Summers End at our Camp

It’s mid-August and 12 degrees Celsius in the morning when we get up. That’s our signal that it’s time to go home. It’s been a terrific summer. Tomorrow we travel south.

I got quite a bit of knitting done through a rainy spring, a couple weeks of hot weather and family time. In the meantime I did a major bit of maintenance on our cabin. It needed to be resurfaced since it was leaking a lot around the door and windows. We refaced it with plywood and put battens up at all the seams. I think it’s looking pretty great.

I’m quite a bit further along on my Just For You V Pullover green version. I think I’m very close to the bottom of the body. I’ll do a proper assessment when I get home.

I am almost finished one sleeve of the striped version of the V. Just the ribbing left and then I can finished the other sleeve. I find sleeve knitting sooo boring. It shows me that I’m missing watching TV (which I don’t have here). That’s the perfect evening activity – TV watching and sleeve knitting. So more of that when I get home.

I was knitting the sleeves two-at-a-time but to mix it up, as I said – really bored, I switched to double points. Anything to convince myself to keep going.

I started the second triangle of my Reversible Ribbon Wrap. I am about to finish this second triangle with the green. That will be the first of the zag of green zigzag. Stay tuned. It will become clearer as I go.

I will start the green with an Eyelet Row which is what is making it reversible.

Earlier in the month I went to the Algoma Fibre day in Desbarats, just east of Sault Ste. Marie, ON, and bought 2 cakes of Briggs and Little Country Roving. It is 5 strands of unspun wool. I’ve been wanting to try knitting with unspun wool for a while but not at the gauge with 5 strands of wool. So I split the whole cake up.

I split the 5 strands into 2 strands + 2 strands + 1 strand balls. Between the 2 cakes I got 5 big balls of 2 strands of wool.

Lyn, of Shelridge Yarns, my sister and neighbour here, offered to help me try dyeing this wool.

We had to change the balls into skeins in order to dye it. We found out how very fragile unspun wool is. We tried winding the balls onto a swift but it kept breaking. So I ended up keeping the swift stationary and manually winding the wool around the pegs to make the skeins. No pulling that way.

Then the dyeing began. First cold water bath and add dye.

Then it got heated up slowly to a simmer and then set aside until it was room temperature again. Then it could be washed and then laid out to dry.

Now I have all these balls of semi-felted wool which I think will knit at about 4 sts to the inch. It feels much stronger after the heating and cooling.

Yay. Something new to try. Have you knit with unspun wool? How did it go?

Cheers, Deb

Any Gauge and Gauge-Free patterns by Deb

Deb.gemmell on instagram

Debgemmell 435 on Youtube Just posted a new podcast.