The Dark Half approaches!

We’re just starting our preparations for this evening – hope everyone’s looking forward to a fun Halloween/Samhain/Día de los Muertos weekend.

Obviously in an ideal world we’d be all ready to go at this point, but no. I’ve spent the last fortnight getting my car ready for an MOT retest, after it failed the emissions test first time out. Thankfully it made it through on its second attempt, but it’s meant that I’ve thought of little else for the last fourteen days.

And those of you that have spawned some freaky halloween knitwear in the form of peculiarclavas, I salute and thank you! Please forgive my apparent lack of concern for those with seaming and end-weaving allergies…

So – time to get off the computer and Do Spooky Stuff. (There may be pics to follow.)

Three Ply III: The Search for Squoosh.

I think we’re getting there.

This is around 10-14wpi – it’s fairly thick and thin, but my main concern with this fibre was not putting way too much twist in and I seem to have managed that, at least.

There’s 161yds, around 70g (I may pop it in my pocket and weigh it on the Post Office scales this afternoon).

I’m pleased with it – it’s an almost-DK, I think? A good part of it is certainly DK weight, some is sport weight – there’s likely areas that are fingering weight, too. Onwards and upwards!

(I’m a little meh about the colour, but never mind.)

I’ve swatched the last 3ply I did, which is certainly overplied -

That’s a 3mm needle, so I’m not sure if the fabric is dense enough.

It’s really stretchy. I expect it’ll make a hardwearing pair of socks, I just need to work out whether I want to drop a needle size.

Baalaclava!

Well, this is what I’ve been up to…

And I’m sorry, but I’m a sucker for a good pun.

This pattern is entirely seamless – the ears are worked by picking up stitches, and there’s a little grafting at the front – instructions for which are given in the pattern.

As per my previous mask patterns, I’ve used an aran weight yarn with 4mm needles. The pattern gives two sizes – standard (19″ to 23″) and extra large (24″ and up).

PDF download courtesy of Ravelry.com, payment via Paypal as usual – click the button below to buy -

£3.00 GBP

Green things

Late August was very, very wet, and we didn’t get up to the allotment as much as I’d have liked. When we did get there the soil was utterly sodden, so it was hard to get much of anything done anyway.

The last couple of weeks have seen a good amount of beautiful dry autumn days, however, and saw us up at the allotment every couple of days, whenever we could make a trip to Glasgow worthwhile.

The weekend before last I got handy with my saw, and took down the dead tree that was cluttering up the smaller outer bed. I’d been trying to weed round it and it kept poking me, so I fetched the saw to take the lower branches off, realised it’d finally completely died – deer had taken the bark off halfway down the trunk – and practised a bit of lumberjacking (very satisfying it was, too).

Later that afternoon I took the saw to the hedge/copse that takes up the outer bed on the other side, and which sucks who knows how much goodness out of the soil (I may have mentioned it before – it came with the garden, a previous tenant had planted a ‘hedge’ which is now at least a dozen beech trees). It was a token gesture really – I took the lower branches that’d grown out over the paths down, but barely made a dent – but lucky for me, as I was in the middle of doing it another allotmenteer turned up at the garden and told me to stop messing about with my rusty handsaw as he had a chainsaw. Long and short of it, they’re coming down in a week or two, yay.

I found some leeks nestled under the PSB – I’d forgotten they were there, to be honest, and they were nearly hoed into nothingness – some of them didn’t surviving the weeding, but those that did have gone in by the parsnips, where my failed peas were.

It’s ridiculously late for them to be going in, but they’re more likely to do something here than if I didn’t do anything at all with them, so I thought I might as well. I’ve fetched some japanese onions and garlic sets from the garden centre to put in (‘Senshyu Yellow’ and ‘Marco’, respectively), they’re destined for the tattie bed, though.

Which is/was here. (You can see the stump of the ex-tree in the background, and all the bits of tree on the floor next to it.) I looked back on the blog and noticed I hadn’t made a note of what varieties of potato I’d planted – the first earlies, that we’re still making our way through now, are ‘Foremost’, and I’m really pleased with them. They’re a good firm potato, and have no scab or anything bothering them. The second earlies (that I’m curious to see, I might actually dig up some next time I’m up even though there’s still the Foremost there) are Charlotte, which I’ve never grown before.

And this is green in another sense – I’ve joined the glasgow freeshare yahoo group, and managed to get a bike for the eldest -

Thanks to my fellow freesharer for that, it’s much appreciated.

It’s been a long, long time coming…

I have never spent so long plying as I have with this yarn. Spinning the singles took an inordinate amount of time – I just checked, and it’s getting on for six months since I started it – but I hadn’t bargained on it taking me the best part of a week to get the plying done.

And now it *is* done, and I’m happy with it – the weight/yardage is good, it’s 30wpi, 585yds, and weighs roughly 70 grams. If I’d got to grips with the snapping sooner it could’ve been almost half as much again, as I began with 100 grams of fibre.

The mini-skein is down to me being cackhanded winding the plied bobbin into a skein – by the time I’d got to the last few yards my arms and back were starting to ache like mad. I need to knock up a niddy-noddy, because my improvised things-to-wind-skeins-on – ie various bits of furniture – are all a bit crap for one reason or another. I guess it wasn’t too much of a bind when I was only producing one or two hundred yards of yarn, but I really noticed it this time.

A better close-up, though the colours are a little brighter than in reality -

There must’ve been a stupendous amount of twist in those singles because even with me treadling like a loony while plying, the skein came out soft and perfectly balanced. And for once I have an amount I could contemplate making something bigger than a scarf with!

I *am* knitting something at the moment – just the one thing – and it’s not the peculiarclava design I was wrestling with last month. I put that to one side… and started a different one. This one’s being much more cooperative than the last, I’m glad to say. All being well I should be drafting the pattern and publishing it to my ravelry shop in the next week or two.

Obviously now I’ve finished up that last yarn – which I haven’t been able to come up with a name for yet – I’m keen to get on with something else, so next up on the wheel will be the fibre I dyed up last, which I’ve named ‘Roseraie de l’Hay’ (sounds a bit waffly, I know, but the colours remind me of one of the rose cultivars I came across during a previous life as a horticultural dogsbody worker). I got my inspiration from a comment by Cat, so thanks for that! I’m just having a wander through your blog this afternoon with a cup of tea, it’s jampacked with all sorts of lovelies.

And I think I’ll make a start on another laceweight. I have a lot of Shetland sliver which would be ideal for this, I think… and I’d like to try using some Shetland yarn to knit some Shetland lace.

And the not-knitting continues…

Yesterday I found myself nearing the end of all the dyed up fibre I had left upstairs – something had to be done!

Supercook to the rescue. (I *will* try my hand with the sugarflair pastes at some point, I just haven’t got round to, um, deciding where to buy it from yet – non-food-safe dyes are still something I’m wary to try, mind you.)

I didn’t have a lot of food colouring in – a smidge of yellow, half a bottle each of blue and red – so I did a bit of blending and aimed for muted, and didn’t worry too much about undyed patches. I made up two pots of dye – 15ml of blue/5ml yellow/4 drops red in the first, 10ml red/2.5ml blue in the second, and made them both up to 200ml with the water/vinegar mix I’d soaked the fibre in, after draining and squeezing it out (a roughly 10:1 mix, fibre soaked for 20-30 mins).

I coiled the fibre in the top of the steamer and doused the edge of one half with the red, and the other with the green – starting at the furthest edges, leaving a little gap down the centre, and then pressing the dye towards the centre, in an attempt to graduate the intensity of the colour (it sort of worked, I think). It got steamed for about an hour, then cooled gradually before rinsing thoroughly.

I’ve another 3ply in mind for this – and this time I’m planning to use a control card, and get involved with tpi, and if all goes well it’ll be a nice squooshy DK yarn. (There’s only around 75g or so of fibre there, so obviously there won’t be a great deal of whatever it becomes.)

I’ve only a little way to go with the fibre I’ve been spinning as a laceweight for… I forget how long, exactly, but it’s somewhere in the region of bloody ages -

It’s going well, the snapping problem is behind me (mostly), and it finally feels like the end is in sight, which I think is helping with the enjoyment factor. At one point I’d fallen out with this fibre, and it was feeling like a bit of a slog (eventually I figured out that I could wind off bobbins onto toilet roll middles and have more than one project on the go – this helped enormously). I did spend lots of yesterday doing lots of spinning, though.

I’ve even been working on this -

I’ve had this on my one-and-only spindle for almost a whole year now. (Yikes.) I need to get it done and get closure or whatever, so I’ve made a little 10-mins-a-day – at least – resolution with myself.

I’ve toyed with the idea of plying this with silk thread, which means getting hold of a substantial length of that – so far I’ve only found spools of a couple of hundred yards at most, and while I’m not certain, I don’t think that’ll be enough.

A three ply of substance

Our holiday was lovely – felt like it went on for ages, too. I came back refreshed, if a little damp.. but with a severe case of knitter’s block, unfortunately. My peculiarclava has gone nowhere since I last mentioned it (other than to the bottom of my knitting bag).

So the first thing I did – no, hang on, that was a shedload of laundry – the second thing I did when I got back was pull out my spinning wheel, and set about finishing the 3 ply I was almost done with before I left.

It came out pretty well – a bit firm (read: large swathes of it could’ve been mistaken for shoelace) the first time out, so I ran it back onto the wheel a couple of times and took some of the plying twist back out, and now it’s balanced, and actually I’m pretty pleased with it.

These are ‘before’ shots -

And after taking some of that twist back out -

It’s not a hugely visible difference, but it certainly feels a lot softer, and it went from being around 18 wpi and 270 yards long to being 16 wpi and 295 yards long. I’m amazed by the extra 25 yards, if I’m honest.

I’m not entirely certain, but it’s just a little shy of 100g, according to my (admittedly not terribly sensitive) kitchen scales.

What’s red and invisible?

No tomatoes.

This is my favourite joke of all time, but sadly, this is also the current situation re my tomato plants. They’re all in the green bin now – bar the last three, as I got so far and then was overcome with ennui, so they’re still sitting in the growbag looking vile. I’ll probably put them out of their misery later today. I’m getting sick of looking at them now, apart from anything else.

We went away on holiday at the start of August – came back briefly the second week to pick up camping gear.

(A week in the Lakes…

…followed by a week in the Highlands.

*end of sneaky holiday snap spammage*)

The plants were showing definite signs of blight back then. By the time we returned (last weekend) they’d utterly succumbed.

The courgettes in the yard were starting to look a funny colour on our first return too, but they had a couple of good fruits on them, so I put it down to a possible day or two of dryness (there’s not been more than a couple of days without rain up here for at least a month). However, it seems it was something more revolting and ultimately fatal than that. I now have only one backyard courgette plant, and I suspect that’s not going to last much longer either. The poor things looked like props in some post-apocalyptic tale when I got back a week ago – all yellow and decaying, for no immediately obvious reason. Very slightly closer inspection revealed a quite spectacular invasion of slugs – even the stalks of the leaves were filled with them.

Excuse me while I take a minute to settle my stomach.

I have no photos of any of this, because frankly, I don’t want to see that and I’m sure no one else does either. Lucky for me, we got up the allotment yesterday – during a break in the rain – to fetch some potatoes, and the one courgette plant up there, which *had* been trailing behind my yard courgettes rather pathetically, is looking happy, and green, and had three or four nice little fruits and one almost-marrow for me to take home.

I lifted the garlic, and what passes for my shallot harvest this year, while I was there – happily, the garlic was a good result, despite being a post-Christmas planting (the first time I’ve ever done this). So here’s a bit of a pic of those.

I’ve got textile-related relating to do too, but for the sake of my categories I’m going to do that in a fresh post.

A finished yarn!

This has taken a while (and I still haven’t finished off the dusky pink singles I was spinning before this, no).

It started life as this BFL -

In attempt to create something other than laceweight, I decided to have a go at my first 3ply.

I blogged about it here.

By which point I was aware that it was still rather fine…

…and no, the plying didn’t save me.

30ish grams, 227 yards, 30 WPI. Doh.

I’m persisting though, and trying upping the amount of predrafting I do. I divided the other roving I dyed up for the dyealong into 3 balls, and have divided up each of those into 3 pieces.

So far it’s looking thicker. It’s certainly progressing light-years faster.

I’ve still not much idea what weight this single will become as a 3ply yarn though – I need to print out the spinner’s control card a kind soul on the UK Spinner’s list on ravelry has made, I think.

Rain+sun+warm

..equals happy plants.

Also quite a few slugs, which I think probably also equals happy toad -

He was having a bit of a nap in the old compost bag, which I was about to use as a container for some flowers and a few herbs. He’s up the top of the garden now (as is the bag, I hope he finds a better bed because I could do with the container, to be honest).

I took these photos of the tomato and chilli plants last thursday – was about to take some more, but the batteries just went on the camera -

They’re a little further on now, and have a bit of a crop going on – these are the Sungold, which in my experience have always been first to crop, particularly outdoors -

I think these chillies are the jwalas that dad gave me (jwala apparently means volcano in Hindi), if not they’ll be the Heatwave – I was happily planting stuff out and then realised I’d not bothered to take note of which pots I’d planted where -

The cucumbers are still at the dinky stage – these are outdoor ridge types -

This was one of the courgette plants last thursday -

I took these two off this morning (again, they’re languishing in the fridge unphotographed), about five inches long and an inch wide. Happily there are going to be plenty more where they came from, and this is my second, smaller plant at home, photographed today -

I may take these off too. You can see there are no male flowers in sight, and I’ve noticed that these early fruits tend to rot off before they reach any considerable size, which I can only assume is because they’ve not been fertilised.

Up at the allotment, this is what was going on before we went away at the weekend -

We’re off up there after lunch, and I expect these will be quite large by now.

Just beside the courgette, this row of kales (cavolo nero and dwarf green curled), and a red cabbage, which seem to be doing well so far -

And beside them, a few more dwarf green curly kale, a red salad bowl lettuce (and a long-bolted chard) -

The parsnips are patchy at best (and I really do need to remember to take photographs after I weed) -

…and the garlic is passable. Not a lot to say about those shallots in the foreground, except to say that it’s possible they could’ve done with more water, and next year I will be buying new sets, rather than reusing last year’s tiny bulbs -

The other, netted, brassica bed -

Redbor kale in the foreground – netted against pigeons, weeks ago – and purple sprouting broccoli (and possibly also a couple of overwintering caulis) and red cabbages that I netted that day after discovering they’d had a visit from the cabbage white butterfly.

And finally, the potatoes -

I planted them at weekly/two weekly intervals, starting with the ones at the back – which yielded a boiling last week -

Yum.

Knitting *is* happening. Lace thing is still in very early development, new peculiarclava is in progress and is in fact in some way related to this plant-based post… (yes, that’s meant to be a hint as to what it is).