I lost a week somewhere, if anyone sees it hanging around gathering dust please send it back and I’ll pay the postage. I know I lost half a day to the plumbers but the rest of last week just slipped away from me. I’m forced to resort to some forensic work to reconstruct what I did based on the evidence that’s waiting to be put away.

I must have spent a big chunk of last week spinning because 700 yards of two ply merino doesn’t just appear out of thin air. I haven’t been spinning much recently as putting new yarn in at the top of the stash doesn’t do anything to help me eliminate those odd balls at the bottom. My excuse is that it seemed a shame not to spin and take advantage of the good light now that we have longer days and some actual sunshine. In addition I made 360 yards of less photogenic and more utilitarian yarn to get rid of some batts that I carded that were too pink to live. You will see that the yarn isn’t pink now because I finished it in a bath of brown dye. It isn’t the best yarn I’ve ever made because I spun all the singles while I was talking to people about wool, it seems that I can spin and chat but not spin well and chat.

I’ve been dyeing too, I dyed four of these last week which demonstrates that I have a pan that will hold 400g of fibre. I suspect that it holds more than that but I’m not sure that I want more than four of a kind. It’s academic with these because I only have two of them left now. This week I kept the lid on the blue dye as when I looked at my last shop update it was all blue and I do have other colours to play with. I’m designating this week as brown week and then next week can feature another pot of dye. It’s clear from the photo that there’s no such thing as “just wool”, the rippled shiny stuff on the left is Teeswater (very like Wensleydale) and the fast drying bouncy stuff on the right is Dorset Horn.

It seems that I warped the loom last week, this is leftover sock yarn sett at 30 epi for coasters. I’m hoping that I’ll have developed either more skill or more love for hemstitching after I’ve done it twice every four inches. I could sit and weave all day but I’ve had my fill of hemstitching very quickly. The weft is some crochet cotton that was given to me from someone’s mother-in-law’s stash, I knew if I hung onto it long enough I’d find a use for it. I can’t remember how long this warp is, I have it written down but I don’t want to look it up because then I’d be able to work out exactly how much hemstitching there is between me and the finish. I’d rather not know, I suspect that it’s more than I want to do. If I lose my will to hemstitch I have Plan B, weave a long strip and make it into phone-shaped bags.

It was the end of the month last week so I had a bit of a knitting frenzy in order to get something finished and weighed in against the month’s target of 180g of old yarn used up. Yet again I made life hard for myself, I bought a cone of yarn weighing over 400g so despite turning in a 95g alpaca cowl right up against the deadline it was still a fail. Fortunately I’d got ahead in earlier months so I’m still on target for 2012g in 2012 but I’ve had a serious talk to myself about restraint in yarn buying. Whether I’m listening or not remains to be seen.

Minni is plodding along. I’ve worked most of one sleeve and have started the second. As ever I’m working from a small ball of leftover sock yarn and I don’t know whether there’s enough to do both sleeves. I could have weighed it before I started and knitted until it was half gone but I was watching something on the idiot box and I was inches in before the thought occurred to me. When I get the second sleeve to the same place as the first one I’ll decide whether there’s a need for stripes. You’ve no doubt noticed that there are a fair few ends hanging about, believe me, I’ve noticed it too. The voice of common sense is suggesting that I sew a few in each time I pick it up but I’ve had a tactical loss of my last remaining sewing up needle so sadly all the ends will have to wait until the end. Oh dear, never mind. If you find my needle just pack it up with that missing week you’re sending me.