Knitting a Homespun Woolly Jumper

Since I have a mountain of coloured wool that was given to me, I thought it was about time I started knitting more than socks with it.  My self-taught spinning has reached a point where I'm a lot more satisfied with the evenness of my thread, although it's still not to a stage where I'd enter it in the A&P show.

I decided that Hubby needed a nice warm jersey.  He gets a bit snobby about handknit jerseys and would never consider one for "nice going out" wear, they're for home use only, but I can live with that.  There's no way he'd wear one in white or the silvery grey that I've got, so it had to be the dark brown.  I was quite curious to see how the colour would come out once it had been spun and knitted.  There is a mix of greys in with the brown and the gold coloured ends were intriguing.

The fleece before carding and spinning.

We had several discussions about how thick and heavy he wanted it.  I made the choice to make a 3-ply yarn for it.  Now when I say 3-ply, I'm not talking about anything close to commercial 3-ply.  A single of my spinning is probably similar in size to that.  I mean three of my singles plied together.  It's come out something similar to a commercial triple-knit or 12+ply.

A ball of my triple ply homespun.

The next issue I run into is seams.  I hate sewing seams on my knitting.  I have a fear that regardless of how well I pin it or mark it (unless there are stripes to match), I'll end up with puckers and stretching and uneven seams.  I also have a thing about measuring each side right.  Because just smoothing out a piece can change it's measurements, I'm rather paranoid that my sides won't truly match without a creatively uneven seam.

So this time, I chose to knit an entire jumper circular.  This took out any chance of uneven pieces and messy seams.  The only seams are at the top of the shoulders because there was no avoiding that no matter how hard I tried to come up with a solution.  I even knitted the sleeves circular.  I picked up stitches along the armholes and reduced down the length of the sleeve finishing with the wristband, rather than the other way around as is usually done.

At times, especially as I reduced down to the wristband, the sleeves were extremely challenging.  Having a long circular needle meant I had to get creative with where I pulled the excess and still be able to knit effectively.  Towards the end, I was needing to adjust it every 5 or 6 stitches, but it worked and worked well.

A sleeve almost at the wristband.

I used threads of different colours to mark the start point and halfway (or the other side).  Those threads continued down the sleeves to mark where I was reducing.

One of my markers.

Knitting an entire men's jersey this way certainly raised some interesting challenges, but I'd do it again, overall I found it far easier to do and work with.

I didn't work to a pattern as such.  I measured up his favourite but battered sweatshirt and worked to it's measurements.  I had to redo the sleeves as they ended up far too baggy and too long as this seems to be wider at the shoulder than his sweatshirt although both seem to have the same straight drop shoulder cut.

More Milk and Cheese!

Last week we finally separated Handsome the bull calf from Brownie my house cow.

We'd left him with her to keep him friendly and tame enough until he was castrated, but with one thing and another, we hadn't castrated him yet.  He was 'feeling his oats' and starting to challenge us at every opportunity.  Putting him into a pen at night (so that we could have milk in the morning) had become a dangerous two-person job.

The wonderful neighbour came down to put a ring on him when he was much younger.  At that time, we thought he was friendly enough that he could safely be pinned against the side of the pen by two people while the third did the job.  Unfortunately, while he was friendly for me, he was less familiar with hubby and didn't respond at all well to the neighbour climbing into his pen and managed to make a hole in the fence and ran around our garden.  We discussed running them down into the yards at the neighbours so that he could use the head crusher and do it safely.  But between him working and going away on holiday and us working and having other commitments, we never quite got it done.

Now he's 9 1/2 months old, far too old for a rubber ring and he's a stroppy little gobshite.  So the vet is coming this week to 'cut' him.  That was quite challenging working out when the vet was available, we were available and the neighbour was available to work his challenging crusher.  Meanwhile, I've had enough and we put him into the next paddock over from Brownie.  They spend a lot of time at the gate together.

For the past week we've been serenaded by him, first it was angry calls, then it was sad sounding.  Over the weekend, there were fewer but it just seems like "don't forget I'm here" bellows.

Now that we're not sharing Brownie's milk with him, we're getting twice the volume.  It may have been more but I've decided to stick with once a day milking.  We were getting more than we needed before, so doubling that has meant that I was keeping a bucket in the fridge for the excess once I'd filled the jugs for our use.  We have plenty in the freezer for when we dry her off - although we have to get her in calf again first for that - so there's no need for more to freeze.

I spent the weekend cheese making.  I've made cheese in greater quantities than previously and different varieties that I hadn't tried before.  Instead of my usual 4 litres of milk to make two blocks of feta, I used 8 litres and made four blocks.  Two have been given away to people who like my feta and two are currently in the fridge.

I was also given a lot of frozen cream.  Miss Nineteen's boyfriend works in a petrol station and brings home the cream that doesn't sell, which goes into my friend's freezer (Miss Nineteen boards with one of my friends).  She gave me a bag with about 8 litres of frozen cream in the usual 300ml and 600ml bottles.  I thawed some of the cream out and tried my hand at making cream cheese.

I don't know if it was because it had been frozen but the cream and milk mixture was a little grainy even before I added culture and rennet and the resulting cream cheese is a little grainy and not the smooth spread that you buy from the supermarket.  However it tastes great.  Next up, I'll be trying some of the flavoured cream cheeses that you can buy for cheese boards.

My grainy but tasty cream cheese.

I also made a real cheddar for the first time yesterday.  I've previously made a farmhouse cheddar which didn't involve the proper cheddaring procedures, so I wasn't really prepared for how labour intensive cheddar is and how long it takes to make.  I'd thought it would be like most cheeses, a couple of hours and it's in the press.  This required an hour of turning the cheese every ten minutes to condense it into a brick-like mass before cutting it into fingers.

I liked the thought of a port cheddar, but lacking port, I used the elderberry wine that I had in the barrel waiting for me to bottle.  It's sweet and smoky and has distinct port-like qualities so I've used that.

Elderberry wine cheddar.

One of the issues we've been running into is making Edam cheeses the way I usually do, I end up with a 1.2kg block and now there's only three of us at home, it takes forever to get through it all. Making it in smaller quantities meant that it didn't press as well and I was running out of blocks for my cheese press.  So instead I decided to make it in the same usual quantities, but just before the brining and drying part of the process, I would cut my cheese into smaller pieces.  Let them brine and dry that way and wax them separately.  I'm going to do this with the cheddar.

The added bonus to doing it that way is that a smaller wedge could make a nice gift too.

Changeable Spring Weather

About six weeks ago I was excited.  For the first time in a year, we'd gotten enough rainfall to actually have mud in the paddocks.  Not a lot of mud, but enough that in the places where my cattle congregate, they were squelching around and leaving their footprints behind.  I have never in my life been so excited about mud as I was then.  I never thought I'd ever be excited to have mud.

We still had puddles on the surface, but they were fewer and the ground around them was softening.

The paddocks have greened up and the grass has more than doubled in a week.

Then the gale force Nor'Westers started up.  For those unfamiliar with the Canterbury Nor'Wester - it's a foehn wind.  A hot dry wind that doesn't just dry up the land, it also causes all sorts of problems for people in it's path.  From migraines to increased suicide rates.

It got very hot very quickly.  What was supposed to be Spring gardening, became trying to find a shady spot that we could work in and still be following our plan.  Any work done out in the sun was in short bursts punctuated frequently by cold drink breaks and excuses to get in the shade.

Thanks to El Nino, we're forecast for another hot dry summer.  Local farmers are already getting nervous about paddock growth and making silage and hay as fast as they can.  Hay is becoming like gold.

For several weeks, we were seeing forecasts of a cold front and wet weather coming just a couple of days away.  Like last year though, that always seems to be a few days away and we just don't quite get it.

We had several days of 30 degrees Celsius.  All my gardening plans went out the window.  I shifted two wheelbarrow loads of stones and that was my limit.  I found myself almost making excuses to hide out inside.

The weather seemed to settle down and become consistently warmer with only the odd oppressively hot day.  I started to plant out the corn I'd started inside from seeds, I planted out my beans and I've planted out my potatoes.

Then I was excited about the rain this week.  We needed it and it was very welcome.

I wasn't half as excited about the snow that covered the mountain or the - 3 (Celsius) frost we got this morning.  So far my corn seems to be okay, but the beans are looking a bit sad.

At least the gales have stopped.

For now.