Tidying up is always a mistake

What I found this time was a couple of skeins of the lovely grey Gotland… They were on the floor behind the computer table. This was after I’d spun up an extra three skeins of the new Gotland to ensure I would have enough for my mate’s jumper. So as the intended recipient’s 50th birthday is today, I have given up. Well the original jumper dad rejected was upto the yoke before it was all frogged and I contemplated the Wishbone sweater in Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Almanac. I even ordered some knitting needles for it (which arrived today). I was using the Gotland yarn double-thickness, but then realised a bottom up jumper wasn’t very sensible when I was unsure how much more of the second darkest shade of the Gotland I had to spin (I’d spun all of the original three shades). This is the same jumper where I had started the yoke after knitting the body and sleeves all separately. So Plan C for this jumper was just a plain top-down raglan, which is such a duplication of work. I had gone past the armpits before finding this yarn (and beyond the point where this yarn matched the shade I was knitting).

I still really like the wishbone sweater and have done a sample of three or four strands of my handspun merino. It would make for a much lighter jumper than the Gotland. I am thinking of putting all the wool into a blue dyepot so they will all be the same colour even if different shades.

A pair of friends visited last weekend, who I always consider my young relatives. As such they got the niece treatment – forced knitting practice and learning to use a spinning wheel. Harry is left-handed so I had to suss out how to knit his way round in order to teach him. It got very confusing when I knitted my normal way as the stitches ended up being a different way round on the needle. And Dennys played on both spinning wheels as she has only spun on spindles and a great wheel before. Yes Dennys is a girl. Just think of the song a Boy Called Sue. Other than that we just sat around and chatted (and knitted) and ate. Somedays that’s all you need to do with friends.