Sampler CM and Pi Bag

I finished pattern 7 of Sampler (C)M Monday while my Honda Odyssey was being fixed. (I finished pattern 6 last Thursday, same place, waiting for an oil change.)

Just in time, as pattern 8 is now out. I have gotten as far behind as six patterns when we were near the end of the original Sampler M, so I'm trying to keep up with the CM ones.

Here is the Pi bag after a third wash, now down to ten inches wide and ten and three-quarters long.

I am pretty happy with it at this size, especially since I was a little worried I had knitted it too big.

It has turned into a nice soft thick felt fabric. The only thing I might still do is wet the edge and bash it around so it doesn't ruffle. (It probably wouldn't have done that if I had left the plastic out of the eyelets during the second wash.)

That's the nice thing about knitting and felting -- I don't have to be too careful with it.

Q: How did you cast off for your Pi bag?

A: I purled around the edge for several rows so it would roll towards the inside of the bag, then I did a sewn cast off. That's the one in the back of Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitter's Almanac called "Casting on casting-off".

I was going to add a photo of the Easter-egg-dyed tussah silk scarf that I worked on at our son's spring concert/talent show (which went much better than last year's). But Blogger has suddenly decided "no pictures!"

Last year I was too frazzled by trying to drag the child to the concert to bring knitting. This year he was calmer about the whole thing, so I brought the scarf and knitted through most of the songs. But I forgot my brand new camera!

Pictures, Odds and Ends

I've been taking so many pictures, I don't have time to upload all the good ones! I have a lot of pictures I took on my walks that I have to go through and decide which to keep.

Here is a photo of a jack-in-the-pulpit, Arisaema triphyllum, that I took a week and a half ago. It is growing in the black, soft muck near the seep at the south end of our property. After it blooms, if it was pollinated, it will have red fruits on the blossom stem.

Water seeps back there through most of the year, but not with enough volume to really call it a spring. It's enough to create about a foot of black muck, though.

I don't know what kind of fern this is. My fern book is pretty basic. For wildflowers, birds, and butterflies, I have multiple field guides, but for ferns I have a little book that I can't seem to find.

I worked on the Sampler (C)M while I waited for my van yesterday (but forgot to take a picture), and afterwards I went to two thrift stores.

At the first one, I found three balls of Pingouin "Confortable" (Con with an N, not an M) for 99 cents total. These are 135-yard balls of washable wool/mohair/acrylic blend for 33 cents each.

I found nothing at the second store. All the yarn was bagged in $3 bags, and I didn't want to pay $3 for the one skein I wanted and four or five I didn't want.

This year's Pi bag has gone through two washes. In the photo it is purl side out. It started out thirteen inches wide, flattened, and fifteen and a half inches from the edge to the center circle. So far it's down to eleven inches wide and twelve inches long.

I washed it both times with a plastic bread wrapper threaded through the eyelets, but when I wash it again, I'll leave that out.

These two photos were taken from about the same spot on the path, looking west, at different times of day.

On the left, the open meadow on a sunny afternoon. The yellow is a yellow hawkweed, one of the Hieracium species, and the reddish bands are wild sorrel, Rumex acetosella.

On the right, the sky around half an hour before sunset.

A Couple of Updates

The canton (local group of the Society for Creative Anachronism) meeting Friday went pretty well. We put both tables in our front room for food, and all the chairs in the geodesic dome for the potluck and the meeting. It was a bit crowded, but unlike the last meeting at our house, everyone did not bring pie!

(Not that there's anything wrong with a dessert potluck -- it was just unplanned. And in the past, we have had a lot of meetings where everyone brought almost all the same thing: all chips and various dips, all chicken dishes, etc. It's actually kind of funny, when it's not weird, how on-the-same-wavelength we are.)

Saturday, as I've already gloated mentioned, we went to that estate sale. I also got outside with my hand shears and worked a little on trimming the grass close around some of my lilies and other plants. I mow most of the grass with the push mower, then I snip right up to the stems of my perennials by hand.

When my hand got too sore to keep snipping, I came in and finished knitting the edge of the Pi bag. The two-foot long piece of green yarn by the ruler is all that is left of the wool thrums after casting off.

That is to say, the latest Pi bag is done!

I can't show it to you right now, because it's in the washing machine, undergoing its first session of thermal shock, agitation, and alkalinity. Since I've been told more than once that "You can't felt in a front-loading washing machine," I'll point out again that I have a front-loader. (And anyway, how would the knitting know? It can't tell what kind of washing machine it's in.)

The keys to shrinking and felting are thermal shock (meaning sharp change from hot to cold and back again), change in pH (from alkaline, say baking soda, to acid, but only as acid as vinegar, not battery acid), and agitation. Oh, and moisture!

The big difference about felting in a front-loader is that it's harder to stop the machine and check the progress of what you're felting. (Mine unlocks, when I stop the cycle, after two minutes of impatient waiting. It's amazing how LONG two minutes are.)

Sunday (Mother's Day in the US) I was woken up at 6:11 am by our son making me toast in the kitchen, and laying a trail of presents for me to follow from the bedroom to the kitchen. I love being a mom!

This morning, on the other hand, I was woken up at 5:11 am by my husband, who said, "The power went off and on in the night, and we have no water pressure."

sleepy groan from me

This meant getting up, putting on jeans, glasses, a coat, and my boots, taking a nail file, a flashlight and my husband (for upper-body strength), walking down the driveway in the dark to the well pit, lifting the very heavy well pit cover, unplugging the pump, and cleaning out this year's first well-pit beetle out of the pump controller contact.

The dead, flat beetle was in the same contact as every single dead, flat, well-pit beetle before! Once it was cleaned out, like magic, the pump started right up. Hooray, water pressure, coffee, and flushing toilets.

And I went back to bed until time to get our son up for school.

Gratuitous Saturday Post

My blue dictionary, a 1960 Merriam-Webster, defines "gratuitous" as "1. Given freely, without recompense, or regardless of merit. 2. Not called for by the circumstances; unwarranted." So you can take today's post for what it's worth!

The Pi bag has now been through a hot wash/cold rinse cycle, along with my other hot-wash laundry. To those who claim you "can't felt in a front-loader", I say pish, and also tosh! We are now down to about 10.5 inches wide and long, from starting measurements of 13.5 and 15 inches.

It's a nice size, but I might run it through one more hot wash as soon as I accumulate the next batch. Why? Oh, I don't know, I guess I just like wool-torturing.

I'm pleased to see that the ends that I pulled to the inside before washing have sunk into the felt and vanished. Literally. I know they are there, lots of them, and I went looking for them, in the sunlight, and couldn't find a one!

My husband took it from me after I dried it, and was making "This would make a good hat" noises. He made to put it on his hot sweaty head, and I had to snatch it back to safety. I have more of this wool left (lots of the black), so a hat is a possibility. I don't know how much wool I'm going to want to knit in summer, though.

One thing I'm all chuffed about (how great is the internet, that somebody who grew up in mid-Michigan has learned a handy word like "chuffed") is how nice and round that gray circle is on the bottom. Another thing I really like is the combination of the biasing and the circle: I don't know if it shows in the picture, but the stitches gently swirl out from the center.

After I decide if it's going through another wash cycle or not, I'll probably make a lining. But before that, as a last wash, I like to use "non-alkaline" (translation: slightly acidic) shampoo on wool. I just use my own shampoo. That sleeks the wool scales back down after their exciting journey through Washer Land, and doesn't leave any weird perfume-y scents.

I am distracted, because some baby bird is begging squeakily outside the window (and has been), and I keep trying to catch sight of it and see what it is. So far I can hear it, but I can't spot it. It's driving me crazy! Squeeeek! Squeeeek! Squeeeek!

First Wash

Well, silly me, I forgot (both times) to put the ruler in the picture, so after cropping the photos, you can't see the shrinkage in the Pi bag! It wasn't much this round (the width went from 13.5 to 12 inches, and the length from 15 to 12.5) as it was only a "warm wash/cold rinse" cycle. Next round I'll throw it in with the "hot wash" laundry.

One thing that was interesting (hope it shows up on your monitor) was that the black wool, which is two-ply, didn't bias at all, but both of the wool singles yarns (the grey and the green) did bias noticeably. I only noticed a slight twist to the singles as I was knitting, but obviously it was enough to cause some biasing. All three of these yarns are marked "100% wool, 8 oz., 1000 yards, Harrisville Designs" inside the cone.

Harrisville Designs, in Harrisville (surprise!), New Hampshire, USA, is still out there, but the singles yarns are no longer offered. The two colors I have (Evergreen and Suede) are very pretty yarns close up. "Evergreen" is a deep forest green from a distance, but knitting it, I can see blue blended in there. "Suede" is mostly gray, but every so often there is a brown spun into it.

The shiny thingie that I put through the eyelets is a plastic bread bag, cut into a long narrow strip, to keep the eyelets from felting shut.

The color pattern at the edge is ve-e-ery simple. One green row is knitted. Then the first gray row is K1, P1. Then knit a green row, followed by P1, K1 with the gray. That's it! It's less prone to curling up than stockinette, and less flat and balanced than seed/rice stitch. It gives that neat diamond effect, with a fast, no-brainer knitted row every other row.

Yesterday was my son's last day of school. Today is the first day of summer vacation! Exciting and fun for him, but it also means less time on the computer for me. (We share a computer.) So we'll see -- blog posting might become spotty and erratic for the next three months.