Monday Morning, Rain is Falling

    And I had a cozy day on the couch. The weather has been giving me whiplash: 80 degrees Saturday, 45 degrees Sunday, and now rainy and cold, but getting warmer? Spring is an odd season. But, that means it was great weather for cozy crafts

Quilting

    This quilt has been faster to fix because most of these repairs are pretty tiny, like this:

    I had to put my finger there at all to indicate where the rip was, because it wasn't really visible on the photos I took before.

    This is basically what the first block looked like to begin with, so the photography isn't that impressive, but the speed with which I'm moving through these repairs is very satisfying.

    Since the previous repair was so simple, I decided to do a second block today, and this one is much more visible.

    It was a quick fix, but a very satisfying one. I'm glad I've been doing these repairs; my Nonne never got a chance to pass on her quilting knowledge to me. She was building up to it, but she died before she got the opportunity. I'm now in a phase of my life where I want to be using my scrap fabrics to make quilts for my family the way she did for all of us, but I don't have her here to ask her opinion on the best methods or to bounce ideas off of. But I do have her quilts, and in repairing them, I'm looking carefully at what she did so I can best imitate it. She's not here to teach me the way we both wish she could have been, but she's still teaching me in her absence, too, and that makes me feel closer to her. Rest in peace, Nonne. 

Knitting

    Officially started strip 10 of the scrap blanket last night. My stitch dictionary calls this "swag stitch" and I found it interesting that two rows of nearly all slipped stitches out of every 6 was enough to keep the stockinette from curling side to side. I was certain it would curl up more, but it's stayed pretty flat. It still rolls vertically, of course, but that's to be expected for stockinette. It will flatten out when sewn to the blanket. 

    All that said, I'm really liking this stitch. I'm looking forward to the first color change, because I think this stitch would look really good with the "swags" being a different color from the background. I think that would make a cute sweater or something.

Spinning

    This spin is progressing, though not as quickly as I'd like. When I took it to the park yesterday, the wind was nearly constant, and it was so bitterly cold, my fingers were hurting so bad, I had to put the spindle away and keep my hands in my pocket. Park time was shorter than we had anticipated, because the kids were cold and wanted to go home too! We had a round of hot cocoa once we got back, but I didn't really get much more spinning time. Hopefully I can get a bit of time before bed for this.

Dyeing

    This is how the fiber looked when I took it out of the oven yesterday, but I know I've used far more dye and had it absorbed, so I knew it just needed some time to soak and then the water would be clear in the morning. However, I can already see some signs that the dye has "broken" (split into it's component molecules and absorbed at different rates in different portions of the fiber) and I could have tossed it back into the oven with some more dye, buuuuuut.... in the past when the dyes have broken, I've gotten some really pretty and unexpected colorways, so I'm thinking I'm just going to let it ride. 

    Ignore the fungal looking paper underneath, it's just dye that stuck to the paper (and then my fingers); it's hard to tell in this photo, because it looks pretty solid here, but in person it was easier to see the mottling and especially as I squeezed out the excess water and hung it up to dry. I know from experience that the fiber will tend to look much more solid than it looks in the fiber (I might do a TBT about another time I had a pretty wildly variegated fiber turn into a fairly solid looking yarn) so I doubt it will look anything like what I'm looking at right now, but I'm so so curious to see what it does do. When it dries enough to photograph the differences well, I'll update. It's still a few days out before I can empty the spindles I need to start spinning it, so there's no rush on that, plus I need to dye the companion roving for the second sock, so it'll be a while before I see the results. But I'm excited!

Weekend crafting

    Friday and Saturday were pretty busy for me, so I didn't have time to sit down and write about my crafting, but the kind of busy I was is the kind that I've heard categorized as "confetti time;" you're not spending long on any one particular thing, and a good amount of the things I was doing involved engaged waiting (laundry, baking, cooking, helping with homework). I couldn't step away, but I wasn't really doing anything either, and hand crafts are great for those times. So, here's what I've gotten done by Sunday morning.

Spinning

    I finished a few things, and started some others, so here it is in chronological order:

    Finished the calico yarn, but it's much less calico than the fiber lead me to believe it would be. I know that colors tend to blending when spun this fine and finer, but I hadn't expected it to become this even when I left so many chunks of separate color. Guess the chunks needed to be bigger and more frequent, something I will experiment on a future project. This came out 80 yards at 47 g, which would imply it's aran weight, but that's just because the amount of twist I add creates fairly dense yarn; it's about 20 WPI and I think will work up more like a sport weight in practice, because I know this fiber tends to halo.

    I spun this skein with the intention of giving it as a gift, but it's much rougher than I had anticipated, so I'm going to add this one to the scrap blanket instead, and I have another skein started that I hope will be nice enough to gift.

    Finished the skein I'd be working on last week. It's a medium grey, and nicely soft. I plan to chain ply it to make a fingering weight yarn when finished. I don't think the yardage will be long enough to really make anything with; there wasn't very much of this color and I had been separating the fiber by color. Right now my plan is to use it for some color work where I combine it with the darker grey and the black (both of which also had very light yardage) and some other fiber that I will have much more of in the future.

    Started some new fiber which this one is resting. I have more of this light silver color, but I'm not sure exactly what the yardage will be because it isn't a ton more than the medium grey. Once I finish it I'll decide if it's going on the blanket, added to the color work pile, or becoming it's own something based on the finished yardage. 

March 27

March 28

March 29

    I haven't worked on it much until today, but I should be heading out to the park, and that's prime spinning time, so I should have some decent progress to show tomorrow.

Dyeing

    I have plans for a pair of knee high socks, but I do not want them to be white, so I'm going to need to dye the wool. I prefer to do this before spinning, because it evens out any variations in the dyeing much better than if I spun the yarn and then dyed it. Sometimes, I like that kind of gentle variegation, the "kettle dyed" look, but for these socks I want a fairly even color, so dyed in the wool it is.

   

    Step 1 is to weigh the fiber so I have a rough idea of how much dye to mix up. I'll be dyeing this in the oven, my preferred method for dyeing loose fiber, so it's fairly important to get the dye amount right on the first go, as I won't be stirring to distribute the dye or anything like that. But that's not a huge deal right now, as I have the fiber soaking overnight as a prep stage. The fiber absorbs dye much more easily if it starts out wet, and wool is very good at retaining pockets of air, so I like to soak the wool for at least 12 hours, though 24-48 is preferred. Even at those long soaking times, and even if I squeeze out the air bubbles I see in the fiber every time I go past the soaking bucket, there's still usually some pockets of air in the fiber when I go to dye it, but this minimizes it the most I can, and the blending that takes place in the spinning usually mitigates it even further.

Quilting

    I am pleased to announce that I am finally, finally, finally, done with my Nonne's quilt!

    It took I think about 6 months, mostly not working daily, but at least 3-4 days a week working about an hour at a time. I'm not sure what damaged it so heavily, but it's looking pretty good these days and I anticipate another decade or so of use out of it! Once it starts wearing too badly to repair, I'll put it into some kind of moth-proof storage and keep it as a memory quilt. It's once of very few physical items I still have from her, and while she would definitely be more pleased to know I'm still using it, the emotional part of me doesn't want to use it all the way up, either.

    My Nonne made me this quilt when I was in high school. It's sized to fit a twin size bed, and she had hoped I could use it in my college dorm, too. I didn't end up going to college and staying in the dorms, and instead got married not too long after high school, so it didn't get the use my Nonne had hoped for, but I cherish it all the same. It now serves as a winter layer for my oldest child, but of course near daily use in the cold season by a child not quite old enough to understand why we should be gentle with precious things means that it too is in need of repair. This is a much smaller quilt and with a pattern that's easier to tackle, so I've set myself a goal of repairing one quilt block a day, and since it contains 35 blocks, that means it should be finished in about a month! Much faster than the previous quilt. 

    This is the first block I decided to tackle; I'm starting with the bottom left corner and working my way across and up, so it's easier to tell where to start the work each day. This one only had a little tiny bit of the circle detaching from the square, so it was an quick fix.

    This repair took 40 minutes, according to my phone's time stamps, but I think that's inaccurate, because I was baking bread at the time and I think I had to interrupt myself to get it out of the oven. I think it was closer to 15 minutes of working time.

    Blogger is being weird, so this photo has to be left aligned, no idea why. But anyway, this is Saturday's block, Day 2 of the repair, and this was also pretty straightforward and simple. 

    

    Phone timestamps say this took about 20 minutes and that sounds right, I don't think I was interrupted when I was working on this.

    Blogger hates the rest of the photos, so they too will be left aligned, but this is today, Sunday, Day 3. The vast majority of the repairs are a portion of the circle lifting up like this, not sure why.

    

    As you can see from the before photo, this one had a lot more volume so even tacked down it isn't quite flat. I assume there's just a little too much length or something in this section. Had I thought of it, I probably could have overcome it by folding the piece differently, but it was already ironed into this shape and the years of being held at this shape also had it folding naturally here, so I didn't really notice until I had finished. It's not worth ripping back, in my opinion, but definitely something I'll keep an eye out for on future blocks.

Knitting

    Strip 9 is complete! My blanket is officially 60% done! My first thought when laying out this strip for photographing was "wow, what a mess" because the curling is out of control and the mess of ends really don't do it any favors either, but I know it cleans up nice, so I'm not too worried.

    Here it is, sewn on the rightmost edge. You can see it's still curling a ridiculous amount, but looking at the other strips that were similarly curly before having something on either side to anchor it, I'm honestly not too worried. It's fitting in nicely over there on the edge, and can't wait to see it with it's newest neighbor in something like 6 months when I actually finish the next strip.

    A gratuitous close up of the newest strip and it's neighbors. The width of the strips isn't exactly even because the tension of the yarns change a bit along with the tension of the stitches used, but they're all close enough to the same, about 6 inches across, that I'm not concerned.

Well, that's it for this weekend. Tomorrow's update will definitely not be as big, but I'm okay with that.

Throwback Thursday - Spindle Tip Tutorial

 Back in 2021, I posted a photo tutorial on how I made the spindles I use just about every day. Since that post I've made at least another 4. As they break or wear out (the flicking area wears fast if you use them all the time!) I just buy new dowels and create more. The dowels themselves are something like $1 each, and at about 4 feet long, I cut them into 4 lengths and have a spindle for about 25 cents a pop. It ends up being slightly more than that, since I have to buy new blades for the craft knife from time to time, but even if we assume that doubles or triples the cost of the spindles, that's still pretty economical. I add the spiral notch because I happened to buy one made commercially that has that feature, and fell head over heels in love with it. It saves so much time over methods that require a half hitch (or two, sometimes) and not having to pause and make the knot lets me get into the flow state with spinning really easily. If you want to give it a try, it's fairly simple to do. This tutorial was made with my 4th or so attempt, and even subpar or imperfect results aesthetically speaking still make very serviceable spindles.

     I watched several whittling videos to get an idea of technique and how to achieve what I want, and then just kind of… made it up as I went. But! It turned out well, I think, so here’s what I did:

    So to start, obviously you’ll need a dowel. The one I’ll be working with is 3/8 inch or 1.8 cm, though the one on the right (whose angle is for plying) is 1/4 inch or 0.5 cm. This will work on pretty much any dowel size, I imagine, but I wanted you to have an idea of the scale.

    The first step is to lay a pencil at the angle you’d like the spiral to be, and roll the dowel in the direction you’d like the spiral to turn (away from you for z spin/singles, towards for s spin/plying), dragging the pencil the whole way to make a mark. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but especially the first few times you try this, it can help to erase any stray marks and really refine the line because this is what you’ll be using as a guide for the carving. It will look something like this:

    The bottom of the spiral should be closer to horizontal than vertical in order to catch the yarn; at the top, mark out a vertical section which will go roughly into the middle of the dowel to allow the the yarn out aligned with the dowel, curbing wobble.

    The next step is to create what YouTube videos tell me is called a “stop cut”. Press the blade of your knife into the wood a mm or 2 all along the pencil line, to create a kind of “wall” for the blade to stop at when you’re carving out the spiral. Unlike the pencil technique, this can’t be done in one smooth operation, it’s more of a press-release-turn-repeat kind of action, no slicing involved at all. When you finish it will look like this:

    It’s a little hard to see, but there’s a groove all along the pencil line, following it all the way up. From here, you’ll begin carving by placing the knife at an angle and “scooping” wood out of the dowel, like this:

    As you’re removing wood all along the line, it will sometime be necessary to turn the dowel upside down and carve out in the opposite direction to remove strips of leftover wood, like this:

    Make sure to keep all parts of your body, fingers especially, out of the path of the blade, in case of any slips. A dull blade is more likely to slip than a sharp one, so use the sharpest blade you can, and discard used blades once they start dulling.

    Continue in this way, all the way up the spiral. If you have these little rough bits in the groove, you can use the tip of the blade to neaten it up, or use sandpaper to smooth it out, but I’ve found that if you remove all the sharp bits, the motion of the yarn, and the oils from the wool and your fingers will soften and smooth the wood after relatively little use, so there’s no need to get really finicky with cleaning it up.

    I forgot to take pictures of this part in progress, but to work the vertical notch at the top, turn the whole operation 90 degrees, and work the knife vertically in a scooping motion away from your body. I can take some more photos of this later if it needs clarification, but once you get to this point, it should be fairly intuitive. It may be necessary to clean up the bottom of the top notch as you hollow out the center, in order to make a “hook” for the yarn to catch on. Once it’s done, it will look like this:

    This is a 1/4 inch (0.5 cm) dowel, not 3/8 inch (1.8 cm) dowel, but the end point is the same. You can see at this angle the depth of the notch. This lets the yarn travel out the center of the dowel, so if your spindle is wobbling badly, this is the first place to investigate. On my first try it wobbled quite a bit, until I added another mm or so to the center depth and created a bit of horizontal space under the notch to help seat the yarn a little more securely.

    The benefit to this method is that you can use it as a drop spindle without having to use a slip knot. To engage the yarn in the notch, just spin the spindle as you would to add twist to the yarn; to release it, keep tension on the yarn and spin the spindle in the opposite direction. It’s kind of hard to explain in writing, but very quick and intuitive in use. Hope this can help someone else!

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    Next week for Throwback Thursday, I'll repost an explainer on the hand held distaves I make and use. They are also similarly inexpensive and easy to make, plus there's a lot of room to customize and decorate those as well, if you're so inclined.

Big Quilting Gains

    I decided I would take a few photos of the quilting anyway, since I was spending a good portion of the early hours of the morning working on it. I still don't think they're especially exciting photos, but I hope they're at least a little interesting.

    This is pretty typical of most of the repairs on the quilt. I guess it's just that the thread is old and disintegrating or maybe there had been some stress on this part of the quilt that had helped wear away the thread on this particular spot. To be honest, I don't know what caused most of these because I am only finding these defects piecemeal; honestly most of them I'm finding as I'm repairing another portion of the quilt.

    According to the time stamps of this image, this repair took about 15 minutes. I have no idea if that's fast or slow, but it feels slow to me because it feels so simple and small of a repair. It's difficult to sit down at something for a few hours and see barely perceptible change, but I soldier on.

    For example, this repair I found as I manipulated the quilt to repair the section above. The vast majority of the repairs are a failure on just one side like this, so it's kind of hard to see unless you're scrutinizing the quilt fairly closely.

    Time stamps say this took five minutes, so I guess it's about 5 minutes per side? That makes some sense, since the first photos took 15 minutes to fix 3 sides.

    Then there's patches like these. Honestly, even though they take longer, these are the more satisfying to work, because there's such a visible different in the quilt once finished. 

    Time stamps said this took 45 minutes, but I think there was more than 9 sides to join, so I guess not having to stop and restart the thread saves some time. This is where I stopped taking photos of everything I was doing, even though I kept quilting another 2 1/2 hours. At the end of that session I turned the quilt over in my hands 3 or 4 times and didn't see any more patches in need of repair, so I might actually be done with it, but I'm letting it rest overnight before coming to any solid conclusions, just in case my eyes were seeing what they wanted to see, instead of what was really there.

    Moving on to my spinning progress, I've got just a few punis/rolags left on this copp. It's proceeding nicely, and I may finish this tonight or tomorrow morning, depending on how much "standing around" time I end up having. Then I'll rest it a few days before chaining it up. It's very soft, and I think it will soften up well after plying and perhaps even be a bit squishy. I try to spin my yarns harder than that for longevity, but a little squish now and then is nice.

    Not pictured because I forgot to photograph it, but I'm washing 50ish grams of the fawn fleece and have another 50 ish carded and ready to go in the bath. I also created the punis for the black fiber that had been drying the last couple of days, so I have two spindle's worth of clean fibers ready to go in the fiber drawer. I also settled on dyeing the BFL fiber black, for some socks, so my next update will probably have progress on that as well. 

    Please don't mind how dirty my landlord's windowsill is, I took this photo in the common area of the building while waiting for a delivery. Anyway, this strip is now 54 inches long, and I think the next ball of yarn I add to it might be it's last. Very excited to sew this one on to the blanket and be that much closer to finishing. 

    Hopefully tomorrow will have some photos of dyeing in progress; I love dyeing, it's one of my favorite parts of the crafting process! Even a "boring" color like black can be fun to watch progress, especially if you have to mix the dye to get the "right" kind of black. Warm undertones or cool? Charcoal or Jet black? It's a bit of science and a bit of art combined because things don't always turn out how you'd expected. 

A technological miracle!

     Okay, so not really. But, I was suggested to try a different adapter, in case that had busted for one reason or another, and now my phone is indeed charging, so thankfully this was a $15 problem and not a $200+ one. That means photos will resume tomorrow, as it's already pretty dark here (the sun is only just setting, but it's been cloudy and gloomy all day, so it's already dark).

    Got a ton of progress done on the quilt; just sat for like 4 hours and worked away at it. The main reason is because somehow the backing of my daughter's quilt has a huge tear in it? She was unable to explain how or why this could have happened, which is typical I guess, but also some of the motifs are loose on that quilt as well, so I've put it aside and that's my next sewing repair project after I finish the quilt. 

    Because of how much energy I was putting into the quilt, I didn't really get anything else done, craftwise. The spinning is still at the same stage it was at yesterday, and I haven't knit on the strip at all. Now that I'm done with my daytime housework and sitting down for rest in the evening, I'll probably work some on both and have something to show for it tomorrow, but as it stands right now, this is a pretty boring update, aside from the resurrection of my phone/camera.

Having a bummer of a time

     I haven't posted in a few days, because on Tuesday evening, my phone simply decided it was never going to charge again. I bought the phone back in December, so that's definitely not something it should be doing, even though it's a refurbished phone, so I'm in the process of seeing if repair or exchange or something can be done so I don't have to buy another phone again so soon. In the meantime, I've decided to just post about my projects without photos for now, seeing as how I have no idea how long this process will take. A friend said they might have an older phone they can lend me in the mean time, so if they find that, then I'll be able to post photos again, but until one or the other happens, this is how it is.

    I plied the calico, and it's awaiting it's turn in the bath along with the socks I mended, my winter headscarf, and my new spring headscarf. It's looking like it might be DK when finished; not sure of the yardage yet. I'm at least halfway through the new alpaca I've been spinning, maybe a little more. When I finish that I've got a little bit more of the grey alpaca (a lighter grey, like a silver), some black that is still drying, and then I'm starting on the fawn fleece. I've also got some BFL roving I wanted for socks, but I wanted to dye the fiber before I spun it, and I haven't decided exactly which socks I'd be making with them, so I don't know what color(s) to dye it. I suppose that's something I should look at this week.

    It's been hotter this week, so I haven't been working as much on the quilt because I haven't wanted to sit under a blanket on the couch as much, but I suppose I should get back into it or else it's never going to get done. I also have to plan a trip to the fabric store to find some fabric to finish up lengthening the skirt for my daughter. She's also requested a few more dresses and skirts, so depending on what kind of sales they have going on, I might pick up a few yards to do that with as well. I also have some fabric at home I've been wanting to make myself a skirt with, so I might clear off the table and cut the fabric for that as well this week.

    I've also been making amazing progress on the blanket strip. I'm about 60 inches out of 75 on this one, and I'm very excited to finish it up and sew it on to the blanket. It's getting to be the wrong season for such a blanket, of course, but being 9/15 strips of the blanket has me wondering if it might be at all possible to finish it in time for the upcoming winter. I want to say no because it's taken me 5 years to get this far, but I also haven't ever worked on it steadily at all. It's always in fits and spurts and I've gotten multiple strips done in a year before. It really depends on what my yarn and knitting production looks like. That and I fully restarted this blanket once before, so there's no reason to believe it *has* to take me another 5 years. I don't know if I'm being overly optimistic or not. Probably, if I'm being honest. But I'm so close to finishing the 10th strip and that feels like a really big milestone. Plus, I've been loving exploring stitches through this blanket. The first 3 were garter and stockinette (one regular, one "reverse" stockinette, even though experiencially, knitting them was the same, it was more a matter of which way I sewed it on). Then a strip of seed stitch, a strip of mistake rib (created a nice waffle texture with most of the yarns I used), a strip of Roman stitch (which I'd never tried before, so that was fun). I got that one from this little pocket stitch dictionary I bought from a Joanns forever ago, and since that was the point at which I was out of all the stuff I had memorized (besides like simple 1/1, 2/2, etc. rib, which I didn't want to use because I didn't want all the draw in or simple rope cables or tear drop lace, which I was avoiding for similar tension reasons) I decided to rely on that book for the rest of the blanket stitches, just going through it one by one. The next one after Roman stitch was one I honestly do not remember the name of. I would look in the book, but we are in the process of rearranging the living room and all my books are in storage totes, and of course I didn't think to write down which books were in which totes, so until I pull them out, it will have to remain a mystery. It was a similarly horizontal kind of stitch, a row of pattern stitch with rest rows in between. I wouldn't use it in a garment, probably, but both are fine for blankets or scarves. Maybe a hat or cowl? Then came Irish moss, which I'd seen before but never actually done. I liked it, it was pretty rhythmic. Unlike the Roman stitch and the other one, I could see using that one in a garment. It has a nice allover texture that's interesting but not distracting. I don't know if that makes sense to anyone else. 

    For the strip I'm working on now, the next stitch recommended was linen stitch, and I got a few inches in, but the gauge was just so different from everything else, and also I hated doing it, so I frogged immediately and moved on to the next stitch, which the book called tweed stitch, but I think I've seen it called half-linen in others. It's basically linen stitch with a rest row, so that makes sense to me. I actually really like the transition zone where I switch colors in it the best. I think two row stripes of two or more colors would be really cute in this stitch, plus it's still stretchy enough to work as a hat or other garments, maybe even socks. That's what been the most fun about this project, to be honest. Trying out the different stitches and thinking about how best to use them. When this blanket is over, I'm casting on another one, immediately, both because I will always have need to use up scraps and of course will always need more blankets, but mostly just because it's been so fun! Wish I could show a photo of the color transition right now; goals for when I get another phone, I guess!

    I keep forgetting to put the modge podge on the new whorls and things. That's another thing I'm going to have to remember to do this week, along with my other chores. I'm also hoping to maybe start a windowbox garden this year, maybe grow some nice tomatoes and some herbs. It would also be fun to see if I can sprout some carrots. That's the problem isn't it? There's always so many fun things to do, and not enough fun time to do them in!

New Day New Projects

    Things are chugging along as usual. This new medication is still kicking my ass, so I haven't had energy to get much done, but that's more than nothing, so here's what I've done so far today and last night after posting:

 

    Started a new spin, just grey alpaca carded into rolags. I have one bag of this, maybe 50 g? I also have about 25 g of black to spin, and then I'll be moving on to the fawn fleece. I took the calico off the spindle and wound it into a plying ball, then chained it and rewound it for plying. It didn't come out nearly as variegated as I hoped, so that's definitely something to improve my technique on going forward. The inclusion of the fawn definitely warmed up the overall tone, but other than that, it's mostly unremarkable grey yarn. Oh well. I'll ply it up probably tomorrow. I usually give a few days between spinning and then setting up the ply ball, and then plying because it helps tame the twist and make the rewinding easier, and I didn't do that this time and hugely regret it. Patience is worth it! Saves a lot of work and headache in the end.

    Getting real sick of these repairs, lol, but the weather is changing, they'll be able to get some rest, and I'll be able to knit a few more pairs to spread out the wear and things will improve. Not to mention this grey yarn in particular was spun much more softly than I would have knowing it was going to be socks, as well as being repurposed from a sweater that was attacked by moths. I definitely am pleased with how well it's holding up in light of all that, but in general, this is not holding up well at all.

    The repair didn't take that long, which was nice. You can see that I've used this yarn for repairs before and it holds it up pretty well, in my experience so far, so I don't anticipate having to redo these repairs anytime soon. It's just that it keeps popping up here, there, everywhere that's the bigger problem. 

    Another one that needed fixing right at the transition of the heel turn. Not sure why that's such a particular weak point, but I have noticed that on a bunch of my socks. This is also the one where I used worsted weight in the heel and toe. It did last a bit longer than the surrounding yarn, but not enough that I would ever, ever do it again. 

    This sock has multiple problems. This is a hole in the top, second sole I knit for this sock. It worked more or less as intended; as you'll see in the picture below, the sock on the inside had many more holes in the sole than were present on the second layer, but the sock is still, in general, intact.

    I stabilized the holes with buttonhole stitch all around the holes. I didn't do a repair from the inside because the yarn is really not stable enough to do so, and I'm mostly preserving these socks as a stop gap. I knew when I knit them they were not going to be a pair that got years of wear (aside from the toes and heels, maybe), I just needed some warm socks for the winter approaching and something is better than nothing. It has been a great lesson in the shortcomings and upkeep of the socks I'll be making in the future though, so I'm not mad. To finish the repair on these socks, I'll be patching the top layer of the sole over these holes. When those patches fail, I'll rip back the top sole and knit another, but for now I'm not putting in the effort because winter is basically over. If it were December or January, the calculus would be different.

    I've seen those bear glasses holders making their way through social media, so I wanted to make one too, but like our cat instead of a bear. If I did this again, I think I would change the eyes; they're not as circular as I would have liked, and I might make them bigger over all as well. I think I also made the whole thing a little bigger than it strictly needed to be, so I might change that as well, if I were to do it again. Otherwise, I think it's a pretty big success.

    Started back up on the blanket strips. On the close up, you can see how little stitch definition the alpaca really has. I have a lot of scraps I've been holding on to for sock heels and toes, but I've decided to just add them to the blanket and be done with it. There have been several attempts and I've found that a lot of the scraps either aren't enough for toes or are just barely enough, to the point that I wouldn't be able to weave in my ends the way I prefer, so I decided to just consider it a wash. Especially since sock repair season is ending and I'll definitely be racking up more odd little scrap balls of yarn as we re-enter sock repair season.

Well, that's it for today!