Second attempt at spinning

Four years ago, after taking a spinning class, I wrote,

I very much enjoyed the class and think this is something I'd like to do more of. I also think I learnt enough to get started on my own, provided I don't leave it too long before trying again. Once I've got started, I suspect I could make a lot of progress with just practice, though there's probably a lot I could learn from other people, too.

At about the same time, a dear friend of mine offered to lend me her spinning wheel, as she hadn't used it for some time. As it happened, the next time we met was at her son's wedding, and she kindly brought the wheel with her to the wedding and handed it over to me there. Chatting to her daughter Polly on the same occasion, I lightheartedly promised that I'd wear something handspun to her wedding, at some unspecified time in the future.

Once home, I found the wheel a little daunting. I looked at it nervously from time to time, noting its lack of drive belt or connection between treadle and wheel, and the bits of half-spun wool tangled around the wheel's axle. I picked at these occasionally until eventually the wheel ran freely, but didn't get much further, and the wheel gradually retreated to an out out of the way corner.

Provided I don't leave it too long. Hmm...

Just over a week ago, Polly got married. Some weeks before that, I started thinking about my promise to wear something hand spun. I was quite sure she'd have forgotten about it and even if she remembered, was hardly likely to care. All the same, it was a reminder of just how long I'd neglected the wheel and it was a shame to leave it unused, especially considering the effort taken to get it to me. In the meantime, I had got as far as buying some carded wool, with the best of intentions to use it. I had a little bit of cheap brown wool to practise with, and some gorgeous purple merino to make something nice.

As at the class, if I started with beautiful purple fluff, surely whatever I made would end up looking nice?

With the deadline of Polly's wedding to spur me on, I brought out the spinning wheel and gave it a bit of a rub down with furniture polish (wax and oil) because it looked a bit dry. I then turned my attention to the flexible parts. The treadle wasn't too difficult; it was fairly obvious how it needed to be connected, so I tied the two parts together with a bit of string, leaving it just loose enough to allow movement. I then consulted the internet to try and work out what kind of wheel I had, and therefore how it worked. The closest model I could find was the Kromski Polonaise:

Do check out Spinwise.co.uk, where I pinched the photo from. They have many nice things.

Having found a similar wheel online, I could see that it differed from the one I learnt on in a key feature: Instead of having a break (an element I found to be of utmost importance to my spinning attempts), it is a double drive wheel. This means that the drive belt goes around the wheel twice, once to drive the flyer and once to drive the bobbin. The drive wheel on the bobbin is smaller than the one on the flyer, meaning that the bobbin turns faster, and the difference between the two is what gets the yarn wound onto the bobbin. There are two things going on here: First the yarn is twisted, then it is wound onto the bobbin. All very clever, but the fixed ratio made it feel like I had less control than with the brake.

It seemed that string was an acceptable material for a drive belt, so I made a belt from string. First though, I had to find out how to adjust the tension. This involved twisting knobs that didn't want to be twisted - most nerve-racking on someone else's wheel.

String? What string? I have no idea what you're talking about.

Once I had the wheel working, with a little help from George, I had a go at spinning my cheap brown wool. It wasn't easy. To start with, I couldn't get it to wind onto the bobbin at all. I spent ages adjusting the tension until it occurred to me that maybe I wasn't spinning the yearn fine enough to go through the orifice, and it was just getting stuck. As well as working on my spinning technique, I did quite a bit of polishing of various parts of the wheel, and eventually got going. By the time I got to the end of the 50g of brown, I was feeling reasonably confident that I could make a useable yarn. It was still very thick - so much so that I decided not to ply it (twist two together) but use the singles directly, as I didn't want super-chunky yarn (nor was I entirely sure the bobbin would take it).

I crocheted up the brown practice yarn, both to check that it was actually possible to crochet single ply, and see what size piece I'd end up with following the pattern I had in mind. I say, follow and pattern as if it was all written down. It was just an idea. Crocheting it up gave me a chance to see whether it was a good idea or not.

After reasonable success with my test piece, I started work with the purple fluff. George like this very much. I managed to persuade him not to get into the bag of fluff, but he kept getting as close to it as he could.

George liked the purple fluff.

My spinning wasn't very even...

Lumps and corkscrews

... but I'd seen beginners' guides offering the advice that first attempts usually end up being fancy yarns like this, so I didn't feel too bad about it. Also, I discovered that it's possible to improve it after the event with careful twisting and drawing out, though there was a risk of breaking it every time I did this.

I crocheted the yarn straight off the bobbin, without bothering to wind it into a ball in between. This meant I was alternating spinning with crocheting, which I quite enjoyed. Since I was using singles, I could join one bobbin-full to the next in exactly the same way as I'd join yarn when spinning, so I have a piece crocheted from a single strand of yarn, which is quite pleasing. The second time I did this, I failed to take the bobbin off the spinning wheel before joining, leaving me with a bobbin-full of yarn on one side of a small hole, and a half-crocheted scarf on the other. The crochet work was somewhat less portable than it might be until I'd finished that bobbin.

Here is the finished garment, modelled by George:

George serving as a black velvet cushion

It's a little too short to be a scarf, and a little too narrow to be a shawl, but at something between the two, it's quite wearable, and I did indeed wear it to Polly's wedding.

With my brother-in-law, nephew and niece, who played their parts as page boy and flower girl excellently

The next step is to start from a raw fleece and learn how to scour and card it. This may require the purchase of equipment.

A nice cardie

I live in Ceredigion, also known as Cardiganshire, so most of the locals could accurately be described as nice Cardies, but they are not the subject of this post. What I'm talking about is a woolly jacket.

When I went to a spinning class last year, I browsed other stalls at the festival and spotted some pure Shetland wool priced at £1.50 per 50g ball. What a bargain! I asked the advice of the more experienced knitters around me as to how much I'd need for a jumper (that's sweater to those of you living across the pond. I tried looking up transatlantic translations for cardigan, too, but it got very confusing. You'll see what I mean by the end of the post). No-one was keen to commit on quantity of wool required, but the best guess was twelve balls, so that's what I bought.

Then followed a long period of doing nothing much, but pondering design. I definitely wanted a cardigan rather than an over-the-head jumper, I want it as long as possible with the wool available, and I want it nice. I have smart office clothes left over from my old life, but those are rarely suitable these days, and I have scruffy clothes for working around the house and garden, but I don't have much in between. This isn't too much to ask from my first big knooking project, is it?

I started by making up a sample piece, trying out different knit stitches and practising buttonholes. I fancied a chunky knit but the wool was fairly thin, so I wasn't getting what I wanted. After a while it occurred to me that crochet would give a thicker fabric, so I tried a few crochet stitches and settled for counterpane stitch, taking just one loop from the previous row (as opposed to both sides of the loop. The difference is that the half-loops left behind make a line along the fabric.) Experiments with decorative stitches revealed them to be not very visible, so I abandoned those. I used up the whole ball of wool in my sample to give me an idea of how much fabric a ball would make. Ah. Not very much.

Knit stitches to the left, crochet to the right. The extra bit bottom right is crochet buttonholes.

As I was working with the wool it struck me that it's not very soft. I didn't think I'd want that against my neck, so I'd make the neck wide and add a collar in a softer yarn at the end. On the other hand, Pebble liked this little bit of woolliness very much.

Mine now.

A bit of investigation with holding this piece against my back and wrapping it round my arms indicated that twelve balls of wool would be enough, but only just. That was going to influence the design quite a lot. Firstly, this cardie would have to be quite tight, with fairly short, tight sleeves. I decided to knook the sleeves, as I'm quite happy to have them thinner than the rest, and stocking stitch will use less wool than counterpane stitch. I wondered if I could save some wool by adding some decoration in a different colour. I have some white that I bought for socks... stars! It has to be stars!

Once I'd had that thought, I then had to find out how to crochet stars. I found this tutorial which was good, but not quite what I was after. I took that as a basis and played around until I'd figured out a way of making individual stars. It's very fiddly and involves two stitch holders (twist ties). I'm sure there's a better way, but this works well enough for this project.

Test stars. Yes, Pebble sat on it again as I was taking the picture.

That was about as far as I could go with my test piece, it was now time to move on to the real thing. Since I wanted the cardigan to be as long as possible, that meant starting at the top. I also wanted to avoid sewing it together at the end, so each piece would be joined as I went along. I did have a look at patterns, but didn't see anything that particularly grabbed me and in any case, I can't read patterns. Making it up as I went along went like this:

Step 1. Make a foundation chain (I read about this somewhere, but can't remember where. You end up with the first row of stitches already in the chain and it's easier to carry on from there) for the neckline. This included a double row (there and back) along the top of each shoulder, where the seam would be if you were making it in pieces. I judged the length by draping it around my neck.

Step... um, I can't remember what order I did the next bits in. The front two pieces and the back were worked in turn, each starting from the top seam, with the front pieces increasing from the shoulders across the front. For simplicity, I decided on square-set sleeves.

Step 5. Continue those three pieces until they're long enough to join up under the arms. Rather than shaping round the sleeves, I decided to make the body pieces straight then add a gusset between waist and armpit. This meant the body pieces had to get all the way to the waist before they could be joined up. Since the stitch I'm using looks different on alternate rows, I had to be careful to make sure I was on an even row (or an odd row. It didn't matter so long as they were all the same) for all three pieces.

Step 6. Once I'd done a few rows of the joined-up section, I turned my attention to the gussets and sleeves. For these I switched from crochet to knooking, and chose a fairly loose stocking stitch for the gusset, then tighter stocking stitch for the sleeves. The first attempt at a sleeve went a bit wrong. I was reducing the number of stitches at a rate of one per round, which resulted in a pointed shape at the join, making a bulge in the armpit. I unravelled and started again, this time working back and forth round almost all of the sleeve, picking up an extra stitch from the gusset at the end of each row until there were none left and I could switch to working in the round. I'm not sure whether that makes sense or not - it's basically the same technique that I used for the heels when I made socks. The end result looked like this:

Armpit of the cardigan with sleeve at the top.
What looks like a seam is where I reduced the stitches.

Step 7. Shaping the sleeves involved much trying-on to determine how much I needed to reduce the rows as I went. Once I got past the elbow I did a couple of rows of stars, which was even more fiddly in knooking than in crochet. I then finished with a few rows of crochet for the cuff, for consistency with the body of the cardigan.

Step 8. After a few rows at the waist, I needed to start increasing the stitches. I measured, I calculated, I calculated some more, I largely ignored the results of the calculations, I forgot where I measured from, then the whole thing got messed up by the stars anyway. One way or another, stitches got increased by a couple per row, and stars were introduced shortly after that.

Step... ah, there's a bit I did earlier, but forgot to mention. I wanted an edging added for the buttons and buttonholes, but couldn't do this until the very end, when I'd have something to add it to. This somewhat disrupted my plan to keep going until I ran out of wool. I solved this by making up a section of buttonhole edging, unravelling it, and measuring out suitable multiples of that length of wool, which I then put aside.

Step 9. Once I'd got fed up of making stars, I put the white wool aside and carried on in blue until I ran out. This wasn't quite at the end of a row, but near enough that I felt safe pinching a bit of the reserved wool to finish it off. Front edging was then completed, leaving just this little bit of wool:

I felt quite smug to have used up my wool so precisely

Step 10. I raided Grandma's button collection for a suitable selection of buttons...

... and sewed them on.

At this point, I should have had just the collar left to do. Then I tried it on... it was way too tight. I'd known it was going to be tight, but thought the extra panels I added at the end would be enough for a comfortable fit. They weren't. I also discovered a flaw in the way I'd done the buttonholes, which was simply a row of triples. Effectively, I had a buttonhole between each two stitches and I just had to pick one that lined up with each button. That proved more difficult than I'd anticipated.

At this point it would have been very easy to get demoralised and give up. To avoid this, I quickly sought out my next door neighbour and showed her the (un)finished cardigan. She said all the right things about it being not that bad, and she was sure it wouldn't take much extra on the front edges to fix the problem, and how nice it would look when it was finished.

Thus encouraged, I went off to one of the wool shops in town to seek extra yarn. I wanted something soft for the collar, and thought it would be best to have the same yarn for the extra strips down the front, even though soft isn't ideal for buttonholes. I found some nice yarn (50/50 wool/acrylic) and asked the shopkeeper's advice on how much to get. I had in mind that two balls would probably be enough; she said four; I bought three. I actually used one and a half. I intend to take the last ball back for a refund, as a matter of principle.

Although the new yarn was thicker than what I had been using, I stuck with the same small crochet hook for the front panels, as I thought tighter stitching would probably be stronger for the buttons. I also changed the way I did the buttonholes so I wouldn't have the lining up problems that had emerged in the first attempt (which I'd unravelled and redone in plain stitch to match the other side).

For the collar I'd decided on double rib stitch and actually used knitting needles for this (larger, to suit the yarn). With knooking, rib stitch either comes out very loose, or is a right pain to do. Knooking turns out to be not such a great technique when you're switching between knit and purl stitches within the row. I found I didn't mind actual knitting as much as I'd expected. In fact, I might even go as far as to say I enjoyed it, though I did switch back to a crochet hook for the cast off.

Trying on the finished garment, I found that my neighbour was quite right - the fairly small strips I'd added made all the difference between not fitting and an excellent fit. Here I am modelling my creation in classic catalogue pose:

And here is a closer view:

I have to say, I'm absolutely delighted with how this has turned out. Not bad for a first big project, making it up as I go along, eh?

Cute crochet cot blanket

My sister's having another baby any day now, so we went to visit while she was on maternity leave and still has some energy and capacity for adult conversation. I started to feel like doing crafts again a little while back (a good sign, I thought) and, having checked that another blanket would actually be useful, decided to tackle this really cute crochet pattern. Apparently its origins are lost in the ether, but Gingerbread Lady did a very helpful photo tutorial which meant that with my tenuous grasp on the terminology, I was able to look at the pictures and see whether my stitches looked like they were supposed to.

I had some green and blue yarn left over from the little hat, but that wouldn't be enough on its own. I popped into a charity shop and checked their bin of yarn, which turned out to be mostly baby wool (I say wool - it was mainly acrylic). I bought a load of blue and white and thought that would probably do... and it nearly did. I also dug out some bright pink halfway through.

New blanket artfully(!) draped over my sister's sofa

I think it takes a bit of imagination to see this as rows of cats, but it's still a pretty blanket and it was a nice project to do - not too big. I need things I can finish, and if they're cute and snuggly at the end of it, so much the better!