Merrilee makes

So earlier in the year I was playing around with a weaving draft and came up with something truly awful. I briefly considered weaving it just to see it, but it's a big time investment to weave something on a floor loom just to prove that a pattern is, in fact, awful.

So I played around at making the pattern less awful. My idea was to have diamonds that change in size across and down the length of the fabric in a gradient, kinda like a mexican wave. My first design had only one diamond in each size and the changes were too rapid, making a fabric that was hard on the eyes.
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Last year I donated a spare yarn swift to the Knitters' Guild NSW Capital Region group. But when someone went to use it the other month it wasn't very functional. I'm not sure what happened, but I took it home for some work.

The little pearshaped nut that held the arms in place while spinning had a piece chipped off, and it no longer held anything in place.
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So in my last post I said I'd knit a Bradford Peak Beaniea by Shelby Nichols in some handspun yarn. Which is true, I had done that. Here it is.



But it's also not true, because physics.
( Let me explain. )

Life has been extremely fucking LIFE at the moment. So I decided to have a bit of a brain break and just weave something simple that made me happy.


( Life. Oh life. Oh liiiiiiiiiiiffe. Oh life. )

So I have been getting new stash, but also going through my stash and seeing what I can use.

I had two random self-patterning sock yarn with no label and a rather unique colourway (cyan, magenta, black and white). I made two pairs of socks out of them (toe up with an afterthought heel which I loved, anything to avoid picking up stitches from a heel flap which would have been one of the 9 circles of hell if only Dante was a knitter).


( Dubious literary reference )

When I was mucking about with my stash earlier in the year I showed photos of some Polwarth spinning fibre. I bought these braids with the idea to spin them all as one project. As the Canberra cold season, and hence spinning season, is well and tryly underway I thought I'd sit down and try can capture my plan.

Here's the fibre. These three braids of natural coloured Polwarth from Tarndwarncoort (Tandie), a Victorian farm that specialises in Polwarth sheep. The fibre is also prepared in Victoria, making it one of the few spinning fibres you can buy that's 100% Australian made.
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Hello world. After a minor hiatus the blog is back again. I've been really busy the last month but I also feel like I've accomplished nothing.
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I decided to do a bit of sewing. I've come to the realisation that I don't actually like sewing. I like having sewn things, but the actual physical process? Not so much.

I've been trying to figure out why sewing isn't something I enjoy, and I think it has to do with not getting into a flow state. This graph is a great representation of what you need for flow.


Source: Research Gate
( Go with the flow )

I had a cone of yarn sitting on my craft room desk for weeks. Waiting.

I wanted to do a bleach test and burn test on it to try to identify its fibre content. Once I knew its content I could start thinking about what kind of weaving I wanted to use it for, and use the cones up. Which is definitely a goal for this year.

But for some reason it just wasn't happening. So I sat down for a moment and tried to work out why. I realised that it was the faff that was putting me off. Mucking about in the laundry with little glass jars of bleach and matches was messy and kinda fiddly. So I decided to just do it, but to grab all the other mystery cones of yarn I had and test all of them at once. I explain more about bleach and burn tests in my mystery yarn tour post.
( Burn baby burn )

So I've finished my giant shawl and didn't even run out of purple yarn, which is amazing. But what to do with the leftover blue and white? I still have a few balls of white yarn in my stash so the leftovers of that is going right back into the stash basket.

The blue is a little more precarious, as it's handspun so there's no label to work out the remianing meterage, and there's no more to be had of it anywhere in the universe. So what to do with a partial ball of unique yarn?



Do some empirical research!
( Time for some string theory )