Good and soggy.

So much rain this summer, but there’s an upside to that – what with the car not working, and the holidaying this month, it’s probably the only reason the tomatoes are still alive. Got up there a couple of days ago, and was pleased to find that they’d not keeled over with blight (so there’s no way that could’ve been blight on the spuds, I reckon), and they’d not actually started to ripen yet (another silver lining of the cool summer). This might seem like an odd thing to be pleased about, but I’d got visions of finding lots of overripe tomatoes going to waste when I got up there.

This photo taken *after* some extensive pruning, stopping and side-shoot removal. I don’t think it’ll be long before the first Sungold start coming in – the ‘oldest’ toms on the lowest trusses are just starting to turn.

We have foxes on the allotments, unsurprisingly, as well as the equally common two-footed variety of pest now and again, but the soft earth revealed we’ve had some more interesting visitors recently –

Two pads – deer!

The old allotment regularly had deer visiting, as well as invisible rabbits, but it was further out of the city, and I was quite surprised to find we have them at Petershill too. I don’t suppose we’ll ever see them, what with all the noise we usually make when we’re up there en masse – and when I’m up there on my own I’m usually looking at the ground.

The sweetcorn, looking weird, and not nearly as tall as it ought.

Pumpkins looking good, though!

I forgot to harvest the one sizeable courgette while I was up there – need to get back up there soon. The shallots (which are also weird – I’ve never seen shallots bolt before this year) are only half harvested, though I managed to get all the rest of the Japanese over-wintered onions out, and the garlic still needs lifting. And the leeks are desperate to be planted in their final positions.

I didn’t photograph the brassicas – well, that’s not strictly true, I took one photo of the over-wintering cauliflowers I put out last time we were up, if only to record the damage that’s been done to them. I covered them with wire mesh, so I’m fairly certain it was slugs rather than pigeons – unfortunately this has rendered the photo entirely pointless, as you can hardly see through the mesh. The PSB-lings in the nursery bed look equally munched on – I’m really, really not happy about that, I’m hoping they can still be saved.

On the upside, most of the calabrese I planted out looks fine and healthy – I may have to take the netting off one end of it, where the plants have grown tallest. You can just about make them out in the bottom of the photo of the sweetcorn, above.

Busy, busy, busy…

…back from our holidays in the north east of Scotland, and while I didn’t get a whole load of spinning or knitting done while I was away, it’s been fairly rainy until today, so I’ve made a fair bit of progress into those previously-blogged Supercook-dyed BFL lollipops…

…in the past few days.

I started with the red/yellow, aiming for a reasonably fine weight (mostly due to the fact that there’s only 25g of each colour). My singles seemed fairly thin, and to my delight, pretty even –

And they plied up into this 2ply –

Most definitely *not* a laceweight. About 50 yards, 14wpi, which I think makes it about a DK or sport weight. (Though of course a true DK would be something like an 8ply, not a 2ply.)

Next up I tried the red/blue – attempting to spin finer again, and it seemed like I might have cracked it –

I made laceweight, but only by a whisker and in the loosest sense of the word. This is about 18-20 wpi, 68 yards of it.

As I plied it, though, I had an epiphany. I mean, I’d read that the act of S-twisting Z-twisted singles during plying balances out the twist, and I’m sure that I’d also read that this opens the singles out, making the resulting yarn softer, but it took plying this yarn to make the little lightbulb go on in my head as to why my finished 2ply was quite so much thicker in diameter than the sum of its singles would suggest.

I’d been hoping for a thin, reasonably tightly plied but still not too hard yarn – something like the laceweight I’m knitting with at the moment – and while it was nice yarn, this latest certainly wasn’t as fine as that. So I moved onto the purple, with my newfound knowledge, and am spinning as fine as I possibly can with the great big spindle I’ve got (yes, I’m considering purchasing a lighter one, but for the time being we’ll see how I get on with this one), and remembering to spin tight – hopefully tight enough –

I’m a third of the way through this roving, so it may yet be a day or two before I have a plied finished product to blog. (I’m being so tight with this stuff too – the last lot I halved really poorly, and to save myself being left with yards of unplied single I took the remaining one, wound it on to two cardboard toiletroll bobbins, did a bit of end twisting and carried on plying – and am now left with about a foot of unplied single. There’s thrifty.)

And just so I haven’t got absolutely nothing to knit, a couple of weeks ago I cast on the Adamas shawl, with the KnitPicks Shimmer I received from ikisti in the ravelry Who Knits? Jelly Baby swap in July. It’s lovely wool (though I probably should know better than to knit with it in the evening by lamplight after I’ve had a drink – several of these rows have been done several times over), and an interesting pattern, so far.

Yes, those are straight needles. I have only just purchased my first pair of Addi circular needles, and started using them the yesterday evening, after I took that photo. TBH, I like using straight needles – they’re what I’m used to, and their sturdiness and even-all-the-way-along-hold-open-your-stitches diameter makes for much easier counting than I found last night with the Addis. I suppose I’ll get used to them in time – I’m certainly liking the fact that they’re not as likely to fall out of my stitches while I’m not looking and make me squeak.

And now – it’s time to go up to the garden. I’ve not been up much in the last month, due to poorly cars, holidays, and bad weather, so we’ll see what we find when we get up there.

Mad professor time..

In a former life I was a lab technician, and applied for (and was offered) a job at Stevenson’s Dyers, in Derbyshire – I didn’t take it, with one thing and another… I expect it would’ve been just a *tad* different to what I’ve been doing in the kitchen this week, though the principles would be fairly close.

I probably wouldn’t have had to have made my own glassware out of Paul Newman’s Ranch Dressing bottles, for starters….

I even attempted a spot of chromatography..

These are Supercook food colourings – the top row, yellow and red, behaved as I expected and didn’t split into anything – they don’t in the roving, either. The black and blue did some interesting things, the blue seems to contain a vivid cerise colour, as well as the turquoise which is more indicative of the colour of the dye when it’s in the pot – the black seems to contain a similar red/cerise colour, but this time mixed with a dark green. (That’s not proper chromatography paper, it’s just a bit of ordinary A4.)

And this is the result of my experiments – I did make detailed notes, of time soaking, vinegar/water ratios, that kind of thing – and tried a few different methods of applying heat. The red/blue ‘lollipop’ was, I think, the most successful and reliable method, using a steamer. The purple roving was a mixture of red and blue food colouring, initially just dyed in the sun, but despite adding salt, it came out more maroon than purple, and not all of the blue seemed to be taken up… basically, I dumped a load more blue into the ziploc bag I’d sat it in, and put it in the steamer – it came out a much more pleasant purple (there’s more variation in it than is immediately obvious in that picture, too).

There’s 25g of roving apiece in those, too – I’m going to pack them for my holiday, to keep me amused in the evenings when we’ll most likely be in the caravan (we’re staying in a caravan on the Banffshire coast, near Findochty, and I suspect there’ll be a few quiet evenings).

Finally, this is a collection of all the things I’ve spun so far, plus the Cygnet superwash at bottom left, dyed by my eldest daughter. I knitted up the very tightly spun and plied Manx Loghtan – it’s a strange material, remarkable in its sturdiness, but oddly elastic.

Seeing the Yellowhammer alongside Wee Tut, you can tell they’re not really suitable for plying together, but I’ve resolved to just keep experimenting and practising and if I find a plying partner for either of them at some point in the future, great, and if I don’t, then so be it.

Patience is a virtue…

…I’m still not sure I’ve got a bundle of. At least, when it comes to dyeing. After my first attempt, where I wasn’t sure if I’d partially felted the roving (it just came out looking somehow frizzier than it went in), I thought I might try being super-gentle, and leave it in a jar in the sun..

..but it seems the road to felt is paved with good intentions. About an hour or so after I’d sat it on the windowsill, it was zzzzing away in the microwave. So much for that.

(I suppose I should mention the fact that initially, I was just dyeing this with turmeric, to make a hopefully similar yellow to that in the single now known as Wee Tut, and then had a small brian wave and thought I’d drop a spot of black onto it – going with the Tutankhamen theme, and all — and that ended up smooshing through the roving, separating into browns and greens. At this point, I swore, and realised I’d made something that might not actually go with the Tut single at all.

So, it became this –

Bad shadow there obscuring the greener part of the roving, but you get the drift. And I’m sure you can see some of that aforementioned frizz, too.

Still, it did spin up, in a fashion (was harder work than I’m sure BFL should be) and here it is, pre-twist-setting –

I decided to call it Yellowhammer, because as it chequered across itself on the spindle, that’s exactly what it made me think of.

I’ve now got my 500g of BFL from bluefaced.com sitting ready to be processed in some way or another, and my first couple of attempts have convinced me that the methodical, scientific approach is the way forward. Lots of control samples, lots of records, lots of patience. And lots more reading. Because I’ve only been doing this a couple of weeks, I’ve only spun up a few different bits and bobs, and already I’m finding myself looking at similarly coloured bits of stringy stuff and thinking ‘hmm… was this from spinning experiment x, or spinning experiment y? And did I spin that as tight as spinning experiment z?’ (Though there’s one advantage to the dyeing – I know which one was which. Though that’s probably also because there’s only two of them.)

The same day I dyed the roving, eldest daughter dyed some Cygnet superwash with Supercook food colourings, with pretty successful results – I’ve only got this photo of it sat in its post-colour-dotting state uploaded at the moment, must take a photo of the skein and post that too, as while there’s a lot of undyed space in it, it’s quite pretty (not least because it has no frizzy feltiness going on at all).