Thursday, December 28, 2006

These few days between Christmas and New Year, are not necessarily good days for me, the weather has been dull, grey and dismal, and I feel a bit agitated and stir crazy.

I have finished spinning all the Finn Sheep and it has had a wash I am now leaving it to dry 'setting the twist'. Here's hoping for a let up in the dullness, so I can finish the month in style with photos, although the colour of this stuff is fiendishly difficult, maybe I could try scanning it!

I sorted through all of my ordinary knitting needles today, you know the straight ones with nobs on the end. The thing is due to one thing and another I have inherited old knitting needles from several sources over the years and I've never actually sorted through them all. I was working with the intention of making a knitting needle roll but ran out of steam when I realised the fabric I wanted was in the roof.

I discovered the only knitting needle size I don't have is 7 1/2 mm! Not that I have anything at all in mind that needs this size.

I then decided it's about time I knitted the gauge swatch for Durrow so I proceeded to winding my hank of yarn on my trusty ball winder..... ok so I thought I could do it on my own, and it did start to go ok until suddenly from out of nowhere it just tangled, and several deep breaths later I did get my first hank wound. After dinner when I decided that if I was going to commence both sleeves simultaneously I would need a 2nd hank, I commandeered Neo to wind the ball winder slowly, what was I thinking? Well actually I had better results than first time round, although getting Neo to wind in just one direction took a bit of doing.

Here is where I got the beautiful charcoal Blue Faced Leicester, (if you're on a yarn diet look away now!). It really is the softest wool ever, there's bound to be more up soon, but E-bay seems to be in a post Christmas lull. He's got Blue Faced Leicester sliver at rock bottom prices, so I will probably buy, dye and spin some of this, when I've worked through some more of the fibre in my stash, although spinning fibre doesn't count anyway!

2 comments:

Marianne said...

Sorry Jo, I'm a day late in getting here, I have no idea what happened to me last night...tired? Funny, I went through my knitting needles last night to mark them on a Needle Log that I can tuck into my pocketbag and take with me...oh just where ever I may go,heh. Oh, I know how that it on getting a tangled mess, I was winding a ball off a skein (it was on the swift even) and it ended up taking me several hours to get it untangled to wind....
I've heard about that Blueface Leicester and how impossibly soft it is, need to get me some of that some day.....will keep checking that site...

Anonymous said...

Now when you say you washed the yarn you spun before you left it to sit. Is that necessary? Because none of the online instructions I found said to do that. Although it would explain why my twist is not entirely set.