Sorting Out and Third Pair of Socks of the Year

The heating engineer arrived just before 8.30 this morning and is currently working away to do all that needs doing so we have an updated heating and hot water system (hurrah!).  Jess is more or less behaving, but she's decided she likes the plumber's son (who works with him) and keeps following him around, trying to bring him one of her toys.  Hopefully she'll get tired of that soon and will settle down for her morning nap.

The guys need access to all the radiators in the house, including the one in the (not used because that, also, needs replacing) en-suite bathroom.  The en-suite is where I've been storing my yarn stash, so I've been sorting it out, making a note of what yarn and fibre I've got.  I've been fairly ruthless and got rid of odd balls that I'm never going to use and I've also put some yarn into a bag to take to knitting group in case any of the ladies there can use it.  That bag is of the 2x100g balls of aran left over from a sweater variety.  Some of the ladies have grandchildren (a couple have young children) so they might be able to use it whereas I won't.

The grand total of yarn is:  approx 40 kilometres.  My yarn stash has grown (and that doesn't include the acrylic DK stash I've got).

My fibre stash stands at approx 7.5kg.  As hubby bought most of it for me, the blame lays at his door for that!

I reorganised it all into a tub, a wicker hamper-type basket and vacuum bags.  This is what it looked like once it had all been put away:

Once I'd squashed the air out of the bags, it looked a bit more manageable:

Still a fair size though.

Yesterday morning, I sorted/cleared out underneath our bed (one of those jobs I'd been putting off) and there the bags and boxes now reside.  I started off using my vacuum cleaner (a Dyson) to suck the air out of the bags, but it started making a funny noise (oops!) so I then stopped and squished as much air out as I could by lying on the bags and then squeezing them (which DD2 found rather amusing).

There - a much better organised stash.  I did remember to get out the yarn for the next project I've got planned and that's downstairs in the hollow area under one of the footstools.  I'll show you that later in the week.

I've also finished another pair of socks (and cast on a new pair).  These are in Regia Kaffe Fasset Design Line and I think I said that they're going to be a present for my Mum.

No, I didn't match the stripes.  I often think that I will and then forget to start the yarn on the first sock so I can start at the same place in the ball on the second one.  Mum won't mind though!

Hopefully, the next time I write I'll have a nice warm house and tankfuls of hot water.  First thing I'm going to do when the work's been finished is wallow in a chin-deep bath!

Drinking Tea and Knitting Socks

We've just started our third week of having no hot running water.

You'd think that in the current economic climate finding a heating engineer/plumber to come out and have a look would be a fairly simple thing (the chap who used to service our boiler has retired).  This proved to not be the case.  Heating Guy One (after I'd chased up the message I'd left him) finally replied saying that he wasn't able to help, but knew someone who could and would ask him to phone.  Heating Guy Two never called.  I phoned someone else, but, again, no response.  I then put a post on Facebook asking for recommendations and was finally able to speak to someone, who came round last Tuesday to have a look.

The upshot is that we're having a new boiler fitted (including new gas pipework from the metre to the boiler - because the existing ones aren't the right diameter), a new water cylinder, new immersion heater, new thermostatic controls on the radiators, a new water pump, plus other bits and pieces such as a new water pump.  I know we said we'd rather wait to get a new boiler, but that isn't a viable option given the age of the old boiler.  Oh well.  It's a good thing I've got a large yarn and fibre stash as we're going to be putting as much money in our savings account as possible for the next x months in order to get other work done around the house.

We've been getting by when it comes to bathing, including sending DD1 off to stay with grandparents for a few nights (and she's going there again from Weds-Fri this week), although the first thing I'm going to do when all the work's finished is have a chin-deep bath!

In the meantime, I've been drinking lots of tea and have been knitting away on the vanilla socks I cast on a couple of weeks ago.  The yarn's Regia Kaffe Fassett Design Line and it's not the most excitingly coloured sock yarn I've used.  I'm going to give these to my Mum on Mothering Sunday as she hasn't had a new pair of hand-knitted socks for at least two years.  As she managed to felt the socks I made her from Natural Dye Studio yarn, I've made an executive decision to only make her socks from now on in machine-washable yarn!

I've also been spinning.  I bought 600g of this merino blend from World of Wool.  It's various shades of red, ranging from a deep reddish brown/burgundy to a bright pinky-red.  So far, I've spun and plied the first bobbin full and have spun another 100g single, which I'll wind into a ball and ply.  I'm planning on making this into a Breckon cardigan.  I bought the pattern ages ago, but didn't have the right yarn.

In the background of the photo, you might be able to see something cream-coloured in a bag.  That's something else fairly mindless that I've been working on and it just needs ends sewing in, a wash and blocking and then I'll show it off.

In recent weeks I've been baking more.  I think I've mentioned that following a gluten, dairy, artificial sugar and MSG-free diet helps manage DD2's autism (she's still challenging, but we get fewer emotional outbursts and less head-banging and her speech is improved if her diet is 'clean').  The downside is that store-bought gluten/dairy-free goods are very expensive and they often include 'extra' ingredients (presumably for a longer shelf life) and with DD2, the fewer ingredients, the better.  I've just taken this out of the oven:

It's a gluten/dairy-free butterscotch brownie.  This one has risen more than the chocolate one I made last week.  The mixture was fairly wet and it might have been because I used an egg from one of my diva-hens and they do tend to lay fairly large eggs (around 70g).  One the brownie's cooled, I'll cut it into bars, which give a decent size for her to have in her lunch box.  See the red silicon loaf tin?  I spotted it in Home Bargains last week.  £1.99 - a bargain!  Although it's silicon, I still line the base with baking parchment/paper as it makes getting the cakes out of the tin a bit easier.

That's all for now.  I'm off to drink another cup of tea before DD1 phones to say she needs collecting from the station.

First socks of the year

Before you start thinking "blimey, her needles must have had smoke coming off them", I must confess that both pairs were started last year, but finally had their ends sewn in this morning.

This pair I started last May, got halfway up the second one and then, well, just didn't knit on them any more.  Actually, that's a bit of a fib.  I did get up to the ribbing, did a few rows and then realised I'd knitted the leg shorter than the first one, so had to rip back, got cross with myself and then didn't finish them off.  They're done now.

The second pair were the ones where I found a knot in the yarn when I was a few inches up the second sock.  I put them to one side while I decided what to do - carry on or frog.  I more or less forgot about them and then came across them when I was tidying up last week.  I frogged the second sock as I decided a join would annoy me, so started again and just got on and knitted it, mostly while I was watching television and then at knitting group yesterday morning.  I finished the ribbing yesterday evening and cast off and then sewed in the ends this morning.

I've already cast on another pair of socks.

I did think about doing these in alternating two-row stripes (one stripe from one ball, one stripe from the second) but wasn't sure if that would work out, never mind the jogs when I changed colour, so have just gone with knitting them straight up, one sock from each ball.  This is yarn I've had in my stash for ages.  It must have been a bit shocked when it was actually taken out of the box it was in!

Am I in a sock-knitting mood?  Not particularly.  Simple, stocking stitch socks are my go-to project when I've got something going on in Life and need some easy, no-brain knitting.  At the moment, we have no running hot water in our house.  Our boiler's broken and when we switched on the immersion heater/water tank, it tripped all the downstairs electric sockets, so that needs to be repaired....... but finding someone to do what I hope will turn out to be a not-too-difficult job isn't proving easy.  Our boiler is elderly, but we'd rather it was repaired than replaced at the moment because we think a replacement will be a big job that'll involve ripping out part of the kitchen for new pipework.  Our house plans for this year are Spring - new windows; Late Summer/Early Autumn - new kitchen and boiler, so we'd rather keep disruption to a minimum, especially when upheaval such as building works upsets DD2 greatly.  We do have heating as we've got three oil-filled radiators that run off the mains, so it's inconvenient rather than a problem, but something we want to get sorted out as soon as possible.

Of course, with no hot water, the weather has inevitably turned colder.  There was a frost overnight and it was foggy this morning when I took Jess out for a walk (I've just looked out of the window and it's still foggy).  I had my camera with me, so I took some shots:

The sun, trying to peek through the fog

The first 'battalion' of geese that flew overhead

The second wave of geese

These geese fly over twice a day.  I think they spend the night closer to the sea on the marshes and then fly over to the Dedham valley to spend their days.  As the sun starts to go down in the late afternoon/evening, we hear them flying back again.

Frosty blackberries that never made it to maturity before autumn set in

I need to go and do some housework now.  I have a large-ish pile of ironing as well as some general cleaning and tidying, as well as tracking down a heating engineer!

Alpaca 'At the first

Yesterday, I finished the alpaca hat I started knitting last week, soaked it and blocked it.

I don't have one of those polystyrene head things, so I improvised with a balloon!  This morning, it's nearly dry, but not quite, so I'm leaving it a bit longer:

I'm rather pleased with it.  I mentioned previously (I think) that I was knitting it so the fabric wasn't too dense and it seems to have worked.  I had a bit of a rest while I was doing the crown shaping yesterday and put the hat on to see how it felt and although light, it's still warm.  I've also blocked it so it's a relaxed fit for me, so hopefully it will fit the male recipient nicely.

The crown came together rather well (if I do say so myself):

So now, it's on to other things.

This morning, I finished spinning this single (more of the alpaca from Hurricane):

In a little while, once I've got some housey jobs out of the way, I shall ply it.  The ribbed hat yarn was a 3-ply (three spun strands) and this lot will be 2-ply.  I shall wind it into a ball on my ball winder, and then ply using the inside and outside strands so that I use up all the yarn.  The finished yarn is destined to be another hat.

Once I've cleaned up my wheel and got rid of the dust that Hurricane the Alpaca had been rolling in, I'll get back to spinning the blend of merino and silk that I started last year.  I think I bought 600g of fibre and so far have spun 100g.  I want to make a sweater from it.

I'm off to fold some laundry, put another load in the machine and have a general tidy up downstairs.  I've got a meeting at DD1's school so my mother-in-law is coming round to look after DD2 as it's very difficult to get her to sit still for any length of time and this is an important parents' meeting regarding the subject choices DD1 will soon be making for her GCSE exams.  A friend and I were saying only the other day that it seems no time at all since I was asking how much uniform she suggested I buy when DD1 first started school at the age of 4yrs 8mths.  She turned 14 at Christmas and is now very much a young lady and not a girl.  As an example of how much she's grown up, she's not coming home between school and the meeting (we live 12 miles from her school and she travels by bus and train each day) but instead is going into the town with at least two of her friends and will buy her evening meal there (probably KFC or Burger King) and meet me back at the school.

Right, off to fold and put away, followed by a bit of ironing.  I'm sure dirty clothes breed whilst they're in the basket :D

Awesome Alpaca (and some clouds)

Yesterday I wound the alpaca yarn into a ball, found my short 3.75mm KnitPro tips and a 60cm (I think) cable and cast on for the Awesome hat.

The yarn I spun is, I'd estimate, a sport-weight yarn, but as alpaca's warmer than sheep wool, I didn't want a fabric that would be too dense, so I'm knitting it to the pattern instructions.

I took a photo this morning:

It does feel nice and soft though and I'm hoping that despite the fact that the hat's ribbed all the way from brim to crown (and the brim is long so it can be pulled down over the ears) it will be a fairly quick knit.  As long as I don't get distracted.  I've done another 4 rounds on it this morning while I was running my virus-scanning on my laptop as I was getting some annoying advertising links popping up on every webpage I went to.

The weather here today is very dreary and the temperature has dropped a bit (we've been very lucky weather-wise this winter; certainly better than other parts of the UK and especially the US).  When I took Jess out for her walk at 8.30 this morning, the sky was very grey and there were ominous-looking clouds overhead, so I snapped some photos:

The sun was trying to peek through the clouds, but wasn't having much success.

Even though we haven't experienced particularly wintry weather (it's been between 8C and 11C according to my car over the last week), it's been cold enough to wear a hat and scarf.  My hat of choice at the moment is my Quincy which I made a few years ago.

(not a particularly good photo - it's one I quickly snapped for my Ravelry page)

It's a Jared Flood design for a pattern book(let) he produced in collaboration with Classic Elite yarns.  I wanted the book enough to order it from a yarn shop in Florida!  Pattern link.

The scarf I've been choosing to wear is special in that I didn't make it.  Last year, I got an e.mail from Jennifer at Thistlebear (if you don't read her blog, you should; it's charming) telling me that my name had been chosen to be the recipient of a scarf she'd crocheted.  Very exciting; unexpected gifts are always good.

The scarf is just the right length for wearing under a coat.  Long enough to wrap around my neck and tuck into the collar, but not so long that it dangles too much.

The colour's a shade or two darker in real life and because I've had to keep the lounge lights on this morning (see comment above about dreary weather) I don't think the sheen of the yarn shows very well, but it's a lovely scarf that gives me pleasure to wear.  Thanks Jennifer :)

The difference a dunking makes

I've been spinning more alpaca fibre recently (well, I've got rather a lot - I'm not even halfway through the first bag).

The first ball I made last year wasn't quite enough to make a decent-sized hat, so at the beginning of December I started carding some more Hurricane (that was the day that DD2 'helped' me once she got home from school).

Christmas meant that I didn't get any spinning done at all, but over the last few days I've set myself to getting it done and on Monday, the latest skein was plied and it was wound onto my Niddy Noddy yesterday.

The first photo below is the skein wound but unwashed; the second photo is after washing, rinsing and drying.  I hope you can see the difference in the skein (the weather's grey and dismal again and it's hard to get good photos).  I dunked it in a sink of warm water to which I'd added a squirt of washing-up liquid.  Once I'd left it for a bit and then rinsed it, it was still a bit dingy, so I put it to soak in fresh warm water to which I'd added a good-sized blob of Eucalan wool wash.  After several rinses in warm water, the colour had changed from greige to cream and the yarn has softened.

I shall be winding it into a ball later and casting on for an Awesome Hat.  This is a basic-looking hat, but has a few 'tricks' that make it a better-than-average pattern (but that's to be expected with Mimi Hill).  I've got 175m of yarn (just under 100g - I think I lost 2g of dirt during washing) which should be enough, although I can use the first skein if I need to (I think I spun them the same way and they're more or less the same thickness).

I shall update you on progress when there's something worth showing (I'm hoping it won't take long to make the hat).

A bit of brightness

The weather has been so dreary, wet and grey recently (wellie-wearing is a must when taking Jess for her walks) that when I went to the supermarket after our first knitting group of year, I splashed out the princely sum of £3 and bought a vase and then headed over to the flower display.

To be honest, the flowers in Tesco were either a bit uninspiring, or a bit pricey (and some of the bunches were rather granny-ish, if you know what I mean).

I was about to admit defeat and come home flowerless, but then spotted some that had a label saying "Bumper Germini".  I think these are a small version of gerbera, but the red, orange and yellow looked so bright I couldn't resist.  I think I paid £5 for them, which isn't cheap, but I really wanted something bright to look at when I'm in the kitchen.

Roll on spring when there will colourful tulips and vibrant daffodils in the shops.

Until this morning, the pot on the left (in the photo) had some pink hyacinths in them, but they'd gone way beyond their best and so they got chopped back.  I'm going to search on the internet to find recommendations for storing the bulbs in the hope that they'll bloom again next year as they were a very pretty pink.  I bought them from Sainsbury's for £3 a few weeks ago.  

The blue 'thing' to the right of the bright flowers is one of those battery-operated hand-wash dispensers which my father-in-law gave us when hubby and DD1 visited last week.  The idea is that you put your hand underneath the sticky out thing and it senses your hand is there and dispenses some handwash.  A very good idea - as long as I remember it's there and don't do my usual of squirting a blob of washing-up liquid onto my hands. 

The pot on the right of the photo is a miniature rose.  It's become a bit of a tradition that just before Christmas hubby arranges for some roses to be delivered to me.  I think it was two years ago that he sent me 40 red roses which was lovely, except I only have one large vase and they only fitted in there with a bit of squashing.  This year, however, he couldn't find somewhere that would deliver a nice bunch of roses (he usually gets them from Marks & Spencer), so he settled for a pot plant of miniature dark red roses which came in a basket with a bottle of white wine and a box of Swiss chocolates, which was still very nice.  I've been checking the roses daily and snipping off the flowers that have died and there are some more buds on there, but I'm not sure if they'll flower very well.  I might re-pot the plant once the weather's nicer (if it's still alive).

I'm still plodding away on my stripey scarf; it's just the right sort of project for knitting group (when we natter away) and for working on whilst watching television.