Earflaps

I finished my colourful hat over the holidays, it was a quick and easy knit. Now I wonder if we’ll get any frost so I can try it on without boiling my ears! I normally wear fleece headbands in the cold because it’s easier to fit with long hair; what usually troubles me is wind hurting my inner ear, not so much the temperature, and knit fabric tends not to block the wind. But they are also very boring – so what else to do with all that chunky, funky handspun? (yes, I’m asking!)

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Last week, last post

It’s a bone-cold, lazy (ie exhausted) indoorsy type of week with no social duties whatsoever, yay. I’m knitting a hat from an old handspun skein for no particular reason, G is finally updating my webserver and in return I’m rebuilding the website for his gun club.

It’s always fun to see how a handspun or handdyed yarn knits up, sometimes they need crochet or weaving to show off, other times they really seem to be their prettiest as a skein. I had some which were too small for the pattern, but if I like the fit, they may become headbands for my delicate ears.

I began writing a typical “status of the year” report, slept on it and decided I really couldn’t be bothered and had no profound learning experiences to impart.

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Lincoln green 1

I created this post 2 years ago with the intention of writing a series devoted to different procedures. But my woad crops failed and other stuff happened, as per usual, and here we are. So while waiting for black paint to arrive some time in the distant future; in between holiday house chores, I have a bit of green for you.

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Pattern testing

poinsettia1For the last couple of months I’ve spent a lot of time weaving on the computer. Making endless variations of patterns for all 12 shafts, exploring how to enlarge them (rather than just choose a thicker yarn), working from scratch or from downloaded files.

But I wanted to see what it looked like with yarn rather than pixels, so I made a narrow wool warp and planned to do maybe 50 cm of each draft to have a bit of fabric for a sample book and perhaps sew some pincusions or whatever. I should have doubled it in length however because of course I continued learning and developing after I had begun weaving, so after a while my samples became 30, then 25 cm long and as I got to the part where I needed to cut and rethread after each draft as well as running out of yarn, even shorter. Threading errors began to appear because I hurried through, etc. etc.

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Getting there: Carding

Had I known how many years it would take to completion, I might never have accepted those first 5 dorset/suffolk fleeces, but here we are closer to completion than not, at last.

Every time I do a post about these, I also look for the original post, the very beginning of the project, and once again realize that it’s nonexistent. I got the first 3 fleeces before the blog began in 2012, so I never recorded the scouring etc. in here, the next two landed the year after, where I probably thought I’d already recorded it so thought nothing of it. Continue reading “Getting there: Carding”