Wool For Brains

After I’d trawled out the various bits and pieces of work in progress I decided to work hard on reducing the numbers. Every knitter has their own views on what constitutes an acceptable level of work in progress, it varies from one person to another but the number that they feel happy with is the right number for them. For me, at least this week, that heap is too big. It’s not just about the numbers either, I know that the reason that some of those things are not finished is because they are stuck. I need to decide whether the sock needs a toe and as that is not knitting it’s not happening. The blanket needs some sort of edging and I can’t decide what. The baby jacket ran out of interesting yarn way too early and the sundress is just no fun. If I cast on for something else then they will linger longer so I’ve put the silk out of sight for now. I decided to chip away at it, one win a day and by focussing on what I have already started I might take my mind off the silk.

Day one of the new wiploss programme (Tuesday) was a clear success by anyone’s standards. I measured the length of fabric, cut it into three and sewed it back together again. The reason it had been sitting about was that I couldn’t decide how to finish the edges, satin binding, candy cane binding, something with prairie points? In the end I did none of those and just hemmed the ends, leaving the sides as they were. I’ve pressed it, sewed the ends in from stitching the seams and it’s as done as a baby blanket needs to be. Final measurements were 36″ by 31″ wide, it’s a scrap sock yarn warp with superwash laceweight weft. It’s a clasped weft which means that it’s doubled and the doubled laceweight is just about the same weight as sock yarn. I used the 12.5 dpi reed, I started off with the 10 but it didn’t look right. It’s just as well that it came out narrower than I’d planned because otherwise it would have been huge.

Day two – there was measureable progress in that I filled a third bobbin with green polworth. The rest will fit on the very last bobbin and then I’ll have a massive plying session. I had this set aside for a Tour de Fleece project but I’m not much of a joiner and I’d filled the first bobbin on the Friday before the start. I watch the cycling every day and I spin most days but that’s as far as it goes

Day three – one sock down, one to go. This has been sitting on hold for a week because I needed to make the decision of whether to start the toe and that seemed to be too taxing in an evening. I spent five minutes during the day doing the measuring and then that got me past the stage that I was stuck on. The second sock is always easier because all I have to do is make it match the first, no thinking about “is the cuff long enough?”, “what heel should I make?”, “is it time for the toe yet?” just match and knit.

Day four (Friday) – The last bobbin of Polworth is done. I’ve gone right off green which is a bit of a shame because I have 8oz of it to ply now and by the time I’ve finished that I imagine that knitting it would be out of the question. I don’t really feel like plying it but it’s filling four bobbins and I don’t feel like winding it off for storage either.

That seems to be the right place to stop because if I continue I think I’ll be looking at a fail for day five. If I give myself the weekend off then there’s a chance that something might be finished by Monday but there’s no realistic chance of a win for tomorrow.

So what happened in a week? I was wondering what I should blog about and why it is that it’s been a week and yet I have surprisingly little to show. I looked at my last post and there was a clue in the pink silk. I stopped spinning when I’d had enough of it, 752 yards, 68g (I’m back to the international scale measure of the Tictac). This looks more purple than the pink fluff in my last post, that’s because when I came to set the twist I added a bit of purple dye to darken it. It’s my current favourite thing, I love it to the extent that I’m prepared to overlook that I don’t like knitting silk and I keep eyeing it up for a little shawl thing.

This is the other reason why I have nothing to show, it looks as if I had a quick burst of startitis somewhere along the line. The pink silk counts as finished but everything else is sitting around the halfway mark. The weaving needs cutting into three and sewing back together again, there’s a baby jacket that is stuck on the sleeves because my favourite yarn ran out, a toddler’s sundress that is going on and on without end and two bobbins of green that are waiting to meet the other two bobbins that I haven’t spun yet. There’s a lot of activity but not much output. I am telling myself that if I just focus then something will get done but what I want to do is ignore the rest and play with the silk.

I took some books out from the library this week because I clearly have nothing else to be doing in the evenings other than reading. It’s only a small village library but of late  the craft section has produced a few pearls, my prize this week was “Freeform Style”. We will overlook that it’s decades since I used a crochet hook for anything other than a provisional cast on or adding beads to knitting, I used to be able to do it and I’m sure it would come back to me. The project that caught my eye was the one on the cover, the big red wrap. There is no way I’d ever make it as written, it starts off by knitting a square rectangle 40″ wide and 48″ long and then fulling it to around a yard square and that is never going to happen. It would work with woven yardage, full it, cut it apart and then add wide pieces of crochet insertion to make a hybrid item that is much bigger than the fabric you started with. I suppose I really ought to start with a sample before leaping into major yardage which leaves me with the question of where do I keep the crochet hooks?

There were no more worms this week, no worm houses or worm workwear. I’m glad about that but I don’t think I’m off the hook yet. We’re now on a James Bond theme (the name is Link, Worms Link) and this is Mr Link finally tracking down the archvillan Goldenworm. The narration for this page runs along the lines of “and Worms says “I have you now, Goldenworm” and Goldenworm, disguised in his green knitted bodysuit says “Who’s Goldenworm?” ” My escape plan is to provide half a dozen drawing pads and hope for safety in numbers.

It’s the come down from the big grey blob, little bits of knitting that are started and then suddenly done. This is Worme (pronounced Worm-eh and not to be confused with Wormie). Her hair was deemed to be too short but I’m ignoring that, he said the same about mine when I came back from the hairdresser earlier this week. He’s too young to know that the answer to questions on hair is always “It’s lovely dear. It suits you”. I did ask where her hair should finish and he said to the bottom of her eyes and that’s what he got. She seems pleased with it anyway. I forsee that I’ll get a week off and then it will either be accessories for Worme or the creation of Wormant. As far as I can see he looks just like Wormie but with glasses so that should be easy enough.

This is the Phazelia’s mitered baby jacket from last time. It was a fun little knit and I’ve another on the needles (which is about to be sidelined until I’ve knitted some more blue socks). I straightened out the bottom edge which is designed to be pointy with cut outs at the side. This was really simple to do but clearly there’s no chance of me remembering what I did when I get to the same point on the second one and the original will then be far away. I knitted all the stitches remaining after the sleeves, increased at the front edges and continued the increases at the centre back with a double decrease at the centre of each underarm. When it was the right length I knitted to the centre back, decreased the centre stitch away, joined on the other end of the ball of yarn and knitted to the end of the row. Working the two halves at the same time I then switched the increases to decreases, decrease at the start of the row, double decrease at the centre (underarm), decrease at the end of the row. When you run out of stitches you’re done.

I’m not sure that I’d get 6 spi with the sock yarn I regularly use, I think I’d want to be using something a little bit thicker. With a 3.25m needle (US3) I was getting something around 6.5/7 spi and that felt right as a fabric. It meant that this one came out about an inch smaller on the chest than the pattern, in future I’ll either make the second size or adjust the number of stitches according to the tension I get. (I know that this photo looks the same as the other but if you look closely this one does not have the tie and so is the back). The only sewing up is the sleeve seams, despite this all being scraps of sock yarn there were no ends to deal with because I knitted them all in with a back join.

Should I vanish for a while it is because of this. It’s pink and purple and orange and it’s my new favourite thing. Some bits are more purple, some verge on red. I have over 200g of it so I may be some time feeding it to the wheel unless I just spin half now. I’ve decided that I like dyeing silk and that’s good because I seem to have a lot of it piled around at the moment.

There are only so many ways to photograph a shawl, really one photo is enough but as I’ve spent so many hours on it I’ve taken more than that. I did think that it would block bigger than this but it was a good job that it didn’t or I wouldn’t have been able to pin it out on the bed. People wanting to knit a blanket shouldn’t start out with laceweight yarn.

This started as the Kerry Blue shawl from Martha Waterman’s Traditional Knitted Lace Shawls but the last border and edging came out of Heirloom Knitting. I planned ahead and made sure that I ended the body of the shawl on the right number of stitches for the edging to fit exactly into. If I had to fudge it on the approach to a corner then it meant that I’d made a mistake. As an error detection method this is pretty poor because it means that you don’t find the mistake until yards later, I found two and left them both.

The start of the edging is grafted to the finish and I sufferred terribly over those fifteen stitches. I pulled the needles out halfway through and had to start over, one attempt appeared to be fine until I reached the end, smoothed it out and found I’d twisted the edging before joining it. I finally got to the end, adjusted the tension, turned it over and found that I’d been working reverse stockinette rather than garter. I’d had enough by then so I duplicate stitched some purl bumps where they should have been and called it done. Invisible it is not. I wouldn’t mind so much if I didn’t zealously follow the directions, it wouldn’t be so bad if I just winged it and got it wrong.

I’m just waiting for a suitable box to turn up and then I will be waving bye bye to the blob. I shall miss it in the evenings but there will be something else to take its place.

Don’t worry, although the big grey blob is not quite finished I have something else that is so you will be spared the sight of the pile of fluff that was crammed in the bag shown last time. One bag of white fluff looks very much like another from a distance so although I’ve been entertained for days by the contents it’s probably not so attractive from over there.

These  are really finished rather than nearly finished. In hindsight the beads were a waste of effort, the colour is so close to the yarn that they barely show. I suppose it would have helped if I’d known what the yarn was going to do and positioned them on the dark brown stripe rather than the bead coloured stripe. They were leftovers and have moved out of the bead box so that is worth something to me. I’m sure that I had a reason for the contrast heel but by the time I reached the toe of the first sock I’d forgotten what the plan was. It’s possible that I intended to have a contrast toe and eke out two pairs of socks from the ball but I didn’t write it down so I will never know. As it is there was 44g of yarn left so with the addition of a few contrast stripes here and there I could get another pair from the leftovers. There again I could just balance it on top of the scraps bag and start knitting with a new ball of something else. Guess which is more likely?

This is Flapworm (saviour of the universe), a mild mannered reporter who has a secret lair (the Wormalair) underneath a petrol station. You won’t have heard of him because his exploits are in a comic strip which exists only in the original. I’m getting a bit worried because we’re on part three of the continuing adventures of Flapworm and he’s now got a named sidekick, Wormgal. I have deep misgivings about what I will be knitting next week but if it’s a choice between a knitted petrol station or a female superworm then I’m going for the worm. He has two other helpers that are as yet to feature in the plot and seeing as we’ve run out of drawing paper they will be remaining featureless for a little longer.

I think I’m safe to say that the next post will see the departure of the big grey blob, it has to be dry by tonight because I’d like somewhere to sleep and after that how long can it take me to sew two ends in? (Don’t answer that, I know from experience that it can take weeks)

There was a point last year when I felt in control of the sock yarn leftovers. It was just after I’d bought my rigid heddle loom and I’d ripped through several scarves using the sock scraps as warp. It made a pleasing dent in the pile of yarn and I knew then that I’d won my battle with the bulging bag. I proceeded to rest on my laurels, happily knitted several more pairs of socks and took my eye off the ball(s). It shouldn’t be surprising that I am now faced with an exploding bag of sock yarn (too out of control to pose for the camera). I know that I could hold four strands together and knit it up on big needles but I like the sock yarn bag. The colours are lovely, everything is washable and sock yarn is just so useful. It’s just that I’d like it more if it didn’t fling itself all over the floor whenever I open the wardrobe door.

I’ve started to get to grips with my embarrassment of riches. The balls on the right are all that is left from the balls on the left, I’m using superwash laceweight for the weft which I did have to buy because in general I’m not a huge fan of superwash. After much dithering I decided that grey goes with everything so the two colours I used were grey and undyed. The grey I love, it’s exactly right against the warp but the white is too bright. Just for once I didn’t go down the road of “so subtle I needn’t have bothered”, the contrast between the two is more than I’d visualised and the white would have been better as light grey. My selvedges are terrible, the one on the right is anyway, which is why they aren’t in the picture. I’m hoping that it will improve in the wash because the edges will be going into a seam providing that I can find a way to straighten them enough to ram them together.

I have the scraps bagged by colour, I think I paid 50p for my colour consultant to sort them for me one rainy afternoon and it was money well spent. One of the well filled bags featured red/russet/orange sock scraps and as the last baby born in the family has dark hair I think these will suit her well. This is the start of Phazelia’s mitred baby jacket, I was going to make it after I finished the blue framed baby jacket by the same designer but I was overwhelmed by the number of baby jackets tucked into the top of my wardrobe and decided that enough was enough. I’ve now cleared all the jackets out of the wardrobe and out of the house so I can start again. It’s another entertaining construction that means there is nearly no sewing up. If you want to see how it grows to make a jacket from such an unpromising start you can pop over here and see Carie’s. She has sleeves so it gives you a bit more of a clue on which bit goes where.

Does this mean that I’ve finished the big grey blob? Nope. I’m about a foot away from the last corner and then it’s a straight run along the last side to a bit of grafting. I like the edging, it’s easy to knit but I feel an urge to knit a row longer than twenty stitches. Hopefully next time it will be finished, if not I will feel compelled to bore you rigid with the contents of this bag (ball of sock yarn for scale).

I have a standard unit of comparison for spending decisions. Actually, that’s not quite true because I have several. There’s the unit of sock yarn, the bfl equivalent and the big unit, the fraction of a new floor loom. Would you rather have an ice cream sundae or half a ball of sock yarn? Me, I’d prefer the non-dairy option. An ipad will set you back half a floor loom (there’s no contest there either). In general wool always wins, I think about the wool I could buy with the money I’m just about to spend and then I put my purse away.

This week I found something that was a better buy than wool. Shocking isn’t it? For my birthday I asked for a professional oven clean. This cost about the same as two kilos of shetland fibre and on this occasion there was no contest. It looks like I have a new oven, the black crunchy bits have gone from the door hinges and you could eat your dinner off the bottom plate (try it and I’ll bite you). The shelves are shiny and he fixed the light as well. I got the idea from Carie who can’t clean her own oven at the moment because of her bump. I can clean my oven but I always choose to do something else with my time. Clean the oven or spin? Clean the oven or knit? It’s not hard to see which way that goes. The top tip I gleaned for cleaning your oven is to start by taking the oven door off, it’s easier to clean the oven when you can actually reach it.

I’ve been waiting for the postman to bring the yarn I needed for the weft for this and I had a moment of panic last night when I read the email from the vendor telling me that the yarn was out of stock. Fortunately Google is my friend and I managed to find something similar, closer to home and 50p cheaper (that converts to 25g of wool). I had hoped that this would be finished by now but it looks like I will be twiddling my thumbs until the weekend. I still have to choose the two colours I want the weft to be, the front runners are white, blue or grey and any two from the three will work. I might agonise endlessly over the perfect choice or there again I might just roll a die, one medium, one light, job done.

The absence of weaving doesn’t mean that I am twiddling my thumbs, I’m knitting. The sometimes-never socks had a burst of activity. The Kerry blob is not allowed on my knee at the same time as the dog, not allowed near food and certainly not allowed to sit outside near the barbeque. This is because the blob is not mine and I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to it. Socks are another thing altogether, it doesn’t matter if they smell like roast lamb and dog combined or if they get hit with the salad dressing. This meant that the sock was the only choice for a few hours sitting in the sun over the weekend while the grey blob stayed indoors where it was safe.

The blob is now in the final phase of knitting. I worked out exactly how I would turn the corners and how many stitches it would take to do that and then calculated how many stitches I needed on a side to be an integer number of repeats with appropriate corner fiddling. I’ve been caught before with devising with something so obvious that I don’t need to write it down then when it all goes horribly wrong I’ve no idea what I was thinking when I came up with the numbers. This time I wrote everything down, with sketches of the corner and which rows doubled back without attaching to the shawl body. It was a brilliant piece of work and I was really proud of it right up to the moment when I tried to knit it and found that it was backwards.

I’m not doing any more maths on this. Specifially what I’m not going to do is time how long it takes to knit a repeat because then I’d be able to work out how long it’s going to take me to knit the edging. I think that’s something that I really don’t want to know. There is no other choice but to get it finished.

Things are progressing but in some cases it’s not at a rate you could easily measure. The big grey blob is bigger and just as grey. I decided that I was not going to think about the edging until I hit 200 stitches on a side and I’m now not that far away from that. I want to finish the border on a number of stitches that the edging fits nicely into. This means that I have to choose an edging sometime soon and then spend five minutes with a calculator and write down how I intend to ease the edging around the corners. It’s easier just to keep on knitting and work the details out later but I’m coming up on the stage where there isn’t any more later, it has to be now unless I want to knit a blanket in laceweight yarn.

The big grey blob is still my main knit but it won’t go in my handbag any more so I need a small project for out and about. These will be growing slowly because the only knitting time they’ll be getting is in odd minutes of waiting time snatched here and there. These are Confetti 100 cotton superwash (49% wool, 35% cotton, 16% nylon) all the way from Canada via a swap on Ravelry, hopefully they will make cool socks for summer. The beads are another tidy up, I had just 128 for each sock so that’s the end of those. They aren’t ideal but they are used up so that’s something.

From slow knitting to slow spinning. This is going to take a while because the spindle is living on the breakfast bar and I spin while I’m waiting for the pasta to finish or the kettle to boil. Like the sock it’s all done in odd minutes here and there so it will take a long time to work my way through the bag of angora. It will be uneven yarn when it is done because I don’t have a reference length that I’m aiming at but it will be yarn rather than fibre and used up is better than being in a bag. This might end up being a cabled four ply or there again it might not, when it’s done I’ll see what the majority of it looks like.

This was very much faster in the spinning. This is 116g of merino from Riverpoet (via a swap on Ravelry) that spun itself into 400 yards of two ply. I like it, it’s colours that I don’t dye and I even like the scary gold parts. I can’t decide whether to use it as warp or knit it and I might just stick it on Etsy while I think about it some more.

I like this one too, 96g and 746 yards of two ply icelandic, alpaca, bamboo, glitz, wool and cashmere from batts from a swap on Ravelry. I did originally think that I’d knit this into something lacey but I’m now thinking that it would be lovely as weft, the irregularity in the spinning will look better woven than knitted and it’s a good colour that will go with just about everything.

In case you are thinking that everything in my stash comes from swaps on Ravelry and that I’ve adopted the barter system for everything well, you’re nearly right. I did buy the angora though.

The big grey blob is bigger now, I’ve 500 stitches in a round and it’s reached the stage where it is a lovely tv knit. There’s one pattern round in every four and providing I can count to six it’s an easy pattern round at that. It looks just the same as it did last time but bigger so we’ll skip the photo.

The sock dyeing experiment came out well, I think I’d award it a tick in the box for “exceeded expectations”. That’s a good mark seeing as my expectations are usually sky high. Both socks came out the same, there was enough in the ball to reach the toes and the colour changed gradually all the way along. I worked the heel using the other end of the ball so as to avoid any colour change along the top of the foot. These are now Daniel’s seeing as they fit him and he likes them.

The end of term report for these would be “adequate, let down by poor preparation”. They are fit for their purpose as teatowels, they’ll dry plates well enough, but they aren’t what I’d planned. I failed the first test, dyeing the warp, because I intended these to be jewel tones rather than pastels. I was ill but I’d promised Dan he could help me dye and the warp was already wound so we did it anyway. The result was that I tipped some dye into jam jars (not enough as it turned out) and he did all the work. He petitioned for the orange and yellow, the yellow worked well enough but the orange was very definitely a mistake.

The thing I did right was to hang the soaked warp to dry before dyeing it thereby avoiding puddles of liquid. Apart from messing up the depth of shade the whole warp painting thing went very well. We covered the breakfast bar with plastic and used a small paint brush to make sure that the dye penetrated all of the warp. I never really thought about how long each teatowel would be and how many colour changes I wanted, shorter colour runs would have been better. You can see how scary the orange looked at this point, even Dan agreed that it was not really a good choice.

The scary orange was only in one spot, the other two patches you can see fell in the loom waste (I may have been ill but I managed to make that come out right). Now that I’ve done it once I’d certainly make a painted warp again, it was much less messing about than I’d thought, but next time I’ll stick to silk or wool where I know what I’m doing with the dyeing. Although I don’t like the finished product the process was fun and it made me use the boat shuttle for the first time and find a way of winding the bobbins for it. It’s never a total loss if you learn something along the way.

I’m not usually a joiner of things, I’ve never signed up for the Knitting Olympics or the Tour de Fleece. For some reason I was thinking of the latter for this year, just thinking you understand and well maybe dyeing a bit too. I thought I’d spin something plain and lacey and I dyed some Shetland with this in mind. It’s light in colour and not something that I’d usually dye.

This demonstrates why it is that I am not a joiner. I have a basic inability to follow someone else’s timetable. The Tour doesn’t start until the beginning of July but having dyed the wool I didn’t want to wait. I’d have been finished sooner except that I fell off a kerb on Saturday and had a day where I couldn’t treadle. I couldn’t walk either but that’s beside the point. I did consider putting these back through the wheel to add more twist because despite treadling like a deranged hamster running in its wheel there maybe wasn’t quite enough twist. In the end I didn’t do it, the next time my inner spinner suggests this perhaps I’ll listen.

The result is something skinny but not laceweight, it’s my standard three ply sock yarn made as a two ply. There’s just under 700 yards here and although it is exactly what I thought I wanted, light and nearly solid, it still might be hitting a dye bath. The fibre at the top of this post was not something I usually dye because it’s not something I’d normally knit with. It would have been better yarn with more twist in the single but it will do. I’m still not sure whether I’m going to sign up for the Tour de Fleece, I suspect that I’d be better waiting until the last minute.

Thank you for the lovely comments about the little flippy lace thing from last time. I would by now be half way through another but I’m still fully engaged with the big grey blob. This is it posing as big grey briefs, such an appealling thought. It started as a Kerry Blue but I’m just about to change to the border and edging from the Cobweb Crepe shawl in Heirloom Knitting. Once I’ve made that transition then I can stop thinking about it and just knit until it’s big enough. You can expect much whining and gnashing of teeth when it comes to the edging because it’s going to be a test of stamina.

These ought to make an appearance before they hit the sock drawer. This is definitely the last pair in this pattern, I’m bored with it now. The yarn is Zitron Trekking Pro Natura which is 75% wool and 25% bamboo rayon. I liked the colours in this and thought that it would make good summer socks but I don’t think that I’d buy it again (not that I bought this because it was a swapsie). I was picking out tufts of bamboo while I was knitting. I’m probably influenced against it because of the two knots in the second sock. If they’d been in the first sock then I wouldn’t have remembered them but the second sock is still fresh in my mind.

The blog is now fixed and shouldn’t be vanishing any more. There was a sound technical reason for it that went right over my head involving something failing memory tests. I fail mine all of the time so maybe it is catching. Next time could be the return of the big grey blob, teatowels – where I went wrong, or maybe we’ll look at the spindle and two balls of yarn that I’ve just rehomed from Ravelry.