Guard Knitter in the Knitting Mobile

I've had a really busy, and sadly knit-free, few days!

Tuesday was a big knitting day though. A friend of a friend was moving house, into a flat on a really busy high street, and was worried that people would steal from her van while she was carrying things in. I offered my services as a carrier, but what with my reputation as a bit of a cripple I was enlisted as Van Guarder instead. They were very worried that I'd get bored, just stood by a van for hours.

How can a knitter who is not currently in the throes of RSI get bored while standing around for hours?!

So I got to spend lots of Tuesday lounging against a van, knitting. I decided not to take the shawl because I'd been a bit cocky the night before ("OMG I'm such a great lace knitter, I have this pattern completely memorised, I can totally watch TV at the same time... huh? Why I am missing a stitch?"), made a mistake, and realised that I do need to concentrate for shawl knitting! Likewise mini-hats would have been too awkward - I'm planning to knit those on looooooooooooooong metal straights held under the armpit, and thought that might attract undue attention from any passing police officer.

So cardigan it was. I got heaps knitted on the body (I think standing up was really good for my arms - must keep me in good posture!), and now I'm trawling ebay for suitable colours to do the colourwork in.

Sadly I just haven't had a chance to knit since then, but the weekend is a-coming :)

My pledge is going well! Innocent even mentioned it both on their knitter-natter page, and on their main blog too! I'm really hopeful that it will succeed, and maybe others will set up pledges too. More hats for Innocent!

Remember, if you're planning to knit a mini-hat, you can sign the pledge too :)

I'll knit hats, but I'd like you to knit some too!

So, since 2003 Innocent Smoothies have been selling drinks wearing knitted hats during November, in order to raise money for Age Concern (50p from every hat-wearing bottle sold goes to Age Concern). Last year some of my friends knit up loads and loads of hats, but it was during a severe-RSI period for me, and sadly all I could do was watch.

This year I have happier joints, and want to join in with The Big Knit!

There's a website called PledgeBank, of which the general gist is “I’ll do it, but only if you’ll help me”, and I've always thought it would be a great way to motivate charity knitting.

So I've set up a pledge too - "I will knit at least 5 hats for Innocent Smoothies' The Big Knit but only if 35 other people will knit at least 1 hat too."

If you want to get involved please sign up! I'd love to have my pledge succeed :)

Innocent Smoothies make yummy drinks here in the UK (I think they may have spread across Europe a little too), and in November they sell their smoothies with little hats on the bottles and donate 50p to Age Concern's fund to help older people through the winter. All the hats are donated by the public, and this year they want to collect 400,000 hats in order to raise £200,000!

If my pledge succeeds then that means we'll be donating a minimum of 40 hats to the cause, but it would be great if we could send in more.

It's my Birthday and I'll Spin if I Want to

Yesterday 'twas my birthday, and so I decided that I really should break out my beautiful new fibre and do some spinning, even if I haven't completed all the things I said I would before I started. I spun whilst watching a made for TV version of the Odyssey (1997) version, which was rather rubbish. I haven't finished it yet, and it was rather good fun, but completely destroyed the characterisation of a lot of the figures, as well as deviating from the tale a lot (must every telling of the Odyssey bar Homer's start with the Trojan War?!).

Since I haven't done any spinning [on the wheel] since I had all the pain in my ankles, I was very cautious. I put my old whorl back on, and my old drive band (I kept a new bobbin though). I oiled my wheel and rubbed beeswax on the drive band. I also made sure the wheel was on a rug, and I sat on the edge of my sofa, rather than the low footstool.

Lookee what I made:



I probably did overdo it. I spun for about 2-3 hours, until my friend said I should go to her house instead to get me away from the thing! I was glad I did, otherwise I'd have probably kept on going for another couple of hours.

I only treadled with my right leg. I figured that if I was going to hurt myself, there was no point in hurting both legs ;) And I did have twinges in my ankle yesterday. I haven't really noticed anything this morning, which is positive, but I haven't really done much. I'll take it slowly.



This is the Forest Sun batt - forest green and forest brown merino, with flashes of pale sunshine. I mean silk. It's beautiful. I tore a 2 oz batt roughly in half, and then tore one half into smaller strips. Each strip I predrafted out, drafting them together into one long roving. This is most of one half of the batt - I was forcibly removed from my wheel before I could finish it off.

This is [eventually] going to become 2-ply yarn. I'll do the other half batt on another of my new bobbins, and then ply them together onto my old one (which has a slightly larger capacity). Hopefully. Hopefully my feet won't fall off.

(Last night I realised that I have a spare sewing machine motor - I know, of all the things to have lying around. I realise that if my feet do fall off, I may well be able to hook up my flyer with the motor and spin electrically. But let's hope it doesn't come to that).

Sock musings

Due to my injuries, I could never face the idea of knitting socks. If I'm going to knit that many stitches, I might as well make something a bit more prominent than socks, or use bigger sticks'n'string and make something bigger!

But if I ever were to make socks, I'd probably make Pomatomus socks, or Chuck's Cabled Socks. But - arm transplants not withstanding - it's unlikely to happen.

And then today I came across this: Pomatomus socks as gloves!

Oh yes.

(Knitting update: I've been off the knit since Monday 23rd April, after feeling a couple of twinges in my elbows and deciding to be cautious. Saturday evening I'd overdone things by ripping out what I'd done on my novelty wrap thing and reknitting (the Eve pattern wasn't working for me so I made up my own pattern). Then Sunday I was quite upset due to something else, dropped a stitch, spent about an hour trying to pick it up, ripped it all out again in frustration, and reknit. So there may have been some excess going on there)

Worth waking up for

This morning Mr Bee leapt out of bed, and I do mean leapt. He threw the covers onto the floor and raced downstairs. I was rather groggily confused, but certain that if there were a fire then he'd at least have mentioned it.

He came back up and said, "didn't you hear the knock?" "The knock?" "Yes, the knock - it was the postman." The postman? For me?



It's my package of goodies that I bought from The Sanguine Gryphon (it arrived so quickly I wasn't expecting it!) and contains the most wondrous fibre...



This is a 2oz batt in the Histology colourway: "90% merino, 5% silk tussah, 5% rayon. The merino is berry pink and periwinkle, and the silk/rayon appears as silver streaks running through it, rather like a histology slide stained with eosin and hematoxylin, for you biologists out there."

I've never really been one for the red-white-'n'-blue combo, but blue is my favourite colour and this colourway just looked like so much fun! The blue in is beautiful, it's almost exactly the same shade as my handbag as well.

And yes, silk. I haven't tried silk yet, because my ethical vegetarian side can't use new fibres made from boiled bugs (the only silk I have so far is in the form of a chairty-shop jumper I'm going to unravel). Then I discovered that Bombyx silk is made from boiled cocoons, whereas Tussah silk is 'wild' silk - the cocoons are collected after the moths have hatched. Ethical quandary over! (Please, PLEASE, no one disavow me of this!)

But there's more, there's more!



Mmmmmmmmmmm - Forest Sun: "90% merino, 5% silk tussah, 5% rayon. The merino is forest green and chocolate brown, and the silk/rayon and golden streaks running through it like rays of sun between the trees." A full 6oz, and this is what I plan to spin up to make the Swallowtail Shawl with.

I deliberately went with this colourway partly because it is so beautiful, and partly because it's out of my usual colour range (blue/black) yet still the sort of thing that I'd wear. The green especially is glorious. I can't get it to photograph properly, so check out the Etsy page linked to above.



I can't decide how to spin it yet. Do I try to separate out the colours, do I heather it... 2-ply? Chain-plyed? Luckily I should have enough to experiment with. My Mermaid's Hair Yarn was my test yarn for how much I could get out of 2oz - so I then estimated I'd need 4oz for the Swallowtail (although this was before I managed to make a shawlette out of 2oz!) and got a further 2oz for playing.

But anyway - no spinning until at least next Wednesday. The other week I decided to start up a student forum (where we all get to practise giving papers) in my department, and the first session is next week. We've basically gone from talking about it to doing it in 3 weeks, and unsurprisingly this meant it was very short notice for getting papers for the first session! So I'm doing it. So I now have a week in which to write a paper.

I am also still getting the odd twinge in my ankles, so another week off will be good. I am desperately hoping that everything feet-wise is OK, because I really want to spin!

Well, I'd better go and put these batts away - if I keep petting them they're going to felt!

Wannabe

My foot still twinges every now and then. I've started a joyous 'pain calendar', on which I put a little sticky dot every day that I feel the slightest twinge. No spinning until after a week minimum of normal activity and no dots.

Meanwhile, I have been knitting with my Mermaid's Hair, and trying not to feel too bitter about it. I've been trying to figure out what it wants to be. I thought it might want to be the SpiderWeb Capelet from Stitch'n'Bitch Nation. But after knitting at it for a while, I realised that it really, really, really doesn't.



As Mr Bee puts it, there is no way that you can look at it, without it looking like a load of scribble.



I knit the first 6 or so rows (ie., nearly half of the capelet) and it just bears no resemblance to the photo. I'm doing the pattern correctly (note that there are corrections!), but the yarn needs to be fuzzier, and maybe a tad thicker.

So, I decided to see whether the Mermaid's Hair wanted to be Ella (I have two huge folders of Knitty patterns that I printed off at work, so I tend to work from those. In going to the actual site to get the link, I notice there are now charts available).

I tried Ella three times, on US6 (too tight), the stated US10 (too loose), and then I tried US8. This also looked dubious because the pattern bunches, so I knit the set-up section and lightly blocked it (which also had the effect of causing me to stop knitting for the day - I think I was trying to drown out the pain in my foot by attempting to set off some arm pain).



So far, so OK.

So at the moment my yarn wants to be Ella, and I'm up to three leaf-things across now. Of course, this pattern calls for 750m yarn, and I have less than 200m, so quite why I am bothering to persevere is beyond me. I'm not planning to make the full V-shape, just a small triangle. But still, who am I kidding?

(also, in order to keep all my options open I didn't frog the capelet before I started Ella. And then once I'd decided to carry on with Ella I couldn't bear to rip out what I'd done and start again from the beginning. So my knitting currently looks like this I know I know. It means that not only am I hoying around a half-knitted capelet, but when I finally do frog that to use that yarn I'll have a join - if I do actually ever have enough yarn to make anything more than a handkerchief - which is irritating, but I haven't been really thinking rationally about fibre arts this past week)

Facing up to the foot

One reason why when I got tennis elbow it was so bad, was that the warning pains you get when tennis elbow starts feels a lot like bruising. I thought I'd just bumped my arm so I carried on. The next day I was in excruciating pain.

For the past three days I have been in pain when I walk. I need to face up to the fact that I may well have a problem with spinning.

It's weird though. That first time, when I had the pain in my right foot, it was immediate pain, and went away overnight. I last spun at the weekend (about 90 minutes on Saturday evening and less than an hour on Monday, with the wheel on a rug), yet I'm still in pain 5 days later and didn't feel a thing while spinning.

And this is my left foot.

It is possible it's coincidental, but I don't want to take any risks.

(I am also trying to keep myself together about the fact my body is breaking down and I'm not even 26).

What's even more frustrating is that I've been saving up to buy some lovely blends and now feel like I shouldn't buy them because what's the point. But then part of me feels like if I'm going to hurt myself I may as well do it for something worthwhile...

I'll just try and rest as much as possible this week and see how I get on.

The End is in Sight...

I've only got 2 rounds left on Tempting. So that's 2 rounds (200 stitches each), 1 cast off round, and 2 3-needle-bind-off underarm things.

2, maybe 3 days.

(Then a couple of months for me to go and buy some ribbon. I still need ribbon for my Lace Up Opera gloves. Luckily it is likely to be the same type of ribbon, so I can just go and buy loads. Eventually. And then the wait for photos. How long has Sonnet been waiting for now? 1 year? 2?).

I spun up the second singles yesterday. I used my right foot very gently (tried to keep it in what my yoga teacher would term a 'tadasana foot'), but I used my left for the majority of the spinning.

Further to what I wrote in my last post, I don't think a double treadle is inherently bad, just that I'd only want to use a DT that could also be used as a single treadle. With an ST you can move the wheel around, whereas with a DT you are - I presume - limited to sat bang in front of it, unless it can be used as an ST. Anyway, I often wonder about the different types of wheel - when I think of what I started with because it was all I had (single treadle, double drive, no instructions, awkward tension, merino top) and what I read people on mailing lists saying is advanced (single treadle, double drive, awkward tension, merino) it does make me laugh (especially since I made a perfectly servicable garment from my first ever spinnings - and this is not because I'm great at spinning). Had I known all this before I started maybe I'd have been more wary, and I think I'd have suffered for it. Of course, in an ideal world everyone should have the wheel that suits them, but sometimes I think people thinking of buying tend to worry too much about whether it will be too 'advanced'.

So anyway, back to my ankles. I think there is a slight problem. Of course, this is when I had changed my whorl, my bobbin, and (probably most importantly): my house. I'm hoping that any problem with over-worked feet is coming from one of these, rather than my body deciding that since my arms aren't too bad my legs can pack up.

Our new house has [very cheap] laminate flooring, and I'm also sat in a corner which limits how far to the left I can have the wheel. I don't think the corner is too much of an issue, but I do think I must be sliding over the floor a little, pushing the wheel forwards. This must put just a little too much pressure on my foot. When I ply I'm going to put the wheel & my stool on a rug, and hopefully (hopefully!) I won't have any further issues.

(And I really really really really hope I have no further issues, since after discovering Franquemont Fibres, I've now discovered the Sanguine Gryphon's etsy store. Be still my treadling feet.)

Spinning a Yarn

Well, my foot has been fine since my earlier spinning mis-adventure.

I did have a hairy (hoho) moment the day following my foot pain. I walked to the corner shop, and during the walk that area of my foot/ankle started stinging again :( It was still stinging for ages after I got back - it felt almost like shaving rash. So eventually I took my sock off and... it was shaving rash! Doh! I had shaved my ankles just before I set off (I only do up the knee if I'm going swimming) because I thought I might go to yoga, and sometimes my leggings ride up. Anyway, I was thrilled to discover it wasn't internal pain.

In response to the comment Batty left on my last post, I'm still unsure about double treadles. At least with a single treadle if one foot hurts you can swap! If I'm entirely honest, my foot was hurting after merely a couple of minutes (so it wasn't just excess strain or that it was tired), but I kept going because sometimes there's a bone sort of protruding in my other foot (I know! I couldn't make it up!) and I wasn't sure whether treadling would be good for it (as it was, it was fine). I think if I did get a DT, I'd make sure it was one that would also work if you only used one foot.

I haven't done any more spinning yet as I've been so busy with work. I'm planning to have a nice long session this weekend, watching all the stuff that's been recorded recently (no time to watch the little TV I normally do either!).

Have I said what this spinning is for yet? I currently have an obsession with lace shawls, but wasn't looking forward to the amount of stitches they require. When I saw the Swallowtail shawl in the Fall 2006 Interweave Knits I just fell in love with it.* Not only is it pretty, but it's also quite small.

So I am attempting to spin for that. At least I know that if my yarn is 'too' thick, it should merely mean that I produce a bigger shawl (but with the stitch count of a shawlette). The question is probably whether I have enough or not. I think I've only got about 60g of fibre (I *need* a good set of electronic scales!) so it's entirely possible I'll only produce 100-200 yards.

If that happens I'll probably make the Spiderweb Capelet from Stitch'n'Bitch Nation (yes, I know I'm phobic of sp*ders & their associations, but this lace pattern really doesn't look like cobwebs). I've always had my eye on that, but when I looked through the pattern the other day I realised that it's only about 22 rows! I'd technically be able to make that in less than a month, so it's very tempting.

(Tempting is still plodding along. I'm *almost* at the YOs row. Almost. Probably no longer than a fortnight left on it. I hope).

Well, this post is getting far too wordy. At some point soon I need to make a 'To Knit' list, otherwise I'll keep forgetting projects!

* I managed to get the back issue of IK with the shawl in, and I also got Summer 2006 as well. Wow - I am seriously impressed with this magazine. And I love the wpi chart they have at the back - it's such a nifty idea. I managed to find an imported copy of Spring 2007 in Borders (so I've seen the Gryphon's lovely Merry Maiden dress), and am tempted to try and track down as many back issues as I can (maybe I need to wait for my first paycheque first).

Toes crossed

I've just spent the evening spinning and my foot hurts - doh! For future reference (that I really hope I do *not* need) it's the front of the right ankle, on the left side. I switched to my left foot about halfway through and that's fine - probably should've switched sooner... Oh well.

I've got my new bobbins! And my whorl!

So tonight I did some spinning with one of my new bobbins, and the new whorl. I've been saving my last lot of dyed fibre for my new bobbins, as I wanted to spin the singles onto two new bobbins, so that they were equal.

I am attempting to spin as fine as I can, for a lace project. I think I got thicker the more tired I got (spun from about 7pm til 11pm). The main problem was that I changed the drive band. My usual drive band was great for spinning fine and having a good take-up, but kept falling off. It used to do this all the time, but has stopped recently, so I assume that this was due to the new bobbin & whorl groves being a little too shallow. So I switched the drive band to being some crochet cotton, and I've just totally lost all take-up. I managed to get into the swing of barely holding the fibre and letting it be gently pulled on by the end, but there is a LOT of overtwist and kinks stuck in the bobbin. I usually add quite a lot of twist anyway, but there are huge kinks going on here which I hope won't make plying too nightmarish.

Anyway, I've done half of my fibre. Not sure when I'll do the second half - better make sure my foot is better first!

Coincidences

I'm still in the middle of reading through all the blogs I need to catch up on, what with my enforced week-and-a-half of no interweb. I've noticed quite a few amusing coincidences as I go through them.

The last blog I discovered was Abby's Yarns, which I decided to read after enjoying Abby's posts on the spinning mailing lists I read. I spent my last night in my old flat (with no furniture and no curtains - we were staying after the movers took everything in order to clean up) reading Abby's blog from start to finish - it's a wealth of information. I also fell in love with the fibre blends that she sells. Utterly, utterly, utterly in love. I have never really been interested in buying pre-prepared batts, or snazzy swanky fibres or anything, until then. They are absolutely amazing.

Then when I came to update myself with The Keyboard Biologist Knits the other day when we were back online, there was a photo of some batts. Mmmmm, I thought, those are stunning, just like the ones I was drooling over on Abby's site. And what do you know? They were!

Recently I've been getting pain from reading. I have another muscular condition which means I have to basically lie down for an hour or two every day and work on that muscle group, flexing and contracting. Obviously, this is slightly boring, so I like to read while I'm doing it. Unfortunately, the action of holding a book (just a 300 page paperback) open and up (since I'm lying down) hurts my forearm in the same way that knitting/ computer navigating does. The other day in a bookshop I saw a bookholder called a 'Gimble'. It looked a little dubious so I didn't get one. And then, lo and behold, there's a bunch of comments on Wendy Knits! about bookholders!

So I went through the comments there, looked at all the different types of bookholder, and decided to give the Gimble a try. I used it this morning and it does work - and I was able to read painfree. Hoorah!

A little update & a new plan

I was recently asked if I thought I could ever go back to normal, that is to be able to use the computer and knit and write and type and -- well, be normal. To be honest I don't know, I doubt it. This past week I've had quite a bit of pain, mainly the outer side of my right wrist and forearm. This is the pain that I'm not sure how is caused, and it's a bugger to get rid of. So this week I've been back to my old self -- that is, doing absolutely sod all and hoping that the pain will go away.

I think it may be possible for me to continue knitting, but I probably need to do a lot less than I have been. On Saturday I did the most amount of knitting that I've done so far -- about 600 stitches (20 rows of 30 stitches each) over the course of A Knight's Tale. I haven't knit since then though, but I don't think that necessarily caused the pain. I was working on my Leaf Motif scarf -- since I finished Branching Out last week (photos shortly!) -- as I had planned to finish all my WIPs in order to free up all my Denise needles.

The problem is though, that the Leaf Motif scarf, well, it's just not doing anything for me. If knitting is going to break me again then dammit, it had better be for a good cause.

So I've decided that instead of finishing my WIPs just for the sake of it, I'm going to do something that I want to. Although ironically, I've decided to finish Tempting first. Tempting is, as far as I believe, using around 4 Denise cables, plus end buttons, connectors, and of course a pair of needles. As far as I can remember Tempting only has around 10 rounds left to go. Admittedly each round is 200 stitches, but I'll maybe go back to 20 stitches a day.

Once Tempting is done, I'm going to make a start on using my handspun. I think I may go with some skinny lace scarves.

Right then, I've been dictating this to Dragon for ages and it is beginning to do my head in! I just got a new microphone today, and maybe shouldn't have bought the cheapest on offer. Hopefully it will learn from all these corrections (!).

Anyway. I should have photos for tomorrow of Branching Out and/or a lovely gift I received. I'm off to go and skein up my latest spinnings (and if Dragon doesn't stop putting the fricking caps lock key on I swear I'm going to cry).

Whaddid I miss?

Poor November. Poor December. Poor January. I can't believe I let them go by unposted. I'll have to fake something so they don't feel left out. I didn't realise that I hadn't posted in such a long time.

So, news.

I finally finished my MPhil, and handed it in in December. That end-of-September-2006 deadline? Turns out that it was actually end-of-September-2007. I kid you not. The MA students had a September 2006 deadline, but the MPhil students are supposed to spend a year researching, and then have up to a year to write up the thesis. I only discovered this when I asked for an extension and discovered that technically my course hadn't ended.

However, since I'd been under the impression I had to be finished my September, I'd applied to start my PhD from October... So I had to finish my MPhil relatively quickly to fulfill the conditions of the PhD.

As I was finishing my MPhil I realised that the 'only' pain I was getting was a constant burning in my right wrist. The reason why it took me about a month to realise that my elbows and forearms were feeling better was because this burning pain has no cause that I can divine, and no cure. Ice doesn't help it; anti-inflammatories don't help it. All I could do was go to bed and hope it had gone in the morning.

After I handed in my thesis we went away for a week, so I did no intense hand-movements at all. When I came back I was relatively pain free! Then I only had a couple of days at home before we went to see our parents for Christmas - so again, no hand movements. By the time we came back I'd been pretty much pain free for most of December, BUT I hadn't been doing anything.

So I was pretty much too scared to start doing things again, because being pain free, finally, after over a year, was too nice a state to be in. So now I'm just taking things slowly, trying not to overdo things. I've been attending an exercise class in the physiotherapy department of the general hospital, working on strengthening my body (I've become very weak this past year), and I've also restarted yoga. But - as the weekly physio lectures stress - I also have to pace myself, and not overdo things. Now I've been relatively painfree for two months I probably underdo things too much, since I'm so wary of setting off the pain again.

I have been knitting and spinning, and - tada! - I've finished one of my WIPs. I've finished the Lace-Up Opera Gloves, but need to get ribbons for them. It took about 2 months to finish them (I'd already knit one last year) - I did a maximum of about 4 rows a day, and I didn't knit daily. I keep a note of what I do each day, partly so I don't overdo it, and partly so that I'm always sure where I'm up to - when you can only knit about 100 stitches a day, you don't want to waste hand movements unknitting!

I'm currently working on Branching Out. This is the piece that gave me tennis elbow back in the summer, so I'm taking it really carefully. And I only knit if I've been painfree that day, and I try not to knit too much on days that I type a lot. I'm doing around a maximum of 10 rows a day (ie., a full pattern repeat), but these are spaced out throughout the day. I'm a little concerned I may run out of yarn, but since it's a scarf that shouldn't be too dreadful - it's already neck warmer length.

Spinning wise, I dyed my final 100g of white Cheviot top with Kool Aid - I went with some of my blue and some of my yellow, mixing them in the middle to get green. One of the reasons why I prefer my Chapter Two yarn over my Chapter Three yarn is that it has more colours and shades mixing together. The Chapter Three yarn is basically blue and pink, whereas Chapter Two has pink, purple, blue, white, red... Each inch is a new delight of colour combination, and so this is why I used three colours this time. I spun the singles last weekend, and will probably ply them this weekend. It may be garish, and heavens know what I'll do with it, but it's all fun.

I also spun back in December, when we got back from our trip. I spun and plied all in one evening - I'd stop every now and then and think 'No pain! Keep going!' That's my secret spinning, from my secret dyeing, and so won't be revealed just yet.

In non-fibrey-new, our landlord has said that he is going to sell the flat, so now we're in the process of moving and will be out by the end of the month. We'll be moving to the city that I go to university in (right now I have a 45 minute train ride), and we've found a lovely house. Unfortunately, it's also for sale so I have a horrid feeling we're going to have to move again in 6 months. But 6 months in that house should be nice, I hope. Now I'm just spending most of the time sorting and packing and clearing, and trying not to overdo things!

And finally, today my postman delivered some voice recognition software, courtesy of Tauret (Hope - thank you so much :) I'm so sorry I haven't sent my half of the swap out yet). I haven't tried it out yet (this post has used up most of my typing time for the day!), but I'm hopeful that it will allow me to do a great deal more in future. We'll see :)

Oops, where did October go?

I do apologise fair reader; I hadn't realised that a) I really hadn't posted for a while and b) Blogger burped at some point during the posting of my last message and stuck it up thrice. Naughty Blogger. (and naughty Bee for not noticing for a month).

In recent news...

* My blue Kool Aid has arrived - 50 sachets for me to play with different shades of blue, and try to make green with all those sachets of 'pineapple'.

* Chapter Three spinning? Done and dusted my friend! Ages ago in fact, at the end of September. I'm not as totally madly deeply in love with it as I am the Chapter Two yarn, but it's still pretty (photos to follow of course).

* I've done some secret dyeing which is next in the spinning queue, which is why the blue Kool Aid is a-waiting.

* I have had a new pain in my wrists that ice nor anti-inflammatories cure (so probably not inflammation then, as my physio pointed out) which is finally easing off now after about a week. However, it's the part of my wrist that I know can ache (as in 'ooh, I've done a lot of work today' aching, rather than severe RSI aching) when spinning, so I'm not going to spin while there's even the slightest chance this pain hasn't gone away. It's also the reason why I've been focusing my typing on my thesis, rather than t'internet.

* Latest 'argh, I hate my body' pain is a severe pain in my jaw which I've had for about 2 months now. Neither dentist nor physio can figure it out, but it's most likely due to my Crappy Upper Back (TM) rather than my teeth. My CUB is apparently the root cause of ALL the pain I have had in the past year. Great.

* Had an appointment with my physio who has now said there's not much more she can do, and is referring me on to someone else, who sounds a bit like a personal trainer for people who can't do things like hold open a paperback without having pain or pick up a shopping bag. So like me then. I haven't had a letter through yet, so I'm not sure exactly what it will be like.

* My introduction to my thesis is done! And I'm aiming to have the conclusion finished by tomorrow afternoon, and then I'll just need to rework the iffy bits. The end is in sight...

Blimey

I've just finished chapter three. I really didn't expect to have it done by today. You know what that means? Chapter Three Spinning - hoorah! I'm going to spend the season finale of Lost predrafting tonight, but I'm not sure when I'll spin it.

The out-of-date Kool Aid arrived today. It worked out at 12.5p a sachet, which is much better than the 47.5p I paid for the first lot. And the colours aren't dreadful, although nearly half the sachets are 'pineapple'. This is unfortunate, but not a disaster and I figure I can mix that with blue sachets to make green. That works, right? Now I need to order some more fibre!

My wrists are... hot. Elbows aren't too bad (I now wear a padded elbow support all the time because I'm so clumsy and keep knocking my elbows on door knobs/cupboards/walls/door frames, etc, and it was beginning to affect my tendons), but my actual wrists are... hot. Not full on burning bracelets yet, but if I'm not carefull I'll get there :-/

I think I might have tomorrow off. I'm probably seeing my supervisor about feedback re chapters one and two on Thursday, so it makes sense not to start the introduction/conclusion until I've found out how crap the chapters are.

So no typing tomorrow. Not even blogs :-0 And if anyone has any experience of using Dragon Voice Recognition software please let me know!

Let the spinning BEGIN!

Yee-hah! Chapter two is finished :-D I haven't yet sent it to my tutor partly because I'd like Mr Bee to look at it first and he's away at the moment, and partly because my tutor still hasn't looked at chapter one ( :( ) and I don't want to overwhelm him. However, other than any suggestions Mr Bee makes, I shall not be changing it until I send it in, so I'm counting it as done (I even spent today double checking my footnotes and reading poems I didn't need to just in case they were important).

I'm not going to jump straight into my spinning, but at least now I know I can do it without feeling guilty! Unfortunately, clicking 'ignore' on the spell-checker for every Latin word in my thesis about Latin poetry that came up has made my elbows twinge.

Also, as Mr Bee is away for a week (don't worry - I've emailed him my chapter, and if I don't get a reply over the weekend I'll send it to my tutor anyway) he has the digi-cam, so I won't be able to take photos. But this means that throughout the week I should be able to find all the random photos I've taken in the past and not yet posted, and stick those up here instead.

Rambles

Today I've been doing quite a bit of weaving with, *fingers crossed* no apparent discomfort (ahem, I'm putting the twinges down to typing, OK?). I have very nearly finished the second half of the scarf, and since we have heaps of videoed stuff to watch, may well get it finished tonight. Then I just have to deal with how to attach the two halves together. Hmm...

One of my new black'n'blue Oh So Goth (as long as you cover over the sports company logo ;) ) tennis elbow bands arrived today. The seller forgot to put the other one in the parcel *rollseyes* These are a different design to my other one. My original one is just a padded band, whereas this new one has a 'tendon pad' which pushes into the skin quite a lot. It's taken some getting used to (in that I nearly emailed the seller to say forget about the other one, I want a refund), but I've been trialling it this afternoon and think it'll be OK. If the worst comes to the worst I can try and hack the tendon pad off the second one and see if it's any better. I've also ordered some heatable/freezable straps, which - if they work - should be a better way of icing my arm rather than balancing ice packs on it.

The dyed top is pretty much dry now - I put it by the window this morning to catch some sun. Some bits seem a little felted :-/ but I'm hoping if I pre-draft well enough and take it slowly it should spin OK. It's all a learning process anyway. I may try and hold out until at least tomorrow before I start it though. How about trying to keep it for a 'congratulations I've finished chapter two' present? I hate chapter two. I've been writing it for aaaaaaaages and just want it finished! I can't believe I've signed up for a PhD (got my confirmation letter today) when I'm whinging about writing a 5000 word chapter :P

OK. I'll try and use the beautiful top as my carrot. No spinning until chapter two has been sent to my tutor. Eek!

I can never keep to things

Personal deadlines fly by (what? You mean the first draft of my entire thesis was meant to be finished by 31st August? And that was two days ago you say?), and I, erm, can't keep off the fibre!



Pretty much just after I made that entry the other day on pain, I plyed the singles which have been sat on the bobbin for a while. Oops. I used the Andean plying method, even though there were lots of fine singles, and it worked just fine (and it didn't hurt either :) ). I do need to buy more bobbins though - I thought I'd spun loads and loads since my bobbin was quite full and the hank reeeeeeeeally long, and am pretty devastated that preliminary calculations suggest it's only 33 yards long.

This is my cheapy cheapy wool that I'm using for practice, since it's only £1 per 100g. I bought 300g of it, but there's only about an ounce (=30 grams) in that skein. It's my first attempt at trying to make a skein look pretty, using this method on the Two Sheep blog. Not too bad for a first try.

I've decided to leave the yarn in a hank/skein (please please - someone tell me the difference!) mainly because I don't want to risk stretching it by winding it into a ball and leaving it for yonks because I can't knit it up (plus: winding stuff hurts my arms). Also, I've finally decided to suck it up and buy some Kool Aid from ebay to try dyeing. I emailed the ebay people at the beginning of August to ask about getting brightly coloured sachets, and they said they often get requests from dyers, LOL! I'll try dyeing this skein, but I also want to dye the rest of the top that I've got since it's going to be reeeeeeeeeeeeally boring spinning 270g worth of white white white white white top. Since Kool Aid dyeing requires no further mordants, and is safe (apparently!) to drink, I'm assuming that it's a relatively environmentally friendly form of dyeing, and I won't be polluting the water courses.

AND I need to get the guts to post to one of the spinning mailing lists asking for help with my wheel. Someone somewhere must have a guide to using the Haldane Lewis!

So. The Pain

I think typing causes a great deal of my pain. In the last post I attributed the pain to weaving. So I stopped weaving on Tuesday 22nd August. However, this Monday, 28th August - a whole week later, I was in excruciating pain. I took painkillers (which I never normally do) and applied the anti-inflammatory gel twice... eventually I managed to fall asleep after being in floods of tears for about 2-3 hours.

I was so upset partly because it bloody well hurt, and partly because I'm scared for the future. If I'm like this at 25 what will I be like at 30? 40? What on earth will my career be? Part of the reason for applying for a part time PhD is because I know that I can't work fulltime right now, unless I'm working fulltime in say a clothes shop. Before I started my MPhil I was a successful college administrator running a department. I always thought I'd maybe go back to that but I can't - it involved far too much computer use. And really, most jobs nowadays do.

I'm also worried because I'm in a much worse state now than I was a year ago, and I hardly *do* anything now. My arms are just degenerating, despite all the rest and exercises that I do.

And what caused all that pain? Well, put it this way: I finished my first 5000 word chapter on Sunday evening, and spent Monday painstakingly looking up references for footnotes. I had been doing my exercises every 45 minutes, and Mr Bee has posited that maybe the exercises could be causing the problem too. It is possible that the stretches I do for my forearms is impacting on my tennis elbow (which was the Monday night pain). I haven't done any exercises since then, didn't go to yoga today either :( but I will have to restart some general stretching tomorrow otherwise the forearm pain gets bad.

Since Monday I've had a break from the computer by doing a lot of reading in preparation for chapter two. Tonight I'm having a 'catch-up on email' session, and then tomorrow I'll start chapter two. And I have to keep telling myself that during my breaks I don't have to feel bad about not doing any fabric crafts or web-surfing: I have plenty of other things to be getting on with, like going through all my photos and putting them in albums.

And I'm worried about the degenerating thing. I'm going to stop using the anti-inflammatory gel unless it is *really* required: I'll go with 10minutes worth of ice-application first. I don't like using strong medicines, and I do tend to use a lot of the gel. I don't know whether it can cause problems, but I've been using it off and on for a year now.

As for knitting (you know, for when I finish the photo albums ;) ), I'm not doing any until I've finished my MPhil. And then I'm only going to do 20 stitches a day. I plan to put a load of stitch markers in every 20 stitches on Tempting, and work on that. If I can manage 20 a day with no probs I'll move onto do a row of Branching Out per day, which is about 25 stitches per row. Any pain and I'll stop.

I'm sure I must sound like a boring stuck record (which is why I don't post on the Knitty forums anymore, LOL!), but if you do have pain you need to STOP. If you can catch it early then you won't be in such an unbelievable mess like me.

Uh-oh, it's that boring pain thing again

Well, I appear to have jinxed myself. Following the pain update the other day, I ended up with tennis elbow in both arms at the same time. Oh, how I chastised myself for returning that second tennis elbow band!

I don't want to admit it, but I guess weaving could be the cause, since it started after that. Well, I've done nothing arm-related bar typing and writing since the pain started, and now it is shifting somewhat. I don't know if fibre arts really are the cause, but I guess I really do need to try and lay off them until I finish my thesis.

And if weaving and knitting are both going to give me hurty pains, then I choose the knitting! Once I finish my MPhil I'll hopefully be starting a part time PhD. The part time job I get will be a non-typing one, so with any luck I'll be able to limit the amount of typing I do at the start of my PhD, and work on being able to knit.

I just keep stumbling across more and more breathtaking patterns that I must make! After seeing some pictures of the latest Rowan magazine, #40, I popped into House of Fraser today (sadly the LYSes in this town don't do Rowan wool, so I guess they don't do their magazine) to have a look at it. I am totally in love with so many of the patterns! Seriously, we'll be here all day if I list them all, but I especially love Aelf and Sadie, with Rosa, Cobweb and Dew coming in close second.

If I can only knit 25 stitches a day it will take me so long to finish everything BUT I WANT THEM. So if not weaving means I get to do 50 stitches a day, well...

I would like to finish my green woven scarf though - I'll take it very slowly and see how I get on.