and it would break up a pooling yarn. This was a really entertaining knit (apart from the bootstraps of doom)
This is the skein that I spun before Christmas, all 50g of it. I don’t expect you to remember what it was, that’s why I put little labels on skeins because even I don’t always remember what I’ve made. This is superwash merino and nylon, navajo plied. Having enough yarn for one sock is no good but Christmas intervened before I got to the rest of the fibre. This is really asking for trouble, to spin one skein, put the wheel away for two weeks, and the spin the second. The first skein came in at 1,943 yards per pound, a nice fingering weight for socks. The second skein (roll of drums, opening the golden envelope) came in at 1,943 yards per pound. Yee ha indeed. I’ve tried hard to think of an analogy that would explain why it is that I am so very pleased about this. Imagine that you are a very new knitter and you knitted a dishcloth. Three weeks later you knitted the same pattern with the same needles and yarn and it came out the same size. Whoo hoo. You are beside yourself with joy because you maintained your tension whereas experienced knitters would expect that as a matter of course and non-knitters don’t get why having two dishcloths the same size is important.
I’ll hopefully be back later in the week with the other stuff that I didn’t cram into this post, if not then it means that I’m still playing with the drum carder.
