Friday, November 25, 2016

It has turned rather emphatically cold here -- not even December yet.


As hoped -- the first half-brioche sleeve is finished and bound off, the poor thing laid aside once again, ¾’s finished. And I've started the stripey hat.

It's great. It's going to knit itself. Winding the mini-skeins is delicious, as compared to yarn-winding in real life. Each one is capable of four rounds (I think), but the pattern requires attention because any particular stripe can be one or two or three rounds wide. Picture soon.

I've spent some more time with Norah Gaughan's cable book, although the prospect of a new great-grandchild has pushed the prospect of a crunchy cabled sweater rather far down my already over-long HALFPINT list. Every cable design in the book is assigned its SSE -- stocking-stitch equivalent. That doesn't relieve you of the need to swatch, perish the thought -- but it does mean that if you're designing something and have a rough idea of how many st st stitches you'll need (as is usually the case), you have a starting point for adding cables.

It's a wonderful book.

I've signed up for Kate Davies' Inspired by Islay club, and am about to order her and Tom's new book about Shetland wool. She does keep busy. My resolution for the next few weeks is to get to grips with "worsted spun" and the other one. I've never really understood. Part of the trouble is that I am not immediately sure, looking at a length of yarn or anything else, which way "s" goes and which way "z". I sometimes have the same difficulty with left and right.

Life

We're getting on, one step at a time. Helen is a great source of strength, and Perdita helps too.


Thanksgiving must be the only American holiday which has not yet made its way across the pond -- but, oddly, Black Friday has recently done so. I'm sure we didn't have Black Friday even in the US, when I was young. I suppose the success of Black Friday here is because it has commercial possibilities which Thanksgiving, touchingly, doesn't.

5 comments:

  1. S and Z twist are easily remembered by starting to write the letters in the air - z twist yarn is spun to the right, or clockwise, s to the left. It's produces only a very subtle difference when knitting though IMHO. The norm for hand spinners is to spin z and ply s.
    I've heard great things about the cable book - think I'll add it to n my Christmas list.

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  2. I have added the cable book to my Christmas list. If there were no fixed prices for books in Germany, I could have bought it yesterday with 20 % off. It took me totally by surprise that almost everywhere there were "Black Friday specials", or just 20 % off everything. I think it was the first time ever; the shops were not fuller than on a normal Friday, and quite a lot of people had no clue what Black Friday meant. But I think that now it has started, it will be a big deal soon.

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  3. Anonymous4:20 AM

    Are you thinking of the difference between woolen spun and worsted spun? Nothing to do with twist as I understand it. Worsted is spun from Combed fiber and is smoother and more dense than woolen-spun, which is from fluffy carded fibers.
    Hope this helps.
    Beverly near Yosemite, CA

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    Replies
    1. A succinct explanation that I may be able to remember!

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  4. Good to hear that things have begun to settle in terms of living with your husband's needs. Long may it continue!

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