Category Archives: Working Stuff

Chain Plying

While pondering my future I tried chain-plying sock yarn, on a size 8 circular needle. Now that I have the rhythm of it, I’m thinking it would be fun to see if a single skein of Phydlbitz Sock yarn would make a typical beanie in a basic pattern. My thinking is that chain-plying would be super for mixing up the colors in a wild multi-color skein, thus avoiding obvious pooling.

If it works I may try doing some more of my sprinkled or splattered multi-colored dye jobs specifically for that purpose, to be sold with instructions on how to do it.

What you think?

Our Arctic Blast in Texas

Okay, so it’s Tuesday, January 21, and literally freezing in Texas.   Currently it is 28ºF/-2.222 ºC and we have actual snow this morning. Here’s how it looked when I got up around 4:00 this morning.  I’m pretty sure there will be more later in the day as the snow won’t be ending until late-morning.

Picture of light dusting of snow on my porch, 4:00a.m. on 21Jan2024I live in an older mobile home that has lots of “issues,”  including a persnickety central heating unit.  It hasn’t turned on since last Thursday or Friday.  I can hear it trying to come on, but it keeps giving an error code for “Ignition Failure.”   Yes, the landlord is aware and will be working with his HVAC guy to work on a better solution, but he has brought me a couple of milkhouse-style heaters.  They work okay, and I have both bedrooms closed off to consolidate whatever heat I have into the living room, kitchen, and bathroom, but the poor insulation combined with the current Arctic Blast, I am always cold anyway, currently huddled under a heavy fleece-lined blanket.

I am grateful that ERCOT has kept the power grid alive this time, but until this cold moves on and the threat of freezing temperatures is gone, I’m not even trying to work this week.

I’m sure many of you are familiar with stitch holders, like these:

I have several of various sizes. I’m not one for fancy stylish shawl pins, but these stitch holders work a charm to hold a scarf in place.  The tips are blunt enough to not pose a poking problem and wide enough to do a brilliant job of holding scarf ends together.

I suppose I could line the front bar with a variety of doodads and dangly beaded stitch markers, but I’m not that posh.  🙂

Anyway, wherever you are, I hope you are warm, dry, and safe.

I’m Okay!

I don’t normally post non-yarn issues here.

Tuesday afternoon the mail carrier took away all the many yarn orders, some of which should have been sent last week but were delays with repairs on the trailer.   I was standing there handing her package, with one foot up on the edge of her truck.  Got down to the last one and I lost my balance and fell backward, stumbling a few feet and then losing to gravity.

I ended up with a  cut on the back of my head.  The mail carrier turned off her truck and helped me up, then yelped that I was bleeding.  Eeek.  It looked far worse than it actually was, since head wounds tend to bleed a lot.

My daughter took me to an urgent care facility where they checked me out, cleaned up the wound, checked me for possible concussion, but thankfully it was just a cut on the head and not something worse.  I’m thinking since I fell first onto my butt, then shoulders, it wasn’t such a long fall for my head to hit the ground so there wasn’t a lot of damage.

I’m still really sore all over — amazing how many muscles jump into action to brace against a fall.  But I’m taking it (mostly) easy today.  I’m surprised that I hurt more today than I did yesterday. Anyway, I’m reskeining the most recent collection of yarns and then I’ll be pulling hanks to be dyed tomorrow and shown on Saturday.  I’ll have this week’s packages ready to ship out on Saturday as well.

 

New Year, New Wall, New Project

Okay, so we are now in 2025.  Welcome to a new year full of hopes and dreams, inspirations and aspirations.

The wall around the window is still not entirely fixed.  I showed you on Tuesday where the wall had been torn out, preparing for repairs.  It should have been a one-day job.  The work isn’t being done by a regular contractor; I’ll leave it at that.  I spent Tuesday night without insulation in that area.  Ditto for last night.  Framing was done today, with insulation and sheetrock, but there was trouble sealing the window back into place, but that finally got fixed near dark this evening.  And, of course, there was some sealant material to prevent further leaks.  But he’ll come back tomorrow to tape and float the sheet rock, and do some other repair work.  Meanwhile, my space is all a-jumble.  Once he fixes everything and cleans up alllll the equipment, tools,  fasteners, and working debris strewn about my space, then I can spend an afternoon putting all the furniture and equipment back into place and I can start regular working again.

Meanwhile, since I can’t do actual work, I’ve used some free time to continue working on The Thing.  I thought I had established a patterning sequence, turning it into a rather mindless busy-work:  starting  with about a dozen knit rows for a garter stitch border, then establish the pattern:  a band of teal with purple squares, then a band of purple with teal squares.  Alternating back and forth, carrying the inactive yarn up the right side, caught up and hidden behind the working yarn of whatever row it is.  Easy-peasy, right?

Wrong!  I somehow wasn’t paying attention and made a double row of teal boxes in the purple band.  I wasn’t keen on ripping out, so I just did a double row of purple boxes on the teal band.  Basically I just turned a mistake into a design feature.

I know I have plenty of both colors, all purchased together long ago.   The piece is 14 inches wide, and currently more than 12 inches long. I have more than enough yarn to make this into 6 or 7 feet long.  So there is plenty of room to just go hog wild and play with variations on the theme; i.e.,  solid bands of color with the contrast color as boxes strewn across.  I could increase the height of the bands.  I could play with the number and/or width of the boxes or how many rows of boxes.  As long as I stay within the framework of color bands with contrasting boxes, I see a lot of room for playing with this.

Or I might just frustrated and frog it out to make a different project but still in the same theme.  I don’t know. The year is young.

The State of Things

I knew there was a leaking problem and the landlord has regularly been apprised of things.  We had a good strong rain several days ago (and there were a half-dozen or more tornadoes in the area), and the ongoing rain issues caused the mini-blind in the front window to simply fall out of the window frame.

So now that we have (mostly) clear weather, that section of the wall is torn out and the guy working on it has to get new sheetrock,  two-by-fours, insulation and assorted other stuff.   It was to be a one-day job.  It’s now mid-afternoon, and the guy running the work has to be with his aunt (off to the heart doctor, unavoidable), so this job will go into tomorrow.

Of course, that wall is where I run my skein-winder (it normally sits on the table pulled out from the wall), and the big etagere that usually sits in front of the window and all the way to the door is where most of my supplies and other materials live.

So the yarns that were promised to be shipping on Thursday probably won’t be shipping until Friday, assuming I can get my space back into some semblance of order in time to reskein the yarns on Thursday.

I am sincerely hoping this set of repairs will stop the rains intruding into my space.  The worker is also aiming to thoroughly seal all the outside areas in that space as well.  He said he also has to remove the window to seal all around it.  I suppose I will throw a sheet or something over the window tonight, and just twiddle my thumbs in the meantime.

 

Knitterman Knits!

It is Thanksgiving today here in the U.S.  For me it is almost always a very low-key holiday, since I don’t normally observe holidays.

I am, however, giving much of the day to trying a new project.  At the request of a long-time friend, I am working with purple and teal on Plymouth Encore worsted wt. yarn.

It is wide enough to be a long rectangular shawl or wrap (80 stitches wide), but I’m not sure I have it in me to continue this pattern sequence to go 66 or 72 inches in length.

What do you think about this so far?

If I worked a black background and an array of rainbow colored blocks I think it might look better.  But I am thinking I might also change the size/shape of the blocks as the work progresses.  I’m just not sure at the moment.

Update on Package Tracking

Good morning!

Yesterday I reported that my outbound packages were picked up on Monday but could not be scanned in because the power was still out at the local postal station.

A little side story — last week I needed something for the kitchen and ordered on Amazon.  Package Tracking on the Amazon Web site said it was to be coming via UPS Mail Innovations.  And the UPS tracking page showed my package was moving through their system, scheduled for delivery on Tuesday.

Tuesday came and went.  No package.    I last checked my mailbox around 7:00 last night, but no joy still.

This morning I went to feed BigBoy and noticed my mailbox door was down, so I went to check.  Yes!  My package had been delivered last night.  Yippee.   I checked the UPS tracking and it shows it was marked delivered at 7:38 p.m.   Terrific!

The package came with the UPS number but also the USPS tracking number for when UPS hands it off to the local P.O. for delivery to me.
So I went to USPS.com to see what they showed for the 9239 number.

So the postal station is still not even acknowledging receipt of the package from UPS.  But the package is here in my hand.

What all of this tells me is that while they aren’t able to track packages locally, somehow things are moving and I expect the customers to whom I mailed things on Monday will get their packages even if a day or two later than expected.

And with that all sorted, I have confidence in handing off today’s packages.  They might not get scanned in by the mail carrier or at the local P.O. but they will travel as they need to.   After all, electronic bar code scanning has only been around a few decades at most, but the post office has been figuring out packages since the U.S. Postal Service was written into the Constitution back in  1787 and ratified in 1788.

And now I will pour myself a coffee and get into the day, but I had to share a bit of somewhat good news.  Or at least hopeful news.  🙂

About those packages….

There were some packages that were supposed to have been picked up and carried away last Thursday.  In reality, the packages were ready but the mail carrier never came around to take them.  I was not here for the carrier on Friday, but I put in another pick-up request for Saturday and still no pick-up.   So I put in yet another request for Monday, but this time I kept a close watch and stalked the mail carrier to ensure the packages were taken away.

Y’all know we had a hurricane a week ago Monday.   I got my power back later that same day.  The mail carrier on Monday told me the local postal station, which serves my ZIP code and a neighboring one, was still without power on Monday, so he was unable to scan the packages in.

I just checked and there is still no tracking available on the packages that were picked up on Monday.  If they had no electricity to power their scanners I’m pretty sure there was no power to automatically sort mail and packages and it was all being done by hand.

It is all very frustrating for me trying to send packages out, and I’m sure it is frustrating for other customers awaiting incoming mail and packages.  But even more, I can only image the frustration of the postal workers and mail carriers trying to do their jobs on the clock while also many of them don’t have power in their own homes.

One of my daughters finally got power back on Sunday night, and my other daughter got power back last night.

I just looked at the CenterPoint outage tracker.  There are currently over 51,000 customers STILL without power around the Houston metro area.  These are meters without power, but many of those meters are attached to homes with families and pets.    I suppose this is better than the 2.7 million customers without power right after the storm, but golly gee this is ridiculous.

Anyway, I just wanted to give an update on what’s happening with your yarns.  The sooner I give yarns to the mail carrier, the sooner those packages starting winding their way through the system, so I will still do my part to have packages ready for pick-up tomorrow as promised for the most recent collection of Blog Reader Specials.

 

Back to Cones

I just put in an order for more Phydlbitz Sock coned yarn.  I really prefer the pre-made hanks as they are easier for me to prepare for dyeing, but the price difference between the cones and the hanks is such that I can more easily afford the cones.   Oh well, it is what it is, and it is the same yarn from the same mill.

The issue this week is that Thursday is a federal holiday and I don’t know if UPS will deliver by Saturday.  I could either fret about it, or make up my mind to reject the stress and do something different this weekend.  Considering Hurricane Beryl is already formed and aiming for somewhere in the Gulf, I have enough stress for the week.  Honestly, based on what I’ve seen and read, it will most likely hit the east coast of Mexico, but since it is already Category 5, there will likely be rain bands up  as high as Houston, creating a bit of a mess.

So, once I get the current BRS collection processed, I can finish reposting allllll the unpost previous Blog Reader Specials yarn and have a big holiday Empty The Bins sale.  And hope the storm avoids Houston.  And further hope my holiday sale discounts are enough to cover the bills due next week.  🙂

Contrast or Coordinating?

I am giving this week to creating 3-skein combinations of previously shown Phydlbitz Sock.   These yarns need to be sold, I need them to be sold, and yarns yet to be dyed need the previously dyed yarns to be sold.

So, I’m wondering — should I lean toward coordinating colors (like  various greens or blues), or should I lean toward pleasant contrasts?

And, should I make them as 3-skein bundles or show them merely as suggestions for people to make their own combinations?