Serene Weekend Over

After puttering around for the last couple of days we’re back to the roofing today. It really was lovely to have some peace but I also want this job over with asap. The back of our house is now covered in tarps:


and more old roof is coming off. At least they left me the front door or I’d be trapped in here! I already had to close all the windows on a sunny summer day. (Yes, I learned my lesson last time.) Help, I’m buried in a sea of blue…

Anyway, while it was quiet this weekend I was finally able to finish the blanket and it dried quickly on a line strung over the deck in the sun. So here’s the details:

Circus Blanket


Begun: July 27, 2007
Completed: July 13, 2008 (nearly a year since I started!)

Loom: Woolhouse Gertrude 45” 8-shaft countermarche
Yarn: Warp & weft — Condon’s 2-ply medium, Briggs & Little Heritage and one or two unknown wool 2-ply yarns. 32+ skeins of various colours (some overdyed). 2 extra dyed black skeins for crocheted edging.
Warp: 324 ends (40.5” in reed) by 11 yards long.
Sett: 8 epi (1 per dent in 8-dent reed)
Weft: 8 ppi (approximately square)

Weave Draft: 8-Shaft Pinwheel Twill


Comments: Since I'm using old yarns in various colours, the warp was wound in random alternating stripes each a multiple of 8 and woven the same way. The colours blend in the plain weave areas and show individually in the floats. The pinwheels show best when the crossed colours are the same or similar, but I'm not taking full advantage of the colour-and-weave design.

Wove 10 yards and cut into 3 lengths of 120". Multi-zigzagged the cut edges with the sewing machine. Laced sections together with a strand of yarn. Crocheted around with 3.75mm hook in Pointy Edging (my own pattern design).


The huge piece of cloth shrank down to approximately 93-95" square (not including edging), which is more than 20% take-up and shrinkage in both directions. This is fulled somewhat more than most blankets might be for thickness and warmth and to stabilize the long floats. It came out a bit smaller than I had anticipated and somewhat unevenly fulled in the washing machine. I did end up chopping off the selvedge knots at the seams as the blanket was drying. The edging is still wavy even after a hard pressing with a hot steam iron but I kind of anticipated that. My finished blanket is very firm and warm and it fits the bed just fine. And it’s heavy! But I slept really well under it last night.

Staycation

When you have an enjoyable garden, big trees to provide cool shade and a double-layer deck with a pleasantly tinkling water feature, why ever would you go on vacation in the summer? The roads and ferries are too crazy, the beach resorts and parks hot and crowded, and it’s just not fun — at least for me. Without the restriction of having children in school, we can go away in September when the weather is usually nice but cool at night for sleeping and the roads and campsites are much less busy. I adore traveling in the late summer even though the evenings aren’t as long. We’re planning on heading out down the coast to California this year. Maybe we’ll even get further south than San Francisco for once. (And maybe all the fires will have subsided.) Meanwhile, I’m enjoying bringing my fibre work out on the deck and puttering in the garden. I also have plans to start on the bathroom which is in dire need of painting. We’ll see how far I can get on that without T-Man’s help.

Today though I’ve promised to look after the grandkids while their parents go to the dentist. I need to vacuum but that would be pointless until they leave so I’ll just run the dry Swiffer around to pick up the wood chips that T dragged in on his clothes after running the mulcher/chipper. His t-shirt retained an interesting smell from the gas that totally reminded me of when he worked at a service station (while going to college full-time) when we were first married. It’s funny that smell reminds me of our youth and is almost romantic! Yeah, that’s weird, I know. Shut up.

I got 1/4 of the way around the Circus Blanket with the Pointy Edging that I unvented. Here’s the cute double-pointed corner:


And here’s my first clip-on stitch marker holding my last stitch from unraveling:


Yes, it does resemble an earring but it’s not! That little green bead is one of T-Man’s lampwork beads, just for fun. I still have to make more of these markers but I’m obsessed with finishing the crochet on the blanket above all else. I fear I’m going to run out of the black yarn somewhere in the last quarter of the distance but I have a skein of the same yarn in blue-grey that I can overdye to match close enough if I have to. I won’t dye it until I see if I actually run out first though. It’s a pretty colour that I’d like to use for something else if I can. You know how it is when you’re about to run out of yarn. You work faster and faster as if that will help stretch the yarn to complete the piece! Either that or you just want the bad news quickly so you have more time to decide what to do about the shortfall. In my case I just want to finish the darn thing! There are only 19 days to go before its first birthday which is my self-imposed deadline.

In other news, the poor VW van got it’s left mirror broken by a gardener’s truck yesterday morning. The perpetrator actually kindly left his card with our across-the-street neighbour but hasn’t returned T’s call yet. It’s only the mirror that’s broken so hopefully it shouldn’t be too difficult or expensive to repair. When a vehicle is nearly 20 years old it gets rather tricky to fix it sometimes because specialized parts are rare and at a premium. If they’re available at all. T says that he treats our van like an airplane —replacing parts as they wear out and keeping her in the best running order possible. There is nothing new out there that’s enough like it to replace her with. She hasn’t even depreciated all that far even though she’s so elderly. And we loves our Fraulein Blau (Miss Blue). Even if cheeky Velvet the MINI Cooper usurped the garage.

Blanketing My World

I seem to be moving right along on both my current active projects. This must be because I’ve been staying out of the garden for the last few days except to water as necessary. It was also considerably cooler yesterday and today which meant that the huge and heavy wool of the Circus Blanket wasn’t quite so hard to take. It now has two pieces joined and part of the third.

Well I’m back! Betcha didn’t know I was gone, didja? We had a short-lived power outage so I went outside to water the garden while I was waiting for it to come back on. Now where was I?

Oh yeah, the blanket. The first photo shows where I was lacing the two parts together, a weft loop from one side then a weft loop from the other.


This is a smooth join and nearly invisible in plain weave but a wee bit more obvious in this pinwheel twill. I used two warp ends at each side that wove in tabby so I wouldn’t have to use a floating selvedge so the join isn’t quite continuous. But since the weft stripe colours don’t match up either, no big deal. It might have helped if I hadn’t used such a light-coloured stripe at the edge of the warp though. I decided that since the knots were helping to secure the two sides together, I would do the dirty deed and untie and re-knot them all in a square knot. The next photo of the underside shows the old overhand knots on the left, a retied knot in the centre and the ends snipped so the knots are almost invisible on the right.


It’s a lot of work but I’d be afraid of things coming apart if I just chopped off the knots entirely. I’d rather go for durability than perfect beauty. The blanket will mostly be under the other covers on my bed anyway. I haven’t quite decided what I will do with the last knotty edge when I work over it while crocheting around the whole blanket. Maybe it will be secure enough to cut them off there. It will all meld together much more when I full the whole thing heavily in the washing machine anyway. That’s going to be a big job. But first, more work to do.

The other project that’s heading for the finish line is the Peeenk Cardi. I’m midway on the yoke and it’s looking just right. My pattern version in a smaller gauge seems to have worked out fine. I’m into the 5th ball of my total of 8 and this one will take me to the end with plenty to spare. Now what to do with the leftovers? Matching mitts and hat perhaps? Pink is certainly not my colour at all (at least by itself) but the Princess loves it. Unfortunately she’s not much on wearing warm hats or mitts no matter how cold she gets.

The Weaving So Far

I wove quite awhile yesterday but only got 29” done. I couldn’t bring myself to stop with the changing colours every 8-row repeat. At least until I run out of most of the different coloured yarns. Or finish one section of the 3 panels for my blanket. It’s just so darned slow! I also kept getting weft loops on my right selvedge and had to unpick a row or several to correct them. Grrrr… That’s what I get for not weaving more. I lose my ability to do a good job. I won’t even show you the uneven beating. I hope most of it will come out in the fulling, which I plan to do fairly thoroughly which is why this is such a large piece of cloth.

The constant colour changes remind me too much of tapestry weaving. It’s too much fiddling and thinking. I just want to have my design set so I can get into a rhythm of throwing the shuttle. I must stop, think “which colour should be next, no that one was just a few rows ago, do I have enough of this left, need to wind more bobbins, blah, blah, blah”, change yarns in the shuttle (I only have 2 going), begin leaving a tail, weave 8 picks, cut it off and then start the series all over again. My neck and shoulders are sore from only a few hours of this.

So why am I torturing myself? Well the plan originally was to use up a ton of old wool yarn in many colours to make a new blanket for my bed. In winter we need several layers to keep us warm since I open the window some no matter what the outdoor temperature is. Otherwise I feel stifled! And I love heavy bulky covers on my bed. I just feel so comfortably snuggled under them. And I like a big enough blanket to wrap completely around my mattress and tuck in well underneath. I have a very hard time sleeping in summer with just a sheet on top. Right now it’s still cool enough at night to need several layers especially when I open the window quite wide. However, we’re supposed to have a really warm spell starting tomorrow. Couldn’t tell right this minute though. It’s still dark and rainy so my garden is getting a good watering before the sun comes out and the temps rise.

The wool yarn was in several colour families. I dyed some of it to get the soft reds and oranges of Utah rocks and some black. There’s a few tans, yellows and greens but I pulled all the purple and blue out except for one ball of blue-violet. (Gotta have some “poison” to spark up the colours!) I may yet need to buy more yarn since I have lost any idea of how much I have and how much I’ve used already. If I do, I’ll probably just get black. That should simplify weaving the last part of the warp! Right now my focus is getting the darn thing off the loom asap. I have Secret Project #3 to work on.

I know — shut up and go weave some more!