I'm back!

What a neglectful blogger I've been...in my defence, I have been busy banging my head against all kinds of virtual brick walls in an attempt to get the shop up and running online. Payment gateways, SSL certificates...merchant accounts, FTP sites...but hopefully soon you'll be able to buy some of this lovely stuff:

Hmm. Sock yarn. Lovely. Doesn't try to confound me with gibberish. Hasn't got a payment gateway to get up and running. Doesn't understand HTML. Lovely, lovely yarn! Yarn is my friend!

Of course in the interim, Christmas has been and gone, and I hope yours was a lovely one. Mr Yaffle and I spent some of ours in Glossop, just outside the Peak District National Park.

This amazing view was just outside the flat we stayed in. It would've been positively churlish not to go and see what was at the top, so we did. Now, my idea of walking is as follows. 1. get into the car with dog and wellies. 2. drive somewhere pretty, and flat. 3. get out of car with dog and wellies, and walk for a bit. 4. drive home, unexhausted, dry, and not aching. So this was a departure. We climbed a bit, and found a 'clough' (no, not that kind of clough) which I think is a kind of ravine:

and right at the top we found lots of these!

We told him about the sock yarn and everything, but he didn't look too impressed.

Main surprise of the festive season was that I did. NO. KNITTING. whatsoever! Unprecedented. I spent Christmas watching this, this and a bit of this. And then I got incredibly twitchy and yesterday couldn't resist casting on a new hat, and trying to start the sleeves of the Big Purple Endless Cardigan of Dullness. So that'll see me to the New Year and beyond...!

Dyeing to spin

Mine's a pint, landlord!

What a good night out that was. And it resulted in a pile of dyed roving, strangely enough.

The colours were inspired by a gorgeous scarf in a copy of Spin Off Magazine which my pal Rosie kindly gave me (thanks Rosie!!). The pattern is Morning Surf Scarf which is designed for handspun yarn. Even handspun yarn with lumps, bumps and dog hair in it. 

I've made friends with my spinning wheel again (we had a chat about the Itchy Yarn Incident and agreed to put it behind us) so here goes...

Watching skeins dry

The inclement weather at the weekend forced my skein-drying activities indoors, so the radiators were festooned with colourful hanks of wool (makes a change from smalls, eh?)

 

I've been experimenting with some paler shades although from the pictures you'd think I was my normal, neon self! It's hard to get the proportion of dye just right for pastel shades but some have turned out quite well.

After watching all that yarn dry, it was time to do something more interesting, such as knitting the Cardigan of Staggering Complexity^TM. You know, the purple one with the inconceivably complicated pattern of (gasp) knit one row, purl one row. It's reached the limp, curly waistcoat stage, so I'd better carry on and knit the sleeves. Before I do that, I'm mucking about with the idea of adding a different colour:

 

No, not greensleeves (how we laughed) - it's for the edging when it's finished! I've been crocheting up a sample to see what it would look like.

Turns out it looks like a frilly purple anti-macassar. If you're short of one for your settee, do let me know!

To stripe or not to stripe

There aren't enough pairs of DPNs in my house to accommodate all the 'sock' swatches I'm knitting! (I say 'socks' - I dispensed with ribbing pretty early on in the show and now I'm just knitting truncated tubes. Handy for all those occasions when you just can't do without a truncated tube!) It looks like a nasty bout of startitis, I know. But I'm testing out some of the skeins I've dyed (honest), just to see how they knit up.

It's really surprising and exciting to see how they turn out (did I mention that I don't get out much? And anyway, it's a welcome relief  form of procrastination change from the mono-colour cardigan).  I think these are my favourites so far.

I experimented with stripes, too. First I tried making a really long skein, like in this tutorial, only I got into a terrible tangle. I had to tie one end to the back of a 376 bus in order to wind the impossibly long skein, for starters (I'm assured that this is how Opal have done it for years. What's that bus doing, Granny? Well, dearie, it's winding yarn into special stripes!) On its return, I eventually managed to hoik the hank off the bus, down the lane, and straight into the bin, cutting out the middle-step of dyeing it altogether! Clever, eh? Hmm. Maybe self-striping yarn isn't the way forward... I stuck to the smaller skeins and tried to get some semblance of stripe into the yarn that way, instead:

(Do not adjust your set...)

Would you knit with this yarn? I mean, if it was in a different colourway, more to your tastes, would single stripes be something you could live with? They start to overlap a bit at the back (the pink and blue go purple and it zig-zags a bit) which is the nature of most hand-dyed yarns. But if that wasn't a problem for you would you knit it into socks? Here's your chance to vote one of the members of Yaffle Yarn out of the Yaffle House...

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The itchy and scratchy show

It seemed like a good idea at the time. To dye some roving that was a wool/nylon blend, then spin it up into lovely, strong sock yarn (just like the real thing!) Such a great idea.

And all the while I was dyeing this, and spinning it up, there was this weird, soundtrack-like background noise. A bit like a foreboding, sinister Bernard Hermann score. I couldn't work it out. When I stopped spinning, it stopped. And when I started spinning again, it carried on. I oiled my wheel, turned the telly up a bit and put it down to over-tiredness and too much wine. And then after the sample was all plied up and ready to knit with, it dawned on me as the yarn revealed its true self (and the soundtrack reached an alarming crescendo. Or it could've been the same moment the dog chose to knock the vase off the window-sill, not sure).

Horror-yarn that has all the softness and light fluffy texture of a used Brillo Pad. I can't spin fast enough or give the yarn enough twist so that the nylon lies flat. It just pokes itself out and sulks, refusing to make friends with the wool. Big machines can spin so fast that this doesn't happen, presumably, because the manufactured 80/20 I've been dyeing is perfectly soft and lovely! You wouldn't want to knit anything apart from a hair shirt with what I spun yesterday. Anyone know of a 'Knit Hair Shirts for Lowly Ascetics and Bald Hedgehogs' campaign I can participate in? argh!!!

Season of socks and mellow knitfulness

My yarn dyeing turned all autumnal and dropped off a tree this week. I dyed up a red and green combination after glancing over the wall and seeing Mrs Virginia Creeper in a back garden.

She gets into a lot of back gardens round here. We had to get an injunction out on her to stop her getting into our shed through the roof felt. Anyway. I dyed this.

Still life with apples, yarn and more stuff off the ground! The apples are Red Devils from our local farm shop (the best farm shop in the world because it has a fibreglass cow coming out of the building).They're pink inside too, which because I am pleased by small things, pleases me immensely...

And now for something completely different.

That's Terry Gilliam's autumnal animation from The Meaning of Life. (any opportunity to crowbar in a bit of Gilliam. Apologies). Moving swiftly back to knitting:

I think the Foliage 'n' Fruit combination's a winner. Watch this space for colourways inspired by: Spotted Laurel and Banana; Filbert and Pineapple Chunks (on a bed of wilted Daphne); Mugwort and Cling Peaches...or maybe you have your own favourite fruit'n'foliage medley (don't we all, folks?) you'd like to see expressed via the medium of knitting? Answers on a tin of fruit cocktail to the usual address...

The joy of socks

I'd love to say to you that I was inspired by the townscapes of Egon Schiele, or that a beautiful crocus flower leapt up and spat at me 'Dye! Dye! Dye!' and that such things propelled me into a frenzy of creativity in which I came up with this:

But it's actually the fact that I couldn't find any orange and purple sock yarn. Anywhere. Ever. In the universe. At least not one that could be posted to me without it being stopped at customs and questioned by officials. So I dyed this skein. And it knits up like this.

I love orange and purple together. Although knitting this as a passenger in the car yesterday did make me feel sick. I like to think that it was knitting in a car per se, not the colours that did it.

Having dyed this, I found a use for at least one of the pieces of junk in my house:

*sigh*. The beginning of a beautiful friendship. Sock, meet book. Book, this is sock. You look like a great couple. (have I read this? have I heck as like. Sorry Mr Lawrence, it's not your writing. Shamefully, I bought it for the cover. Hands up who hasn't done that? Book as desirable object in itself regardless of writing contained therein, discuss and hand in your essays later. I'll be setting a test on Tuesday.) This could be the start of a whole new website full of socks that match my dusty old books...imagine the possibilities...The Richard and Judy Sock Club. Socks and Lovers. Lady Chatterley's Socks. Miss Pettisock lives for her Endpapers!

Note to self: introduce Iron to Tablecloth before taking next batch of pictures. And hide books as far away from socks as possible.