Alternate activities

So much for the idea of a long weekend's weaving. I'd planned to take Friday off and weave all weekend: but I took a chill in my upper back early in the week. As someone who's had a lot of injuries to the neck and shoulders, a chill in that spot can be quite bad. So I took Thursday off sick (feeling a total fraud because I'm perfectly healthy, just stiff) and lay down a lot. Couldn't use the computer, couldn't garden, couldn't weave because I was at the tie-up stage. So I read. A lot. Fortunately, I had a book delivery that morning with a couple of novels and the Interweave Compendium of Finishes, and the latest issue of Handwoven arrived in the mail that morning as well. I also took the time to reacquaint myself and read properly Anne Heche's exqisite book The Art of the Loom, and read in more detail Janet Phillip's Designing Woven Fabrics, which continues to tantalise and tempt me, despite the fact that I've not had the chance to try anything out of it yet. This was all made much more pleasant by the fact that the weather was nice, and the discovery that lying in a deck chair in the back yard was a comfortable as lying in bed. At least, once I got the deck chair out of the garden shed - we're buried under bikes at the moment (we cycle. A lot.), and it was behind one.

However there's only so much one can read in one go, and not being able to work with my hands was driving me nuts. But did you know you can knit while half-reclined? I almost never knit. I'm not very good at it, and it's something I don't enoy as much as spinning and weaving. But I wanted to make something for young Benjamin, the recipient of the very first of the babys blankets, who chose to make his way into the world on Tuesday afternoon. And so:


This is made of handspun white 22-micron merino, and a navy blue merino-flax blend, plied with a thin strand of spun silk cap (the white flecks in the blue). I spun the blue yarn years ago (Celia, this is the roving you and I shared!), and this was the last of it, after I had already made two beanies from it.

I made an adult-size beanie, because this is a 2k, 2p rib, which pulls in a lot. I figured I may as well make something Ben can grow into and keep, rather than a tiny baby thing - especially as he's already a big boy. This is actually round, by the way - it's only square at the top because at the moment it's keeping the back of my spinning chair warm!

And then I went on to spend way too much time tieing up the loom because I'm a sucker for punishment, but that's another post...