I have bags! Paper bags!

They are white. They are cheap. They are flimsy. They are not very large... and they come in large quantities only.



Those large quantities are subdivided into packs of 100 each, neatly threaded onto a bit of string...

and they are just the right size for wool samples.



Which is exactly what they are going to hold.

Because, you see, I have all those wonderful rare sheep breed fibres, and I have them in packages of 100 grams, which is a nice amount if you want to spin a little or felt a small item, and it's also a good base amount to order multiples of, if you have a slightly larger project. But maybe you don't want to have a full hundred grams but still are curious about the fibres, or you would like to have just a handful of locks for some small projects, or you are not sure which one to take and would like to try a little bit of them all first, or you would love to have a sample of different ones to see (or show others) how very different the wool from various breeds can be.



And now I have the solution for that - sample packs of the fibres I have in the shop, a handful of each, which is enough to get you a taste (or rather a feel) of how the fibre will work and behave.

The actual sample set will have one more bag, but the Walliser Landschaf fleece (another dark one) is not dry yet, so no stuffing in bags of samples of that one at the moment. If the weather holds, though, next week should see these sample packs in the shop - and I plan to do a second set of sample packs with carded fibres, too.

So yay for these white paper bags!

Just in case you feel a little like I do - that this week is slightly too long, and that there is slightly too much work to fit into the single days - here's a silly video of the Star Trek theme song, with lyrics added on top:


The singing is... hm... not the most melodic. The thing is fun overall, though. And with that posted, I shall boldly go to wash more wool, write more things about clothes depicted on a wall somewhere in Northern Germany, and catch up on the most recent emails...

Time for a link roundup again! Here you go:

I've been finding weird messages in my Facebook inbox recently - my name, a few emojis and a link to a video. This, as my browser obligingly tells me, is a virus-generated scam. While I was smart enough not to click on that link the first time it appeared (ages ago), it has become more frequent recently, and it's rather annoying to get those messages.

A totaly different message, not annoying at all but totally fascinating, is a diary written on floorboards by a carpenter in 1880 and 1881 - recently discovered in a castle in France.

If you are looking to do some knitting for KEME, Jane is still looking for volunteers for her knitting and fulling project. Here's an Interweave article about  it, including full instructions, so you know what you are getting into.

Stupidity has made a little bird nest in my brain, and I have managed to utterly and blissfully misunderstand knitting instructions. Consequently, now, Weird Things are being done here to fix this.

I've misread the instructions for an overall stitch pattern for the front parts of the Cushing Isle cardigan. The instructions are for the overall pattern, and there's a knit stitch added before and after the pattern stitches in their *repeat everything between this* star brackets. A little below the eight lines of written-out instructions, it says "charted version at the end of the pattern, add selvedge stitches at start and end of row" and the subtitle for the section explains that this is the cabled check stitch pattern, multiple of four stitches plus two selvedge stitches.

And what did my brain make of it? I knit the pattern as written out (which included the two selvedge stitches, which means one at each end of the row) and added two selvedge stitches. At each end. So when I had finished with the right front, I had a total of six selvedge stitches... three at each side.



Which, very obvious to any sane knitting person who looked at the picture of the finished cardi at the front of the pattern pdf, is way too many.

I had wondered, inbetween, why so many plain stitches at the button band edge were asked for. I had also wondered why none of the plain stockinette edges were visible on the picture of the cardi. And only when the right front had been all finished and bound off and I started the second front part and re-read the pattern instructions, just to make sure I remembered correctly... it dawned on me. Like a ton of bricks. On speed.

So. Obviously, I was not happy with the result (I had sort of already bemoaned the stockinette strip while knitting, as it was apparent that this would change the appearance of the front). Obviously, as I'm also a lazy person, frogging the whole piece is not what I totally want to do (though I actually considered it, as the start of the neckline decreases also is a little early, but that's a totally different story, and it shows how much this misinterpretation irked me). However... I have a plain stockinette back for the sweater, so the side seam extra-wide stockinette selvedge does not touch me as much. As for the midline part, the overall pattern has a repeat of four stitches. I have two that are wrong... exactly half a repeat. You know what's coming, right?

Right?

Yes.



The needle stuck in diagonally holds the extra stitches freed up by the decrease maneuvers for the neckline, fourteen altogether (two are held with safety pins). The needle at the top holds the correct selvedge stitch, keeping it all together, and the freed live stitch from the bindoff. The needle at the bottom holds the two live stitches in the last row of the hem ribbing.

And now I'm slowly making my way back up.



Once I'm there, I will un-bind-off the rest of the shoulder seam and let down the two wrong stitches along the armhole edge, re-do those in pattern, and then I am all set. I don't mind having the side seam optics shifted by that scant centimetre as long as all the rest looks okay.

I'm still a little malcontent with myself for making such a blatantly stupid misreading error... but oh, well, it happens, and at least it's relatively easy to fix. In the future, I'll look (and think!) twice, though, when it is not totally and utterly clear whether the selvedge stitch count refers to each selvedge, or both selvedges added together, and whether these stitches are already in the description or not...

As requested via the comments, here's the picture of our tandem in action, with numbers stuck to the pedals...



The picture was taken at the Frankenwald Radmarathon, which is an open cycling event with several different distance courses to ride. It's not a race, though some semi-pro cyclists use it as a training event. You pay a little fee and then you get starting numbers that you are supposed to fix to your handlebars (the small numbers) and to your own back. In our case, this needs a little adaptation: we fix the small numbers to the front pedals and the back numbers to Frieder's back and the back of the saddle, and then we're good to go.

It is basically an organised long tour where you get food stops along the way (necessary to re-fuel) and a lot of other people ride along with you on the same roads, all having fun and all pedaling hard. The several times we did the FRM, we were one of the few tandems going on this ride, and with our special kind of tandem the extra-odd one out - most of the participants ride normal single road bikes.

The FRM was skipped last year and this year due to construction works that were very much in the way of the usual course, but we hope there'll be another chance to do it in the future. It's exhausting, but a real lot of fun as well!

You might have noticed that I am actually ding more of the making fabric with sticks and string thing recently - and I thought that maybe you are interested in the knitting library I have. Which is... how shall I put it... rather minimalistic.

[caption id="attachment_3846" align="alignnone" width="461"] That's it. That is my full knitting book library.


I like to look at knitting patterns, but I'm not a collector - so I'm not someone to buy a magazine just for the patterns. In fact, I leaf through them and usually think something along the lines of "oh, a basic sweater with lace pattern XYZ, aha, nice" or "ah, cabled socks, nice, cable soandso looks pretty in this yarn" - but then I sort of not want to knit it. Or I think that I'd probably fare better by taking a standard vanilla patterns for a sweater or socks (of which I know it will fit me) and modify that with lace pattern XYZ or cable pattern soandso. (I'm looking at food and recipe magazines the same way - I look at something and think "ah, variation on basic stew A" or "hm, standard cake batter with some extra spices thrown in" and that's it.)

So when I set out to assembly my knitting library, I knew what I wanted - also thanks to the first book in the assembly: Knitting Rules by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. This is a wonderful book - it is fun to read and it's chock full of good, sane, sensible advice, tips and tricks. It has a very sane view on gauge swatches, for instance.  It's a lovely book, and I would recommend it to anyone who starts out to knit in a heartbeat.  It also advises to have a stitch dictionary and a basic knitting technique book in the knitting library.

Advice I took to heart - and got a small stitch dictionary, with pretty colourful pictures - the one you see to the right of Knitting Rules. It's called "Field Guide to Knitting". It is nice... but I very soon found out that there are so, so many more stitch patterns than in that book, and that I'd prefer having more patterns instead of colourful photos. And then I found out about Barbara G. Walker's "Treasury of Knitting Patterns" series, and got the first three books. (There is a fourth one, but that was not as interesting to me as the first three, so I left it at that.) I wouldn't buy the Field Guide anymore, but I totally recommend the Treasury books; they are indeed a treasure trove, and utterly wonderful to leaf through.

The "sock innovation" book, written by Cookie A, was a souvenir from one of our England travels, and while it is quite nice and I did make a pair of socks out of it, I was sort of disappointed by the book. It promises to tell you how to design and adapt sock patterns, but the patterns in the book are only given in one single size, and I'd have appreciated to actually have examples of adaptation instead of just a hint on which technique to use. Also I prefer to knit my socks toe-up, and these are all cuff-down. The socks are beautiful, and I did enjoy looking through the book and marveling at the intricate patterns, but I'm pretty sure I would not buy that one again.

The remaining two books are June Hiatt's "Principles of Knitting" and Cap Sease's "Cast on, Bind Off", and both were very good buys. They are both solid books, full of information on how to do things - especially the "Principles" will probably tell you about everything you need to know about everything.

So... in the nine years since I started knitting, I managed to buy only two knitting books that I'm not still in love with, and that I would probably not get again. I also managed to buy only eight books altogether, including those two. With the six others, I have yet to find another book that I feel would add more knowledge not covered already to this bit of the bookshelf - so I am really happy with these choices!

It's a holiday here in Germany today, so instead of giving you a proper blog post, let me point you to another blog: Jenny Dean's Wild Colour, where she writes about tests with Anglo-Saxon mordants (clubmoss) and lots of other interesting things - if you like to read about historical dyes and natural dyestuffs, you will definitely want to check out this blog.

And for those of you who don't care about these things, here's at least a gratuitous cat picture:



That bag she is lying on, by the way, contained unwashed Waldschaf wool... resulting in a cat that was not only well-rested and happy, but also quite definitely smelling of sheep!