Thrum, th-thrum thrum thrum

I'm not looking especially lush in this picture. It was taken late in the evening in the last week of term and I was wearing a thermal because it's been cold and I refused to put the heating on until yesterday. Those are my excuses, anyway.

Pattern: Thrummed mittens from the Yarn Harlot's Thrum-a-long
Needle: 3.25mm and 4mm DPNs
Yarn: Malabrigo Worsted in azul; thrums are 100% new wool tops for felting by a brand called Filz-It. Not especially soft, but a gorgeous colour, very warm, not scratchy.....a perfect yarn for my first attempt at thrumming.
Mods: I did a K1P1 rib on the cuff, instead of a 2x2. This was only because I started off using a different pattern. I wish I had used a slightly larger needle because the cuffs are pretty snug.
I cheated and didn't thrum properly, as detailed in a previous post.

I love them. Really, really. I am looking forward to wearing them in Prague, and hoping they will cut the mustard as skiing mittens. Perhaps I should look into treating them with something to make them more waterproof.

I moved straight on to a pair of Evangelines in the other skein of Malabrigo I bought, which is variegated blues and greens. I nearly finished the first one today whilst watching the first 8 episodes of Big Love on TV On Demand. Big Love is good! Kind of creepy in parts. Also I can't decide how I feel about Chloe Sevigny and her character is making me swing towards the negative feeling.


Anyway, there must be many blue accessories because I bought this coat yesterday and I'm waiting for it to arrive. Boden! Loves it. Not quite as lovable as that amazing spotty coat I was lusting over in the summer, but a fair whack cheaper and, according to reviews on the website, warmer and more suitable to winter. I am not a big coat wearer, so I thought I'd better really go for it if I was going to shell out for one. My very naughty friend Parpy Jo told me I should buy both and send back the one I don't like, but that was disaster lies.

I realised I never made a post about my finished swing jacket. That might be because, when it was first finished, I didn't much care for it. However, having had a few wears of it since, I realise how well it suits me, how warm it is, and how pleased I am with it. Still, I only have a rubbish picture I took on my mobile in the bathroom before I'd even woven in the ends. I'm waiting for a fine day so we can have a photo shoot. There's been some gorgeous autumn foliage which would look lovely in the background, but it may have all gone in the last round of high winds and toreential rains. I heard that the Original Mountain Marathon in the Lake District this weekend had to be called off and hundreds of the participants are stranded. Not a good weekend to be a fell runner. Hope everyone's OK.

Autumn days, when the grass is jewelled

...and the silk inside the chestnut shell.

I remember thinking those lines didn't make great sense when singing that hymn at school, so perhaps I was singing it wrong then, and it's wrong now. Why was there a line about jet planes waiting in the air to be refuelled? Does that only happen in the autumn?

Well, it's autumn, anyway. It smelled very autumnal last week, the way the air smells when somebody might be having a bonfire many streets away and you can ALMOST smell the woodsmoke....but not quite.

I have managed to hold out in my resolve not to switch the heating on before the end of September this year. In fact, the heating still hasn't been switched on. I attribute this to the amazing toastiness of Bunnyland now that the loft insulation has been augmented, and the cavities have been stuffed with foam. There may be brick dust over everything. There may be unsightly cement-coloured spots all over the house where they didn't even attempt to paint over the holes they made. I may be nearly £400 poorer. But I am certainly warmer, and that's the important thing.

I can live an extravagant life now, you know, since I am sort of a published writer. I didn't think they would name me on the website, especially since they gave me a fat payment for the work and I don't get any kind of royalty, but it seems my name will be attached to this project everywhere it goes, which might some day include Amazon. There'll be something I wrote for sale on Amazon, how exciting is that?! Much like that nonsensical hymn, it takes me right back to my primary school dreams of being a successful authoress in my later years.

In the spirit of keeping warm, I am working on these thrummed mittens from the Yarn Harlot. I don't read her blog. I like bloggers who write a couple of times a week at most, and am not terribly good at keeping up with anything more frequent. Hey, if I've got the time to be reading someone else's blog I'd rather be writing in my own, right?

Anyway. Mitten!















And the crazy inside view...















They're so much fun. I'm totally cheating on the thrums, though. There's this crazy idea floating around knitting websites that thrums have to be pulled gently from their fellow fibres, teased and fluffed, made into loops, lightly felted between the fingers to seal the ends, and then twisted. NEWSFLASH! There are over 160 thrums in this mitten. So many, I ran out of roving. If I spend all that time making the thrums, the mittens are never going to be finished. They felt together when you're wearing the mittens anyway - this process was already under way, just from me agitating by turning the mitt inside out to look at them. So, they aren't going to fall out. The ones at the top I knotted to make sure. It was much quicker - I just cut the roving and knitted pieces in.

I'm sure I'm going to that special level of hell reserved for knitters who don't follow the proper processes, but since I always do a gauge swatch for any kind of garment I figure that buys me some good karma.

I suppose, also, that it's not traditional to do thrums this way. However, traditionally thrums were fleece coloured: they were simply undyed pieces of unspun fleece, all full of lanolin for waterproofing. So, using brightly coloured roving is already breaking the tradition. Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

I shall report back on how the thrums hold up to constant use. I'm going to Prague with school in 3 weeks, so I'll have the chance to try them out in the proper cold....assuming I finish the second one, anyway.

The Big Hat Project is also well under way. For some strange reason, I said I'd knit all my tutor group hats for Christmas. I must have been on crack that day or something - there are 22 of them. I'm onto hat number 5. They don't take very long, luckily - I'm using double stranded DK and 6mm DPNs so they only take about 3 hours. It's tough to find 3 hours together sometimes, but I always have knitting club.

Hopefully by the next time I update, we'll have a sink in the kitchen again. We haven't had a kitchen since the last week in August. I've sort of forgotten what it's like to cook a proper meal and not have to drain my pasta in the garden and wash up in the bath. Thankfully we finally have a floor and walls again now. Father Z laid all but about 3 inches of the new floor 2 weeks ago. Around midnight, Mr Z heard some weird banging from the kitchen, but couldn't see what it was. This happened 3 times - each time, the noise stopped when he went out there. About 10 minutes later, the cat emerged. How she'd got down the gap, we'll never know, but she was a uniform filthy grey for a week after.

We were slightly concerned the next day when Father Z finished the floor and commented that he hadn't seen the cat all day, but luckily she was hiding under the bed.