Busy, busy

Things are busier than usual this week (and probably will be next week as well). I have had time to do a bit of spinning. I've got a two ply of white BFL that is waiting for me to spin another two ply of white BFL to ply it to. Once I've got that spun I will be on my way to hand spun socks.

I've also managed to get the scarf finished. I still need to wash it and see if I can get some of the curl out of it with a bit of blocking. I used up all of the cashmere sock yarn and my little skein of hand spun Shetland and got a scarf a bit less than 6 feet long. I'm really pleased with how this scarf turned out, though now it is finished I don't actually have anything on the needles. I will try to remedy this in the next day or two, time permitting.

Spinning mohair

Yesterday was pretty busy what with one thing and another and I didn't even think about posting on my blog. In fact I didn't realise I'd missed a day until I checked just now. My knitting is pretty uninteresting at the moment. I am still working away at my scarf but it is really the only thing on the needles at the moment. It should be done in the next couple of days, though. After the scarf is done there are sweaters and socks waiting to be knit.

I spent Sunday playing with my wheel. I've had a 50 gram braid of kid mohair dyed by Fleece Artist sitting around since the KW fair last year. Since most of my other available fleece is white or brown and I felt like playing with colour the mohair was a natural choice. I spun it into the fine singles that I favour and then decided to ply it to something else. I happened to have a bobbin of white Blue Faced Leicester sitting around so I pressed it into service.

I was aiming for a fingering weight and the 2 ply wasn't going to be thick enough so I tried adding a bit more twist and the plying the two two plies together to get a 4 ply cabled yarn.

Unfortunately I didn't add enough twist and the resulting yarn was too loose. Today I unplied the 4 ply, added more twist to the pair of 2 plies and then spun them back together. I am much happier with the yarn the second time round.

I used the full 50 grams of mohair and an unknown amount of BFL and got about 130 yards of yarn. I think I will spin up more plain BFL and make some socks.

Hat details

At long last I have tracked down the missing ball bands and can now post the pattern details for the Overdue hat. Again, it is kind of appropriate that this has taken a while to get finished since the original plan had me knitting the hat for Christmas and we know how that turned out.

Pattern: Ragamuffin Ear flap Hat from Teva Durham's Loop-d-Loop

Yarn: 2.5 balls of Jo Sharp's Silkroad DK Tweed for the main colour and then bits of my Shetland hand spun (white), Jo Sharp's Pure wool DK (dark blue), a mystery merino (burgundy) and some wool that I experimented dyeing with coffee (gold).

Needles: 4 mm DPNs for the majority of the hat and 3.25 mm needles for the crown and ear flaps.

Errors in the pattern: There are two mistakes in the pattern:
1. Round 5 should read: knit 3, *C6B, repeat from * to last 3 sts; work C6B over last 3 and first 3 sts of round.
2. The pattern says: "...you will discover that by adding color to the first or second set of 3 sts of the cable, the contrast color will appear to be woven to the right or to the left..." This isn't quite right. If you add it to the wrong set of stitches it ends up being cabled under and so mostly invisible. It is the row that you add the color on that determines which way it leans.

Modifications: The main modification was to turn this child's hat into a large adult's hat. Instead of casting on the 132 stitches I cast on 180, which is the main reason it took so long to knit this hat. Because I was knitting a larger hat and wanted to forgo the fringes on top I needed to modify the way the top of the hat decreased. When I was finished cabling the body of the hat I switched to smaller needles (to maintain the stitch density and keep the fabric from ballooning out) and decreased 8 times every row until I had only a handful of stitches left and could draw the yarn through. I kept adding bits of colour so that the top would match the body. The ear flaps I Knit as written only I chose to do them in the round rather than knitting the insides and outsides separately.

The most valuable lesson I learned in knitting this hat is that not everyone wants a hat to fit in the same way. Bumming around on line I learned that hats should have about 10% negative ease to fit properly. I decided that this was the flaw in the other hats that I had made and that didn't fit. It turns out that this was just one flaw. The other major problem was the way I was making the hats fit at the top of the head. I like hats that are snug at the top so that the top of my head is touching the top the hat when the brim is over my ears. After some trial fittings I leaned that this type of hat feels too tight on some people and that some hats need to be knit so that there is some clearance at the top. This was a valuable lesson and one that I will try to remember next time I knit a hat for someone who isn't me.

Hurray it is still winter!

With so many people tired of winter and ready for spring I just thought I'd be contrary and celebrate the continuing cold. It helps that I just finished my mittens and look forward to wearing them a few times before the seasons change. It also helps that I keep meaning to knit a spring coat but I haven't gotten started yet. Anyway, mitten details:

Pattern: 'Mittens with bird pattern' from Knitting in the Nordic Tradition by Vibeke Lind. I found this book at the local library and there is a ton of stuff in it that I want to knit. Maybe I should start looking around for my own copy.

Yarn: Gauja (100% wool) from Headwater Wool. I used about half a skein of the black and a bit more than that of the white.

Needles: 2.25 mm DPNs for the ribbing and 2.75 mm DPNs for the rest. The pattern suggests using 3 mm needles but from past experience with this particular wool I knew that would be too loose for my liking.

Modifications: I made the ribbing longer because I wanted it to tuck well into my coat. Other than that I made the birds' tails longer and added some white to the bird on the thumb to make them look more like magpies. I also changed the pattern that runs along the edges of the mittens to accommodate my changes to the birds.

Since the black yarn made my hands look like they had been rubbing up against newspaper, I was worried that a lot of colour would come out when I washed them. The water did turn a bit dark but not nearly as much as I was expecting. I was pleasantly surprised, though I do think I will wash the remaining black yarn so that I can knit with it without changing the colour of my skin.

Half finished

It fits well and looks pretty much how I want it to look. A day or two should be enough time to finish off the pair. Since we got a bunch of snow last night and there is more snow still to come I will probably even have a chance to wear them.

Before I wear them, though, they will need a couple of rinses at least to get rid of extra black dye. There is enough extra dye in the wool that it is coming off on my hand as I knit. I think as long as I wash the mittens in cool water I can get rid of the black without having it settle into the white.

I'll worry about it when the time comes, though. For now I'm just happy to have a nice mitten that fits and its mate in progress.

New mittens

Yes I will eventually post about the scarf and hat (maybe tomorrow) but tonight I want to post about the mittens I just started.

The only down side to my trip to Toronto last weekend was that somewhere along the way I lost one of my hand knit mittens. This is not a huge tragedy but it has left me mitten-less. My solution was to cast on for a pair of Nordic two colour mittens and hope that it is still winter by the time I've got them finished.

So far progress is good. I am working on a modification of the bird mittens in the book Knitting in the Nordic Tradition, which I got out of the library. When I first saw these mittens I thought the birds looked a bit like magpies and I love magpies and miss seeing them now I'm in Southern Ontario. I've tried to tweak the pattern a bit to make them look even more like magpies and I'm waiting to see how it turns out. So far so good I think:

Making the socks of two toes

A quick post because it is late and I'm ready for bed. This afternoon I finished my Afterthought Socks. These are knit from a single skein of Koigu and a part of a skein of Zwergergarn Opal on 2.75 mm needles. I worked these toe-up on 64 stitches and I think I would have been better off with 60 stitches instead. I worked each to where I thought the heel should go (I compared them to one of the other pair of toe-up socks I had laying around) knit in a bit of scrap yarn and then kept knitting until I ran out of yarn.

The first heel I knit as a standard toe, by which I mean I decreased 4 stitches every two rounds until I had 16 stitches left then I used kitchener stitch to close things up. When I put this sock on, though I didn't really like how it fit. It seems less deep than a short row heel and some of the decreases produce gaps:

The second sock I picked up and knit a short row heel instead. Depending how these wash up I may or may not go back and reknit the heel on the first sock Since these socks don't represent a huge investment of time I might be content to have them not match exactly in the heel.

I'm not going to make this sort of heel one I use often but I like it well enough as long as I stick to short rows. I can see this would be a good heel to knit if you thought that your sock heel might wear out and that you might want to reknit it. Since I'm just finishing darning a number of socks that wore out in the hell perhaps I should rethink my plan not to knit more of these...