A loop closed

Since the great thaw we had quite nice and mainly dry weather. A few frosty nights, but some days actually felt like spring, when the birds did sing.

I was, and am, at several things in knitting, that’s why I didn’t write much here. Two jumpers, one is finished.

Knitters may know that it is difficult to get back to a project and finish it in the spirit that initially made you start it when you got distracted for too long, because that spirit has vanished.

I discovered a hat and scarf I had started to knit from yarn handspun from my softest sheep, and dyed with plants, many years ago. I also found some unused bobbles of that yarn. It was the softest and finest yarn I ever spun from my sheep. And I remember well my first and only attempt to dye with indigo, and how disappointed I was that I didn’t manage to get a darker blue. Now I love this blue.

I unravelled the scarf and used part of the hat as collar in the jumper I’ve knit from that yarn now, top down. I didn’t care much for design; the main interest was how far the variously sized bobbles will go.

Further than I thought, actually. At the bottom I used some yarn from another sheep, and intentionally a small border incorporating some of the new yarn from the flock. This will be a feel-good jumper at home.

By knitting it I closed a circle, or a loop. And of course while knitting I thought back. I was also reading Fintan O’Toole’s Ship of Fools at the same time. Funnily the main reason why I didn’t do any crafts for many years was related to property, when I was voluntarily actively involved in trying -and in some cases succeeding – to prevent property development. Didn’t local politicians regularly bash us then in the media?

Fintan O’Toole, p 117:

“…Leitrim ended up with almost one in three of its houses empty and with hundreds of houses built in villages like Dromod or Leitrim that recorded only a very small increase in population. It is a strange housing boom that leaves such places literally emptier than they were before.”

And incidentally on the front page of the Leitrim Observer two weeks ago:

“Leitrim County Councillors are calling for the Government to address the large number of empty, unfinished and derelict housing stock now evident throughout the country, with demolition being one of the options proposed.”

two projects

Anyway, I also came across my cards for tablet weaving. That made me look for my old book on tablet weaving. And I got the idea to knit one of the patterns in it using my way of “double knitting”.

It’s the pink and grey piece in the picture. The other side shows the same pattern, with colours reversed.

I’m going to describe this technique here soon, when I have finished another project I’m at…