I came home from spinning group today with a bad headache and also with an inspiration to crack on and spin myself a sweater’s worth of yarn. I am not sure that sheep come big enough to make me a sweater from a single fleece… but I need 1,280 yards of Aran weight for the project that I have in mind – plus, of course, a good margin for safety. I always intended the Zwartbles for the job but I really do hate that fleece and cannot bear to think about the amount of work that would have to go into it. Perhaps I need a different Zwartbles fleece — I could always write this one off to experience. That said, the yarn that I made from it blended with Mohair is very nice indeed and I enjoyed knitting with it.
My ability to spin consistently is… underdeveloped (as evidenced earlier today) and I shall have to invest in quite a few new bobbins so that I can spin 20 or so bobbins of singles and then ply #1 to #20 and #2 to #19 etc. Of course, such a large project is just the practice that I require in order to learn to spin consistently.
I could diet. Make a smaller size.
Thinking about all this just made the headache worse and so I decided to cast on something new and simple and colourful. That’s when I discovered that both candidates to fill that role require 4mm needles. The needles are, obviously, in use — and so I have had to knuckle down to some finishing of UFOs. The hap shawl edging is out of the question until my sore arm recovers a little more. That left… the swirly red thing. The Red Thing of Doom.
I really do not want to think about the swirly red thing. I loathe it quite unreasonably. I desperately want to frog it but having invested so much energy in it already I kind of feel that I deserve to whip it soundly on its backside and show it who is boss.
It took a while to work out where I was. I tinked it back to check, managing to drop a few stitches in the process, needing then to work back even further. We are going forwards again now. The border is 23 rows and I am on row 13. I hate every thing about this project. Everything. I cannot wait until it is done. That said, rather than complete row 13, I put the needles down to blog about it.
There is little hope.
And my head hurts worse than ever.
I’ll tell you one thing, though. It is a Work In Progress once more. Half a row is progress, isn’t it?
Oh, I need to show you my inadvertent laceweight from this morning. It’s a bit gloomy for photos right now. Perhaps tomorrow…
How many stitches in the border – or is that too depressing to answer?
🙂
um… good question. I’ve been trying not to think about it. There were 547 stitches at the end of the body. All on straight needles. One of which appears to be bent. Considerably.