17 December: A rug - and yet another hat

Winter time is just right for making a rug - thick and heavy spread over your lap as you work. Even after my attempts to use up all my stash of rug wool, there was an awful lot left; perhaps something to do with my carrying home an enormous bag full of old Durham Carpets yarn from the Guild one day. They acquired a lot of carpet yarn when the factory closed, and I liked some of the colours.

It's made by hooking lengths of wool into knots on rug canvas, using a latchet hook. Each knot is worked individually. There are 23 rows of 6 sections, and each section is 20 stitches wide and 5 rows deep. Each knot has 2 strands of wool, which have to be cut from the ball or cone. It took nearly 3 weeks to make (not a lot worth watching on TV lately).

The design is simple, based on a couple of carpets seen recently. One was sampler in John Lewis, showing all the available colours in one carpet range, and the other was seen in a shop window in York when we were having coffee in the cafe opposite. My version is 3 feet each way.


There's another hat, too. This one is the Joined Up Thinking hat - it needed a lot of thought (and many pages of squared paper) to work out how the design would carry into the top shaping.


It's come out rather small, though.

10 August: Yet more socks - and a rug

After knitting socks for some time, I had a bag full of small balls of left-over sock yarn, in many different colourways. Never one to let anything useful go to waste, I have used some of these to make some odd socks -


As they will never match anything, this is their main feature. They will go into the sock drawer, and a random 2 will be taken out to wear. If I like them enough, I may never knit a matching pair of socks again.

And on the theme of never letting anything useful go to waste, there has been a box of rug yarn in my possession for the last ooh, 30 to 35 years. There was also a certain amount of the same yarn in my mother's belongings when she died in August 1983.

Last week I wove most of it into a small rug on my peg loom, a very low-tech affair consisting of nylon pegs and a length of 3" by 2" wood. I used 5 strands of the yarn together, to mix up the colours and to produce a squishily thick and soft rug.

It's about 29 inches long and 25 inches wide, and the cat has already selected it for a favourite place to lie.