Catching up

Oh dear, this has been a very neglected blog of late. I’ve not been feeling brilliant, and I find that whenever I feel a bit down, my words are the first thing to go – I try and write, but it all just comes out very stilted and I give up. I’m still not quite right, but I’m feeling a bit better, and I managed to take some photos today which don’t make me look dreadful (as most of the last lot did), so I’ll start trying to catch up on what I’ve been knitting.

Starting with the most recent and working back (because that’s the most logical way to work, obviously), here’s a little shawl in the beautiful Kidsilk Stripe from Rowan.

I’ve been lusting after this colourway (twilight) for ages, and I finally cracked and treated myself to a ball a couple of months ago. This very simple pattern – mostly stocking stitch with an easy lace edging – seemed perfect for showing off the amazing colours in the yarn (the colours haven’t come out brilliantly in the photos, the stripe above the lime green is actually a beautiful purple, and the stipe which looks purple is more muted. But you get the idea).

The Kidsilk Stripe seems expensive at £18 per ball, but it’s a 50g ball (compared to 25g for regular Kidsilk Haze), and this shawl only took one ball. So pricy but not extortionate. Unfortunately I have a yearning to make a cardigan or jumper out of this colourway, which is going to take at least three balls. Hmm, better start saving up!

Next up is a huuuuugggge shawl, in a merino/possum mix yarn, and Noro Silk Garden. I bought the possum a few years ago, from the Knittery in Australia when they were closing down, and I’ve been waiting for the perfect project for it ever since. Similarly three balls of Silk Garden in a long discontinued colourway have been sitting in my stash, and this was the perfect opportunity to put them together.

The pattern is Sonia’s Shawl, and it calls for equal amounts of yarn. I had 640m (in four skeins) of one, and 300m of the other, so I used the first skein of the possum at the top of the shawl, then striped the silk garden with the next two skeins, and used the last skein and a bit to do a garter stitch border.

To say I’m happy with this would be something of an understatement – it’s one of my favourite things of everything I’ve knitted. It’s going to live on my sofa in the winter, and keep either my shoulders or my legs warm, and if it gets really cold it’ll go over my coat as a lovely snuggly furry layer :)

And it’s why I love Noro so much – you can do an incredibly simple pattern and the wonderful colours make it look absolutely stunning.

(Pause for a slight interruption – this is another reason it’s sometimes hard to blog –

Someone thinks that the space between the laptop and my face is her space. Thankfully she never stays very long!)

And back to the knitting. Continuing the shawl theme, when I saw the Leftie pattern I couldn’t resist starting one pretty much straight away.

The pattern’s written to use up leftovers, using a different yarn for each leaf (hence the name Leftie), but the thought of all those ends to sew in had me running away screaming, so I had to come up with a plan b. Which was to use handspun yarn, and it worked perfectly! This was a skein I’d spun a couple of years ago, and then gone off as all the colours seemed to merge together in the skein. Thankfully when I started knitting they sorted themselves out again – and because the leaves are done with short rows all at once, you’re only using a short length of the yarn and the colours came out fairly clear. If that makes sense!

This is the whole thing once it was done – you start at the small end and the rows get longer, then you stop once you lose the will to live. Which was after 30 leaves in my case. The pattern’s written for fingering weight, but I used DK, largely because I bought a huge amount of cheap wool/alpaca mix from Kemps a while ago, and wanted to use it up. Well, make a start, anyway.

And this is the shawl in action – it’s very cosy!

Last up on today’s photo session was a shawl I finished a while ago, but failed to photograph in any sort of flattering fashion. I had better luck today, thankfully!

The knitting world went mad last year when Kate Middleton was photographed just after her wedding wearing a shawl with a frilled edge.

There are now lots of patterns for similar shawls on Ravelry, but none of them seemed quite what I wanted until I saw Atlantic Storm. It’s a very plain shawl – Kate’s was patterned in the body, but I thought that would be too much with this DK weight yarn, so I wanted to stick to stocking stitch.

It’s a shallow triangle, increasing at the ends of three rows out of every four, then stitches are picked up along the top and then a couple of rows of increases worked until there were – wait for it – over 1800 stitches for the edging. Which is all in 1×1 rib. Thankfully I was watching tennis at the time, so I needed mindless knitting. I just slogged away at it until I’d done 19 rows, then thought about casting off. I knew I didn’t want to do a standard cast off, which always looks odd on rib to me, and the only other one I could find in most places was a sewn tubular one. Which is fine for the edges of garments where you have under 100 stitches, but the thought of doing 1800 stitches filled me with dread, not to mention how many ends I’d have to sew in.

So I did some more searching on Ravelry forums, and came up with a link to Techknitter’s fake tubular bind off. Which is a bit more fiddly than a regular one, but gives a lovely edge.

It’s not a stretchy cast off, so I’m not sure how useful it’d be for garments, but it was perfect for this. The section in the middle of the photo above is actually the right side, but I decided that I liked the reverse better, so I cast off the other way round the circle. And about five hours (!) later I was finally done.

The yarn’s Rowan Cashcotton DK, which is lovely and soft. The 18% angora content does mean that it will spend the next five years shedding over everything it comes in contact with, but hey, soft!

Why do cats always stand on knitting the minute you put it on the floor?

And I think that’s enough for tonight! There is more to come, but I think that’s plenty for one post. I’ll try not to leave the next one so long, honest…

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Weaving once more

Long time readers may remember that back in July last year I spun up a gorgeous skein of dyed baby camel and silk (from Freyalyn) plied with undyed cashmere and silk.

And that at in October I started weaving a scarf with it, using some commercial BFL/alpaca as the warp.

I didn’t feel the love for the project, largely because the warp behaved very oddly, bunching up in places randomly, and feeling quite harsh under tension. At one point I contemplated undoing it, but when I took the tension off the fabric it felt much better, so I persevered. Well, actually I dumped it in the conservatory for the winter and tried to forget about it, but I didn’t actually rip it out.

But the sunny weather this weekend make me want to do outside crafts, and I tend to think of weaving as something to do in the garden, largely because there’s more space out there, and I plodded away at it until at last it was finished.

I braided the ends using my hair braider, and then gave it a bath, which had a somewhat scary outcome – it went very ripply and uneven, and I thought I’d ruined it. But a good seeing to with the iron sorted it out, and now it’s a thing of softness and beauty, with a very interesting texture.

I took it to the park at lunchtime and did some arty shots against the backdrop of St Mary’s Abbey. I may have attracted some strange looks, but I ignored them!

You can see how drapy it is here.

The texture is quite strange, you can see it best with the light behind it.

I have no idea why it’s done this! It could be that the warp wasn’t evenly stretched, or just that it wasn’t really strong enough (one thread at the edge did break eventually, but I was pretty much at the end of the warp anyway, so I just took it as a sign to stop…) I think the slight thick-and-thinness of the handspun weft probably had something to do with it. It’s very interesting to look at!

All in all, I’m very pleased I carried on with it! It’s a beautiful soft, drapy scarf for spring, with subtle colours (probably because only 25% of it is actually dyed fibre). It’s 13.5” wide and about 62” long excluding the fringe, so it’s long enough to do a few different things with. It weighs about 170g, and there’s some of the handspun left – I haven’t weighed it though, it’s still on the loom shuttle. Maybe I’ll do a smaller project with it next. Oh, and I still need to trim the ends of the tassels neatly, I meant to do it before taking photos but I forgot!

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From sheep to sheep

Bear with me, I’m ridiculously pleased with myself today :) My Sheep Heid is all finished, and I’m as ever amazed that it is possible to turn this fibre

(photo from Etsy listing)

into this hat, with sheep and rams :)

with just the aid of a spinning wheel and a pair of needles :)

Anyway, when I finished knitting it yesterday (not long after posting, I just sat and didn’t do anything else until it was done), it looked like this

A sort of slightly oversized beanie. Once upon a time this would have disconcerted me, but I know from experience that blocking over a plate works wonders.

Moll did wonder why there was a hat on a plate on her chair though.

A trick I’m sure I’ve mentioned before is to thread a length of cotton yarn round the top of the ribbing before soaking, then pulling it tight and tying it once it’s on the plate, to stop the rib from stretching out.

Min came to have a look what I was doing in the garden in the cold and damp – she’s not used to seeing me out there at the moment! The apples on the ground are being feasted on by a large family of blackbirds, which is a good excuse for not picking them up…

The brim is a bit itchy, being mostly Shetland, I think I’m going to line it with something, perhaps a strip of merino inside.

I nearly binned this photo when I realised that the washing line was on top of my head, but then I spotted Min sitting on my shoulder!

The details – the pattern is Sheep Heid, by Kate Davis. I used nine different handspun yarns from British breed sheep (Shetland, BFL, Jacob and North Ronaldsay), spun semi-woollen, and with two plies. I used 3.5mm and 3.75mm needles. I used about 80g of yarn in total. The double thickness of handspun yarn should make a lovely warm hat!

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Looking sheepish

I have sheep!

The trouble with fair isle hats is that I become completely addicted to knitting them, I could hardly stop yesterday, I kept wanting to just finish one more bit.

I should have read the various forum threads about the pattern before I started though, quite a few people who have taken part in swaps where everyone got 25m of each colour (as stated in the pattern) have run out of one or more colours, especially moorit, which is the colour the sheep are knitted in. I didn’t measure exactly how much of each colour I had, but I counted wraps on my niddy noddy, and I had at least 20 wraps of each, so about 34m, although I seem to remember that the North Ronaldsay I’m using for the moorit was one of the shorter ones, and I’ve run out.

I also didn’t read the instructions properly, and cast on with moorit as well as knitting the first round – if I’d used a different colour I’d probably have had enough, as it is I ran out after row 7 of chart C. I changed to black a row early, and I’ll use something else for the next band, so it’s not a massive problem, but it could have been avoided.

I’m loving the way the handspun is knitting in for fair isle, it’s a lovely dense and squidgy fabric, and any unevenness in the yarn has pretty much disappeared. It should be a lovely warm hat!

In other news, the frequent colour changes in the hat mean I have to find my scissors on a regular basis (we won’t mention all the ends to sew in, I’m trying to do them as I go, but it’s very tedious…) and every time I’ve had to search for them. Then I had the bright idea of putting them on a ribbon and hanging them round my neck, and a quick search of my ribbon box found the perfect ribbon which came with one of my Clothkits kits.

The inch markings aren’t quite accurate, but they’re not bad, so now I’ve got a measure as well. Of course I still keep scrabbling around on the sofa looking for my scissors, but hopefully in time I’ll get used to the fact that they’re round my neck. Just have to be careful not to go out with them in situ!

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Handspun cowl

I’ve had another go at taking photos of my cowl, they’re not much better than the last lot, but they’ll have to do! I look a bit like death warmed up, but that’s pretty much how I feel – I think I’ve got a bit of a bug, I’m just tired and headachy. At least I’m not streaming with cold, like plenty of people I know. Well, not yet, anyway.

Going with the fibre-to-FO theme again, this is the Falkland fibre as it arrived from the Yarn Yarn in February 2009 (it was a club fibre).

I finally spun it up a couple of months ago, spinning it as thick as I could manage (I’m not good at spinning thick, my yarns tend to go thin unless I concentrate!) These are the singles on the bobbins.

And this is the finished yarn.

Nice and chunky :) I had about 296m, which seemed to be enough to make a long cowl, and inspired by the Gap-tastic cowl pattern on Ravelry, I did a swatch on 6.5mm needles, which seemed to be about the right size for the yarn, and worked out that to make it about 44” round I needed 165 stitches, so I cast on and knitted round and round in moss stitch until I ran out of yarn, when I cast off loosely.

The yarn’s striped nicely, in a very Noro-esque fashion (it looks very like the Iro I used to make a big jacket years ago).

It’s a nice length round my neck once, it’ll fit into the front of a coat like a scarf, or when it’s cold I can wrap it round my neck twice for a very cosy neckwarmer.

If it’s very cold, I can pull one loop up over my head as well, but I forgot to take a photo like that!

Oh, and this is how I blocked it – it was the right length but a bit narrow when I took it off the needles, so I threaded wires through both sides (two per side) and pulled it as wide as I could get it, pinning it into place before standing it up in front of the radiator to dry (one of the few advantages of winter is having the heating on and being able to block things so quickly!) It also made it much more drapey and soft.

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Trying out shadow wraps

I know I promised photos of my new cowl, but I took some on Wednesday morning and they look dreadful, both of the cowl and of me, so I’m going to have to take some more, but not today, because visibility’s about 10 yards outside, and my hair needs washing. Hopefully tomorrow!

In the meantime, I’ll share the socks I finished last night. I am trying to use up some of my handspun stash (it might even be going down, despite me spinning up more from time to time…) and I took a ball of handspun superwash English wool blend from Wildcraft with me to my parents’ last weekend.

Because I love seeing how the yarn started off, this is the fibre before I spun it.

And this is afterwards – about 240m of a heavy-ish fingering weight yarn, a bit overspun in places but not too bad.

When I knit socks, I’m a big fan of short row heels (one day I will try a heel flap, just to see how it works, but I like the way that short row heels fit on my feet), and over the years I’ve tried quite a few different ways of doing them. I’d pretty much settled on wrapping and turning, even though it is fiddly to pick up the wraps, when I saw a link to shadow wraps, and I decided to give them a go.

They’re easy to work, once you get the hang of things (the instructions make them look more complicated than they really are, I think – what you’re actually doing is wrapping the stitch but on the needle instead of round the base, so you don’t have to pick the wrap up to knit it with the stitch later), and before long I had a nice line of double stitches up each side of the heel, ready to be worked on the second half. I was a bit dubious about not wrapping them again on the increase rows, and after a few rows I realised that I was right to be worried. The technique is probably fine for short rows in garments, but for heels you do need to wrap twice – I solved the problem by working the technique again on the way back, so that each stitch had three stitches coming out of it, ready to knit together, and this worked much better.

Can you see how the first few stitches have holes between them?

This might show it a bit better. I did debate ripping the heel back and doing it again, but I decided that at the end of the day it was only a heel and I could live with a few holes. Besides, I was watching tv at the time and couldn’t rip back and concentrate.

The second heel looks better. Overall I’ll probably use this technique again – the results are the same as wrapping and turning, and whilst it’s a tad more fiddly to do the wraps, it’s easier to just knit them together than to mess about picking up the wraps from the base of the stitch and get them in the right order.

And the finished socks! My feet look a slightly odd shape on the photo, I think it’s down to the camera angle. At least I hope it is.

They’re a bit baggy at the top, I went up a needle size to 2.75mm because the yarn was slightly thicker than usual, but still cast on my usual 64 stitches without thinking. After the heel I decreased on the foot to 60 stitches, which worked better. They’re not the softest socks ever, down to a combination of the rougher fibre and my overspinning it a bit (I do tend to overspin for socks, to make them harder wearing, but I think I overdid it a bit this time), but they should be hardwearing, and I can always up a pair of cotton socks underneath for warmth and comfort.

The colours are pretty, although I’m not sure what happened to the pinks in the original fibre, they seem to have disappeared completely!

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Morgain shawl

The weather’s been a grey and damp here the last couple of days, so I’ve hunkered down on the sofa catching up on TV and finishing off my Morgain shawl. The pattern was tricky to get the hang of in the early stages, but as it grey it became more predictable and I could see what I was doing. It just took a while as the rows got longer… It did all squash onto a 60cm needle though!

The pattern says that you can cast off after any row, which is technically true of just about any shawl, but to get nice points at the edge, you need to cast off at one of the points where the pattern changes direction (the author does say this), so when I was halfway through chart 3 I did quite a lot of maths and measuring of yarn, and decided that I’d have to stop there (I had about 600m of yarn, the full six charts take about 1200m). I did an extra pattern row to take the decreases right up to the leaf spines, then did a two step cast off, doing a knit row with yarn overs but no decreases to increase the stitch count, then doing a k2, ssk cast off for stretchiness.

I blocked it using wires on the straight edges and pins for the points.

Mollie pointed out that it wasn’t really symmetrical, but I decided that it would be fine once I unpinned it. And it was :)

I used my new shawl pin to fasten it – it’s very clever, just a spiral which you thread through both layers, but it won’t come undone by itself.

It came from Spinning Forth, and was very reasonably priced, with very cheap postage (from France). She does them in copper or brass, I bought one of each. And it came with a very nice little note :)

This photo shows the striping of the yarn a bit better.

The details – the pattern is Morgain, by Stefanie Bold. The yarn is my own handspun, from beautiful merino, cashmere and silk fibre from Picperfic. I used about 104g/550m, and 4.5mm needles. It’s lovely and soft!

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Ripples and batts

My raspberry ripple scarf is finished! I finished it off at knitting group on Wednesday night, and as soon as I got home I blocked it by ironing it through a wet tea towel – I usually soak things and pin them out, but I thought that trying to get the edges straight might be tricky, plus I really wanted the fabric to be very flat, so I went with the iron.

And all was fine until I came to wear it the next day, when it dawned on me that the reason that feather and fan-type patterns usually have at least some garter stitch is because stocking stitch curls. Uh, duh. Of course I knew that! I just didn’t associate the stitch pattern with stocking stitch (okay, I can be very dim sometimes, I know…) and it wasn’t until it just wouldn’t stop curling that the penny dropped.

You can see it starting to wave in this photo, and as I wore it the two edge portions folded in on themselves so that the scarf was half as wide but twice as thick. Oops. The yarn’s still pretty though! And I can probably live with it curling – it’s not one to wear for warmth particularly, more for decoration in the office.

And it’s just the right length for that. It’s also beautifully soft :)

The details – the pattern is Chevron Scarf, by Joelle Hoverson, from Last Minute Knitted Gifts, and the yarn is my own hand carded/handspun. I used 3.5mm needles, and it took a eleven days from start (blending the batts) to finish – the actual knitting took a week.

In other news, I’ve been playing with Fiona’s drumcarder again – I was going to take it back to spinning group on Thursday night, but she’s had a leak in the shop, so the meeting was cancelled and I’ve still got it, and the opportunity seemed too good to miss.

These two braids of superwash BFL were from the Wildcraft fibre club a couple of years ago, and whilst they were lovely, I wasn’t sure what I’d do with blue and yellow striped yarn, so they’d been languishing in my stash. I found another 65g of white BFL, and 20g each of cashmere and silk, and made some smooshy pale green batts.

This is half blended and half waiting. There are eight batts (just over 300g) altogether, I tried putting less fibre on each batt and it made things a little easier. I also put each on through the carder twice, which was a bit tedious but did blend them more.

Whilst looking for the BFL I’d come across a 100g bag of angora I’d bought at Woolfest last year, clipped straight from a rabbit.

It was still in clumps, and I didn’t think that I could spin straight from it (it may be possible, but I don’t think I’m up to it!) so I found a 100g bag of white merino, and a bit more cashmere and silk, and blended the whole lot together, for just over 200g of fibre.

Again I blended each batt twice, and they look pretty well blended, there’s a few streaks of silk, but I like that in a yarn.

They’re very floofy, and there’s angora all over my living room – spinning them could be interesting! But the yarn should be lovely and warm, I’m thinking perhaps the lining for a winter hat.

Then this afternoon I attacked this very old braid of BFL and silk. It was a bit compacted, probably because it’s been stored for so long (it was one of the first fibres I bought after I started spinning three years ago), and there were quite prominent streaks of silk in it, so that went through the carder too, only once this time.

It was dark by the time I’d done, so this is the best photo I could manage, but it gives an idea. I’m sure it’ll be easier to spin!

Now I really should put the drum carder away and do some actual spinning. But for tonight I’m getting on with knitting the Morgain shawl I’ve been on with for a while – it is growing, but the rows are getting long now…

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Knitting, ripping and sewing

I’ve had a busy weekend, crafting-wise. Yesterday I spent a good portion of the day catching up on the week’s TV and knitting my two handspun projects – the first is the shawl I started a few weeks ago, which is growing slowly, although the rows are getting long now.

It’s not much to look at yet, but I’m sure it’ll be lovely when it’s done and blocked, the yarn is feeling beautifully soft :)

Second is a scarf I’ve started with the yarn I spun from last weekend’s batt. It wasn’t until I’d done a fair chunk of it that I realised that the ripple pattern went perfectly with the name I gave the yarn – raspberry ripple!

I’m loving the way it’s knitting up, it’s very random, but the pattern is showing the short stripes off perfectly. Some sections are pinker than others…

I’m still not quite happy with the falkland bits, although they do look a lot better knitted up – it’s amazing what knitting will do for dodgy handspun! – but I’m pleasantly surprised by the bamboo bits, which are absolutely fine, despite feeling a bit odd when I was spinning it.

I’ve also been ripping out knitting – this cardigan was an early effort of mine, it was the second I’d made from the pattern, and in a classic example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing, I decided that I knew better than the pattern writer, and put my new-found skills of grafting to use on the shoulders (um, that seam’s there for a reason!) and compounded the problem by knitting on the back neck band to live stitches instead of casting off and sewing the band on. Predictably as soon as I put it on the whole top of the back stretched like mad (the fronts were about three inches apart when I laid it out!) and it fell off my shoulders all the time. I did persevere with it a bit, but then it ended up at the back of the cupboard, where I found it when sorting out last week. The yarn’s Silk Garden, so too nice to give away, and yesterday I steeled myself to unpick the seams (not as easy as it sounds!) and reclaim the yarn. There was also a matching beanie which I quite liked but never wore, so I pulled that out too.

And now I have 420g of lovely Noro looking for a project. Yum.

Today I decided to do a bit of sewing, so I fished out my various Clothkits projects-in-waiting, and made a start.

Watched by Mollie, obviously.

First up was a hat for my nearly-two-year-old niece. The pattern pieces were all nicely printed on the fabric, and were easy to cut out, but for the lining you have to pin them to the unprinted fabric and cut round them, which they don’t tell you on the website. Sewing the six hat panels together (times two, including the lining) was a bit fiddly, and I was a bit bemused to find that they didn’t mention snipping the seam allowance before ironing the curved seams. The brims went on surprisingly easily, and then I sewed the lining to the hat. And stopped and had a look at it. There are three sizes, done by using a different seam allowance, and I’d done somewhere between the two largest ones (the largest is supposed to fit a 54cm head). But when I tried it on it fitted me just fine, and the circumference is more like 60cm. Hey ho, it’ll fit her one day.

The lining was also a bit big for the hat, so I topstitched round both edges of the brim, so that the extra fabric is at least inside the hat.

It is cute though! I love the birdies.

And lastly I started making a skirt for myself. But I’ve only got the outside done, so I’ll do the lining and finishing tomorrow, hopefully before it goes dark so I can get some photos. I hate these dark evenings, I so wish they’d stop muttering about permanent summer time and do something about it. And if Scotland don’t like it, let them stick with GMT, countries in Europe cope with different time zones, why can’t we? Bah. Right, now to hunker down with my ripply scarf and wait for the Strictly results. I so hope Nancy goes this week.

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From the sublime to the ridiculous

I’ve spent most of the last week knitting squares for my blanket, but I won’t bore you with them just now – I’m thinking of setting up a separate page on here for them, so I can record them without cluttering up the blog. But that’s a job for another day.

At the weekend I decided I’d had enough of squares for the time being, and plucked up the courage to weave using the handspun warp I set up a few weeks ago.

You might remember that I was worried that the yarn would disintegrate once I started beating the weft with the heddle. I decided to try using spray starch to strengthen it, but then had to wait until a suitable occasion to do it outside, as I didn’t really want starch on my carpet. I duly sprayed the first section, but all that happened was that the yarn stuck together in the shed and I had to separate it before each pass of the shuttle. So I lived dangerously and tried it without the starch, and it was absolutely fine. Phew.

Previously I’ve had trouble with my selvedges when weaving, but more by accident than design I worked out what I was doing wrong this time – the trouble was that I was weaving too far up before winding on, and getting close to the heddle, so the angle of the weft before beating was getting smaller, which pulled the fabric in at that point. This time I concentrated on making sure it was the same angle each time, and wound on every couple of inches, and it was fine.

I pinched the yarn at the opposite edge, pulled it tight at that angle, then let it relax before beating. The fact that it was handspun with a lot of bounce probably helped.

So after couple of hours on Saturday, and a few more on Sunday, to the accompaniment of Emelia Fox reading Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, I had this.

I did have enough weft for another inch or so, but I couldn’t fit any more on the warp, despite moving the heddle blocks to the rear position. I cut it off, and spent an hour or so making 50 fringe twists with my useful hair braider, and gave it a bit of handfulling in hot and then cold water (I wasn’t trusting it to the washing machine!), and then it looked like this.

To say I’m pleased with it would be a massive understatement – I keep looking at it and not quite believing that I made it. Especially when you consider that it started life like this –

100g each of merino and BFL, dyed by Fiona at Grace and Jacob.

Which then turned into these –

450m of merino (used for the weft) and 515m of BFL (warp). It’s like alchemy, it really is.

The twisted fringe was a little tedious, but I love it. There’s two strands in each twist, with five ends in each strand. 25 twists per end mean that I had 250 ends in total, and I used a 12.5 dent heddle. The weft was about 14epi, so it was nearly a balanced weave. It looked quite open before I washed it, but afterwards it’s closed up beautifully. The stole measures 56” x 17”, not including the fringe.

And look at those edges! They’re just so much better than anything I’ve managed before, I’m really pleased with them :)

And I love the subtle plaid effect the handspun yarn gives.

The camera chopped the top of my head off on this one, but it gives a reasonable idea of how lovely and drapy the fabric is.

It’s on Ravelry here.

So, that was the sublime, now to the ridiculous. I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but I finally fell for that frilly yarn that’s everywhere at the moment. It’s not for me, I hasten to add, but it’s my Mum’s birthday next month, and I think she’ll like it. Well, I hope she will. It’s not the Can Can that’s very popular, but a new version from Coates, called Frilly.

The ball band promises full instructions on the website, but they are possibly the worst instructions I’ve ever seen, so I winged it a bit, and it seemed to work.

I basically knitted into the third eyelet along on the second row down every time, which is a bit tedious, but it goes fairly quickly once you get into it – I only used six stitches per row, and there’s only 29m on the ball!

So after an evening’s knitting I had this, which I do actually think is quite pretty in a mad sort of way – it doesn’t look quite so much like a shower scrub as the Can Can version, and it feels okay, quite light and cottony. There’s a glitter in the edge, which jazzes it up too. Now I’m wondering whether my sister-in-law would like one for Christmas… But maybe I won’t knit it just yet!

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