Tour de Fleece

Well, yeah. I’ve disappeared from the blog again for 2 weeks. I have no excuse. It’s not even nice outside so I could blame it on summer. I think it got all the way up to the mid-60’s today, though at least there’s been sunshine this afternoon and evening. I think everybody in this neck of the woods is just sick to death of grey and rain. It normally doesn’t hang on this long, but there you go. And I have a nasty sinus infection and/or cold, so it makes it even worse. I guess if it was gorgeous outside and I was sick, I’d be even more pissed off, so there’s that.

I have been doing a little knitting, but mostly on my plain old sock. Sinus medicine doesn’t go well with complex lace knitting, so that’s pretty much out. If you think I do stupid knitting tricks on whiskey, you should see my knitting on antihistamines and decongestants (and cough medicine, and ibuprofen, and pretty much anything else in the medicine cabinet offering even a remote possibility of relief).

I do appear to be able to spin on drugs, however. The Tour de France started today, and the Ravelry Tour de Fleece started as well. I’ve signed up, of course. It won’t be too hard, since I spin almost every day already. The only rules are that you try to spin every day that the Tour rides, and to spin something challenging on the 22nd, the toughest cycling day.

Here’s what I’m doing. Though I have 7 spindles, all with something in progress on them, I’ve chosen one to be the primary Tour spindle. Hey, you don’t see Lance changing bikes every hour, do you?*

This is the spindle entry:

Pretty, eh? Click on the picture to see. That’s a Bosworth Moosie, made out of real moose antler. Of course he’s named Bullwinkle. What else would you name a moose antler spindle? I’ve had my name on the waiting list for this since last year, and got it this week just in time for the tour. The fiber is from Anna at Corgi Hill Farm. It’s a blend of merino, camel, silk, and firestar for sparkle. Sparkle is always good. And isn’t that a lovely color? You could get a lot of Corgi hair in that and never know it. The color name is really something like Sea Salt Caramel, but I think it looks a lot like Corgi.

And this is what I’m doing on my wheel.

Yeah, I’m mixing drugs and alcohol. What can I say, I live on the edge.

The fiber is Wensleydale, from Damselfly Yarns. I finished the spinning today, and can now wade into the plying part. The goal for this is a 3 ply sock yarn. I think it will be a little heavier than fingering weight, but I’m still pleased with how it’s turning out. Here’s what Wensleydales look like, if you’re interested.

And just because I learned how to do this today, one last photo:

Hope your 4th of July is full of great picnic food and fireworks tomorrow!

*I’m making that up, I have no idea about that. He might change bikes every hour for all I know. Humor me, I’m sick.

UFO-WIP Progress

I’ve done a little more work on that UFO/WIP pile.

The whole pile, for your reference:

And The List:

1) True Blood Faery sweater

2) Crazy King Cole Mohair thing, um, stole RIP

3) Wollmeise Squashed Frog Socks

4) Grey Ribbed Peace Fleece Socks with red accents RIP

5) Frootloops Morning Glory Stole

6) Puppy Mittens

7) Evenstar Shawl

8 ) Baktus Shawlette Finished

9) Euroflax Linen Facecloth Finished

10) Spirit In The Sky Beret Finished

First up, #2 on the list.

This is really pretty stuff, but it just wasn’t working. The yarn is King Cole Luxury Mohair, color Biaritz, which is gorgeous. I started this a really loooooonggggg time ago, and just picked up needles and cast on for a garter stitch stole thing. This yarn deserves better, I just don’t know what. I do know that I have no plans to rip mohair anytime again in the near future. If it hadn’t have been 7AM, I’d have considered whiskey. I’m thinking that a feather and fan stole might show this yarn off to better advantage, but for now it’s back in the stash. RIP!

Next is some lovely Peace Fleece.

This was a misguided attempt to use leftovers. I had the Ukrainian Red leftover from a hat that I made a friend, and a couple of skeins of Negotiation Grey from John’s sweater. I decided I would make some heavy weight socks, with the red for cuffs, heels, and toes. I started the ribbing, and hated how it was working out, and it has been in the UFO pile for over two years. I pulled it out of the box yesterday and knit a row and gave up. It needs to be on smaller needles, and wasn’t working with a 2 by 2 rib. Then I tried to find the rest of the grey, and it’s disappeared into the stash somewhere. If you’ve seen my stash, you well know that this is a serious problem. There is no way I will ever find it.  The only way I ever find anything in my stash is if I put it into numbered boxes and record the item in my Mac Bento database. If I just jam something into a box to get it off the floor, thinking I’ll remember where it is, I am totally screwed.  So this one bit the dust as well. The red yarn is in a numbered box, and it’s recorded, so if I ever find the grey yarn, I might resurrect this. For now, it’s gone. RIP!

That leaves me with 5 active projects, which is a lot more manageable. I’d like to get one of those shawls off the list, and then I’ll be at the perfect WIP number: 1 sweater-like project, 1 sock project, 1 lace project, and 1 other small interesting project.

Have a happy Summer Solstice! It’s 51 degrees here, overcast and grey, and forecast to be drizzly all day. Ick. We might break out the gin and tonics tonight anyway, even if the weather’s not cooperating.

And one last item. I have been getting a ton of spam comments lately. My spam filter picks them up and puts them in a holding cell, and usually I scan through them to make sure a real comment wasn’t tagged by mistake. There were so many of them when I signed in this morning that I just deleted them. If you have left a real comment, and it’s not showing up, try again, or email me at loretteireneatcomcastdotnet to let me know.

More Finished Stuff

Boy, with a title that enticing, I should get loads of visitors flocking to the blog. Anyway, this time it’s spinning stuff that’s finished. First up is some pretty pretty Carolina Blue yarn.

Project Details

Fiber: This is a merino tencel 50/50 blend, purchased from Yarn Chef.  The color name was “Whisp of Clouds” but it is most certainly a Carolina blue. I live with a good Carolina boy, and he knows his blue.

Wheel or Spindle? Spun on the Schacht Matchless wheel. I used the high speed whorl and high speed bobbins. I think the ratio setting was 19.5:1. I set the wheel up in double drive.

Style of Spinning: Again, I’d point out that my style is still a little inconsistent. This is mostly an attempt at a short forward draw. It’s a 2-ply.

Yardage/Weight/WPI: I started with 12 oz of fiber, and ended up with 11.88 oz of yarn, or 337 g. It’s about 14-16 WPI (wraps per inch), depending on where I measure, which makes this somewhere between a heavy fingering and a light sport weight. There are about 684 yards.

What I Plan To Make With It: There should be enough of this for a shawl/stole of some sort. It will need to marinate in the stash for a bit first (see last post regarding numerous WIPs/UFOs).

What I Learned: Well. I feel like I’ve finally spun up enough fiber that I can start working more on being consistent. I sat down this past week and started to re-read The Intentional Spinner by Judith MacKenzie McCuin (reviewed here). When I started to learn to spin, every time I talked to more experienced spinners (meaning pretty much everybody but me) I kept hearing “well, Judith says this about that subject”. I read through the book last year, but there is just so much information in it that a brand new spinner can’t really absorb it all at once. I don’t want to just spin and see what I end up with, my goal is to say “I want to spin x type of yarn for a specific project, then figure out how to get there.

I learned with this project that it’s not entirely about the size whorl I use that gets the yarn I want. Typically the extra fast and extra extra fast whorls should get you to thinner and thinner yarn. I need to work more on tweaking the settings of the wheel, and also on my drafting technique to get to that thin yarn. I’m also beginning to discover that I like the Scotch tension set-up a little better than double drive. I set the wheel back up in Scotch drive after I finished this yarn, and I’m finding it much easier to control what I’m making. I also have learned that I need to change the drive band now and then. This should seem obvious, but I changed it out after I finished this, and the wheel is working much better.

The next project (yes, you get a two-for-one!) is spindle spun.

Project Details

Fiber: This is some unknown wool-sparkle blend that I got from one of the vendors at the Whidbey spin-in earlier this year. The sparkle stuff is Firestar or something similar. This color combo of red and vivid purple reminds me of a children’s book, but I can’t remember which one. It had illustrations of fireworks over a city, with big flashes of red and purple. It was one of my favorite kid books when I was a kid. Anybody remember which one I’m talking about? I don’t remember the story either, so I’m really not much help here. I’m in my early 50’s, if that helps anybody place this. I think it had dragons, but I might be making that up.

Wheel or Spindle? Spun and plied on my Bosworth midi spindle.

Style of Spinning: This is a worsted type of spinning, again pretty much like I do on the wheel, just with a drop spindle. This is also a 2-ply.

Yardage/Weight/WPI: I started with about 3 oz of fiber, ended up with 2.66 oz of yarn, or 75.5 g. There are 264 yards here. This is about 18 WPI, so more like a light fingering or heavy lace weight.

What I Plan To Make With It: I think this will make a pretty scarf or neck warmer, something with a lacy pattern.

What I Learned: I can spin a lot more evenly and finely on a spindle than my wheel. I’ve finished yarn on the spindle before, but with the other yarn I’ve done, I’ve chickened out when it came to plying and did it on the wheel. I decided to ply this on the spindle, so it’s the first fully spindle-ized yarn I’ve done (that should be a word!). Here’s how I managed my singles and the plying. I’ve tried a number of ways of getting the singles off the spindle when it’s full, but the easiest I’ve found is to wind it off around a clean tennis ball (no dog drool here!). After I finish spinning all the fiber, I have a bunch of tennis balls with singles wound around them. I made one giant plying ball onto an empty tennis ball, wrapping from two singles-balls at a time, and wrapping neatly and fairly snuggly as I went. Then I just plied from the 2 ply ball back onto the spindle. I tried plying from two separate balls directly back onto the spindle and ended up with a mess.

Reading through that last bit, even I think it doesn’t make much sense the way I’ve described it. The next time I’m ready to ply with the spindle, I’ll take photos and show you what I mean.

Last but not least is another photo that I took yesterday. We’ve had so much rain here in the last few months that I’m getting ready to start shooting holes in my refrigerator from cabin fever. Yesterday we had an almost day-long sunbreak. It was all the way up to the 60’s here, and we had a glorious trip to the farmers’ market to celebrate. Here’s a flower that I snapped.

Of course it rained again all day today.

My sweetie just handed me a martini, so I’m off to help in the kitchen. Until next time…

And Another UFO Becomes an FO!

For those of you keeping track, I’m trying to whittle down the UFO pile into something more manageable this summer. Here’s a list of what I started with, and a photo or two of the whole pile.

1) True Blood Faery sweater

2) Crazy King Cole Mohair thing, um, stole

3) Wollmeise Squashed Frog Socks

4) Grey Ribbed Peace Fleece Socks with red accents

5) Frootloops Morning Glory Stole

6) Puppy Mittens

7) Evenstar Shawl

8 ) Baktus Shawlette

9) Euroflax Linen Facecloth

10) Spirit In The Sky Beret

I think that’s it. The crossed through stuff is finished finished finished. There are a couple of things in that mess that will eventually get frogged and repurposed, but I think eventually most of it will be finished finished finished as well.

And here’s the last finished finished finished thing:

Spirit In The Sky Beret

Project Details:

Started: Hmmm. This is the second go-around for this yarn. It started as a pair of socks way back when in 2007. I took it with me to a knitting retreat in Idaho, and left the second skein of yarn under the bed or something when I left. It hung around as a half-knit single sock for awhile, since I was pretty sure that as soon as I ripped it out that I’d find the other skein. I finally ripped and started this in April 2008.

Finished: Last week.

Pattern: Here.

Yarn: Sock Hop sock yarn, color Spirit In The Sky. One of my favorite oldies songs, by Norman Greenbaum. Of course you can’t get this anymore. If you could, I’d have finished the socks, now wouldn’t have I?

Needles: Size 3.0 double points

For: ?? It doesn’t quite fit me, and I’m just not a beret person, really. It’s a little small for me, and will probably fit a kid in the family. It depends on who gets here first to claim it.

What I learned: Keep track of your yarn while on vacation. I’d have knit this to fit me if I hadn’t been worrying about running out of yarn. The pattern is pretty easy, but I’d be a little nervous knitting it with just one skein of Koigu, which is what the pattern calls for. If you want a slouchier beret, you might need a little more yarn. I thought about doing stripes, but I like what the orange yarn does all by itself, so a kid hat it will be.

And just because I want to, here’s a pretty flower photo I snapped today.

And I can’t for the life of me figure out why that smiley thing is in front of the Baktus shawl instead of a number 8, but I can’t get rid of it, so I guess it stays.

ETA: I fixed the smiley face, thanks to Chris!  8)

My Pretties…

But first, that FO!

This has been in the UFO pile long enough. It’s now done, and I can use it. It’s a linen facecloth. I’m not doing the whole Project Details thing on this one. The yarn is Euroflax linen, the pattern is from Knitters’ Stash. Here’s the Rav link for the pattern. This one is the Lacy Vine pattern. The needles I used were 3.75 mm. I probably will make more of these, if only because I have a bunch of this stuff in the stash, all in different colors, of course, so I can’t use it for much else. The Euroflax is sort of stringy and harsh feeling while you knit it, and splits like crazy. It softens up amazingly when you wash it though.

Enough of that. On to the “pretties” of the title. Click on these photos to really get a good look. Try not to drool on your keyboard.

Those are all of my spindles, out for inspection. Well, all of them except the Ashford boat anchor. Oh, OK, I’ll show you that one, too.

That thing weighs over 2 1/2 ounces, compared to less than an ounce for most of the other ones. Next time I get each of them empty, I plan on weighing them and recording it for future reference. Somebody remind me to do that. I usually think about it when it’s close to full and I’m wondering how much fiber is wound on. It would be very handy to know what the empty spindle weighed.

Here’s another photo of the pretty ones. Clickety-click.

From left to right:

1) My latest acquisition, a Greensleeves Damsel Monique. Very lightweight, great for lace. The whorl is redwood burl with purpleheart, and the shaft is mahogany. The fiber is an Abby Batt, in the color Glitterpigeon.

2) Cascade Spindles Mt. St. Helens. This is just a great dependable spinner. The fiber is a merino silk blend, I think it’s from Louet.

3) Bosworth Midi, in Zebrawood. I want a Bossie in every size and wood, really. The fiber is a merino-sparkly blend that I got at the spin-in on Whidbey earlier this year. I’m actually almost done with the plying here, fortunately. I’m not sure how much more I could get on this thing.

4) Another Cascade spindle, this time the Cougar. This one weighs next to nothing and is terrific for lace. The fiber is more Louet, 80/20 merino silk, color Golden Hibiscus.

5) Last but not least, my first Butterfly Girl spindle. This has a whorl made from Italian resin. It’s also quite lightweight. I say first since there might just be a second one from her shop on the way. The fiber is also hers, a merino/bamboo/firestar batt called Blue Morpho. There might just be some more fiber coming this week, too.

You might note that while I seem to be happiest with only three or four knitting projects going at any one time, I seem to have absolutely no problem having a spinning WIP on every available spindle and bobbin.

After I got my wheel, the spindles sort of sat around some. They’ve gotten a lot more use in the last few months, and I’m rarely without one close at hand. Don’t get me wrong, I adore my wheel, but if somebody put a gun to my head and made me choose, I’d pick the spindles.

I’m off to check the mailbox for the umpteenth time today. Have a good weekend, everybody!

Lunchtime Knitting

Just because I can.

This is another UFO out of that big UFO pile I showed you a couple weeks ago. It’s a washcloth, so you’d think it wouldn’t have taken me two years or more to finish the thing, wouldn’t you? I picked it out of the pile after the Baktus was finished as an easy one to get done. I’m on the last pattern repeat, then a simple garter border, and it’s done.

And done will be done, even if it’s only a washcloth.

By the way, John reminded me that I never shared our Williamsburg photos with you. He put together a Picasa photo album, if anybody is interested!

Baby Blue Baktus

Finally, something finished around Chez Knitting Doctor! This came off the blocking board this morning. We had a bit of a discussion about whether it was acceptable for John to take the photos while he was still in his bathrobe, but once we got past that, it was blog-ready.

What do you think? I even put on lipstick for the event. Per his request, we have no photos of John in his bathrobe.

Project Details:

Started: Um, how to answer that. I started a plain ribbed scarf with this yarn way back in 2008. It sat in UFO-ville for a very long time. I dragged it out earlier this year, didn’t feel the ribbed scarf love, and ripped it all out. I found the Baktus pattern and started over with that in February of this year.

Finished: Officially this morning. I finished the knitting on it last week, and washed and blocked it this weekend.

Pattern: Lacy Baktus. The pattern for the lacy version is on the Flickr page.

Yarn: Butternut Woolens Silk Garden. The color name is Blue Flax. It’s a 50-50 merino silk blend, and you can’t get it any more. I should have bought this stuff by the truckload. It’s a DK weight, and just the softest, squooshiest stuff you can imagine. This was 252 yards per skein, and I used two of them.

Needles: Size 5.00mm straight needles from my faux tortoiseshell collection.

For: Me

What I learned: Sometimes you have to experiment a little to get the right pattern-yarn combo. This yarn would have been totally wasted in a plain ribbed scarf. This is a pretty versatile pattern. You start with one of the corners and four stitches, knit and increase along one side until you’ve used half your yarn, then decrease till you have four stitches. I learned that being cocky, as usual, is a recipe for ripping. I knit till I’d used what I thought was half the yarn, started decreasing, and ran out, had to rip out half the knitting and start over. You can use any weight yarn with this pattern, and it works well with sock yarn, especially in the plain version without the lace holes. If you wanted to make a bigger shawl with this pattern, I’d probably recommend doing the increases and decreases at a more rapid rate. This one measures just a little over 8 feet long, and 22 inches down the center spine. If you did a full size shawl with this, it would have 10 foot tails.

Check out the Ravelry pages for the lacy version and the original to get an idea of what you can do with this pattern.

I’m more than happy with this one. I predict that this will be worn often. I also predict that this will not be the last Baktus around here. This would be a great pattern for those hand spun skeins that are accumulating in the stash!

More Williamsburg!

We’re still here on vacation, and I’ve managed to take hundreds of photos. There is a ton of stuff to see and do here, and we’re making a grand attempt to take it all in. Today is our last full day here, then we drive back to the DC area for a day, then home.

I did manage to find the yarn shop, and even bought a couple of things. Now there’s a surprise!

I also found some lovely sheep. These are in Colonial Williamsburg. They keep them in the pastures around the old reconstructed town. They shear them every year, and you can buy their wool in the shops. John drew the line at me buying a fleece and trying to stuff it into the overhead bin on the plane, so I settled for some finished wool. I’ll show photos of the loot in a different post when I photograph them. The sheep are Leicester Longwool, an 18th century breed from England.

This next photo might be familiar to those of you in the medical profession who use digoxin in your practice. This stuff (foxglove) grows all over the place here.

The nice thing about having a timeshare is that we have a kitchen. Even I can get tired of eating out for every meal. We tend to have lunch out, then cook dinner at “home”. That way we can have wine with dinner and nobody has to be the designated driver. Here I am stirring the stew pot.

Notice that like any good Colonial woman, I’m doing two domestic chores at once.

Speaking of spinning, I found the weaving and spinning cottage in Williamsburg yesterday. John gets the award of the week for standing patiently while I took photos and asked the very knowledgeable women every question I could think of.

The last place we toured yesterday was the Decorative Arts Museum, which has a fabulous collection of Colonial (and some later periods) furniture, pottery, quilts, and other household decorative items. I could have spent days there alone. The museum is on the site of the former Public Hospital, which was an insane asylum in Colonial times. A corner of the museum has a display of some of the items from the hospital. Here is John, demonstrating that perhaps I have driven him crazy after all.

Today we take the ferry across the James to the Smithfield area. It’s supposed to be hot and humid. The weather here makes me appreciate the Pacific Northwest. If I don’t melt in the heat, I’ll be back again with more photos next time!

Vacation!

We’re off on another adventure. This time it’s to Colonial Williamsburg. We’re using a week of timeshare as a base of operations. After a bit of a hectic week at work, I raced home, packed in under an hour, and we headed for the airport, where we spent the night. We got up Friday morning to catch an early flight. Here we are, starting the morning properly.

We went to the Jamestown Settlement yesterday and spent most of the day there. There’s a terrific museum that gives a very good overview of the Colonial period, and a reconstructed fort. We also visited the full size replicas of the ships that brought the colonists from Europe, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery. I surprised the nice young man stationed on the Susan Constant by asking for his photo. I’m pretty sure nobody has ever handed him a partly-knitted sock before. He was a good sport, though, and smiled like this is a normal activity.

As you can see, it was a beautiful sunny day yesterday, even if it was a bit windy. I’m pretty sure that crossing the ocean on any one of these ships wouldn’t exactly be like a cruise. I never did find the bar on this one.

Our friend Byron lives near DC and is here for part of the week with us. Here he is with John and another friend we met along the way.

We’re off for another fun day. We’re heading back to Jamestown today to see the original historical site, then to Yorktown. I’ve already scouted out the yarn shop in Williamsburg, but don’t let the boys know that. I’m keeping that as a surprise for them.

WIPs and UFOs in Abundance!

OK, I finally got all the WIPs and UFOs out and lined up for a photo shoot. Here’s a photo of the whole mess.

There are ten unfinished projects in that pile. Let me show you a photo of everything out of the bags.

This is rather unsettling for someone who insists that three WIPs is my comfort zone. I clearly need to get to work and get some weeding out done. Rather than overwhelm you with descriptions of all of these at once, I’ll do them one at a time.

First up is the Lacy Baktus.

I’m about half done with this. This is pretty much mindless knitting, as long as I remember to keep track of what row of the pattern I’m on. I started this one back in February. Let’s see how much of this I can get done between now and the next post, shall we?

Sunbreak

We’ve had another of those weird spring days here. Cold, pouring rain, grey, and then all of a sudden, bright and sunny. That didn’t last, but it got me outside with the camera to try to get a decent photo of the color of my Evenstar shawl. This will have to do, since it’s pouring rain again. At least it’s raining in the front yard. The sun is still shining in the back yard. Weird.

That’s the best it’s going to get. The inside photos of this color just look pale grey-blue. In real life, it’s a pale clear aquamarine color. The yarn is a cashmere silk 2-ply light laceweight from Colourmart, for those of you not keeping up.

Oh, good, now it’s a downpour out back too, that was worrying me.

I never did show any photos of our trip out to Whidbey Island for the spin-in and visit with Dorothy. Here are a couple of Deception Pass, probably the most photographed spot in Washington. Click these to embiggen.

Here’s John, as usual, not following directions:

And here are a couple from the spinning day:

There were some serious opportunities for fiber stash enhancement, and I did not pass many of them by unheeded. Here’s one, already on the spindle.

This is a blend of deep red, blue and purple wool, along with some firestar sparkly stuff. There’s about three ounces of it total, and I think it will be a light fingering when I’m done with it. We’ll see. I think that would make a pretty little neck thing, either a scarf or a cowl.

I’ve been spending much of the last few days that I’ve had off trying to organize my fiber office. Fiber Office, that sounds sort of official, doesn’t it? Much better than the Pit of Despair, which is what it usually looks like. Now that it’s a bit more organized, I have discovered that I have way too many WIPS and UFO’s than my usual comfort zone allows. I really need to get knitting on some of them. Hopefully you all will see some progress soon on things.

One last thing. I’ve been looking at my blog stats. The funniest three search strings that got people here lately are “big stonking circular shawl”, “clean knitters stories”, and “goofy knitting”. I’m not making that up. I’m off to knit…

ETA: “pee blog knit”. One silly person actually got to my blog by typing that into Google. If you’re that person, please comment and explain exactly what you were looking for.

Everybody’s Doing It…

There might be a “real” post later on. I had a great weekend last weekend at the Spin-In on Whidbey Island. Dorothy and her husband Bill were great hosts, as was Maggie the Corgi girl. Dorothy unfortunately didn’t feel well, but she soldiered on and finished her sock yarn for the class anyway. When I get the photos together, I’ll post something. My sister will be here visiting this weekend, so I need to get my butt in the shower so we get to the airport on time. Have a great weekend!

Fires of Mount Doom

The Evenstar shawl project almost bit the dust last night.  I’m behind, as usual. This is a “mystery shawl”, and the clues come out every other Friday. Today clue 5 is due to be released, and I’m just starting clue 3. Every other row so far has been a plain knit row, and on the last row of clue 2, I put in a lifeline in case of trouble. In this case the lifeline was the trouble. I’m using a very fine crochet thread in white, as I was a little nervous about my usual dental floss cutting the near cobweb yarn I’m using.

Anyway, I had done the lifeline on the last row of clue 2, done the first row of clue 3, and set it aside a couple days ago. I picked it up last night, knit around the second row, then set it down while we had dinner. After dinner is where the trouble began. Actually it was after a couple of glasses of wine and a long phone conversation with my sister, so I could probably blame her, though I suspect it was more the wine. I picked it up and looked at it, mind you this was in a dark TV room with only a reading light, I noticed a long loop of yarn back a whole row or two. I’ve done this before, somehow getting a loop of yarn not pulled all the way through, so it leaves a loose loop just hanging there. Crap crap crappity crap. I tinked back, messing up a couple of repeats in the process, and got partway around the row, thinking that I was royally screwed.

Some Knitting Angel must have been sitting on my shoulder. Instead of continuing to tink deeper and deeper into the Mines of Moria, I decided rather wisely to set it aside and go to bed. I woke up this morning thinking about it, and reluctantly pulled it out of the bag to investigate. In the light of day, what I thought was a mistake loop of yarn back two rows, you guessed it….it was my long loop of lifeline hanging there. Nope, didn’t need to tink at all. This, as you might imagine, resulted in some well-deserved self-head-slapping. And now I was still left with the mess from tinking. On a couple of the repeats, I dropped a couple of stitches down to the lifeline. I counted around carefully, marking the offending repeats with pins, then had a bit more coffee before proceeding.

After a serious consideration of going out on a quest to cast this whole thing into the Fires of Mount Doom, I decided to suck it up and fix it. Armed with teeny tiny crochet hooks and teeny tiny double points, I got those blasted fracked up repeats fixed. Here’s a photo.

And here’s a photo of that lifeline.

I’m leaving it in, of course. It might just save my sorry knitting-butt yet.

We’re off for the weekend. Dorothy and her husband have invited us and the mutts up to Whidbey Island for the weekend for a local spin-in. I need to go get packed. I’ve got the camera packed, so you might even get to see some photos!