Wool For Brains

Although I still have only one item on the needles the socks aren’t growing as they should be. I was trying to work out what had been cutting into my knitting time and I think this is the guilty party. I have this idea that to make a bag I just have to cut and sew a bit of lining but when I’ve really thought about it I’ve realised that I’m far off the mark with that idea. It took me the whole of music school to pin it and sew the side seams and top edges. That’s an hour and a half of quality knitting time gone. I spent most of “Mastercrafts” (Friday 9pm and this week they will be weaving) putting gold beads on the fringe, running out, taking some off and replacing them with bronze beads. It took two evenings of Agatha Christie’s Poirot to twist the fringe by hand (I’ve lost the battery case off the fringe twister) and no time at all to sew the lining, make the cord for the top and fashion a tassel. Despite all the time that it took it’s pretty and so I forgive it everything.

I can’t spin and knit at the same time so there must be some knitting hours lost here. The sock yarn was 400 yards before I soaked it, I should remeasure it now but I have better things to be doing. It’s a three ply superwash merino and nylon and it looks very like sock yarn to me. The others are very soft merino and I’ve given them the hot and cold water treatment to hopefully stop them pilling. They run about 200 yards to 100g and I like them too which surprises me no end. They are soft and squishy and nothing like what I usually spin or knit and I’m sure that they have been good for my personal development.

These have been the other time suck. These are rather large bookmarks in Jaggerspun Zephyr at 30 epi (ends per inch, the weaving equivalent of stitches per inch). I didn’t measure a bookmark before I started, just looked at a ruler, and as a result they are wider than they needed to be. I can now read a weaving draft and negotiate an eight shaft pattern with floating selvedges and two shuttles all at the same time. My brain hurts. The warp was long enough to make more bookmarks but after the second I reviewed my learning.

I had discovered that I’m not longer scared of the big scary table loom, that I have a deep dislike of floating selvedges because they slow everything down, that changing sheds sounds just like slamming the knife drawer and that I don’t much like working with tiny yarn because it takes too long to see any progress (also slamming the knife drawer thirty times an inch is not much fun). I couldn’t see what I would learn from a third bookmark other than selvedge improvement so I cut off the rest of the warp and chained it up. I have a lot to learn and I’d rather spend the time trying doubleweave or any of those other chapters in “Learning to Weave” (ideally without a floating selvedge and with thicker yarn. The drawer slamming I’ll learn to live with). I should say that some of the weaving is that of the husband who took to tabby with tiny yarn better than I thought he would.

The big surprise was that the new noise didn’t need barking at. Nothing interferes with the morning nap, not even me slamming the knife drawer over and over again. If it had sounded like the fridge door opening that might have been a different matter altogether.