How many strands?

Chunky yarns are very useful for making warm hats, scarves and mittens ready for winter, especially the cold winters in middle and eastern Europe.  I don't have much in the way of chunky yarns, but I do have lots of thinner coned yarns which I have been combining to make chunky or thereabouts weight for knitting mittens for adults in Bulgaria.

The first pairs were made with charcoal and blue yarns.  If you look closely at the picture above, you will see that the 2 balls of yarn comprise 5 separate stands - one of 4 ply, 3 of 3 ply and one of 2 ply.  A total of 12 ply is roughly chunky, and knits into a tight fabric on 5.5 mm needles.  The pattern I used is Marlene's mittens.

Using so many strands slows my knitting a bit as I have to check that I am working all of the strands all of the time... Occasionally a couple of stitches have to be unpicked and reknitted because of a lost strand or two.

After making a couple of pairs in the grey/blue mix, I moved on to a brighter combination of colours:

How many strands this time?  Well, actually it's seven:

There are two strands of 3 ply and five strands of 2 ply - 16 ply altogether.  In fact the white and black strands may only be 1 ply, so I could be exaggerating slightly!  It is definitely knitting a thicker fabric than the grey/blue.  I have found that stacking the 3 balls on top of each other makes it much easier to control the strands, and there is really no difference in knitting with seven rather than five strands.  The mix of colours works well together too:

Mitt number one still missing a thumb.  For some reason my strategy when making mittens is to knit the bodies of both, then to knit the thumbs after.

Can I beat 7 strands?  We shall see!

Closet card sharp?

My little corner of our front room (as I like to see it) contains my end of the settee, a side table with my macbook (a present to myself when I retired 4 years ago), my iPad mini (an unexpected present from my husband two Christmases ago when we had agreed not to give each other big pressies), my knitting bag (OK, 2 knitting bags), my circulars roll and my library book.

Having my laptop and iPad to hand is my means of staving off the dreaded Repetitive Strain Injury.  I take a break from knitting or crocheting, open up the laptop and check my emails, the Loving Hands Forum, and then I open up an app which has lots of different games of Patience on it.  My favourite is one called Australian Patience.  The game doesn't often work out, so it is very satisfying when it does.  I do find it very relaxing (the background is a video, so the waves break rhythmically on the beach), and a bit mentally taxing too.

Then today I looked at the stats which the app helpfully compiles.  It showed that I get it to work out 25% of the time (higher than I thought), but then it showed that over the last 4 years I have spent 11 days, 13 hours and 36 minutes playing this game.  Eleven days!  That's a good length for a holiday, let alone playing games of patience.  At first I was horrified at the loss of this length of time, then I broke it down to 3 days per year, less than one percent of my time.  It didn't seem quite so scary then. What would I have done otherwise with this time?  Probably watched mindless TV, or eaten biscuits, or carried on knitting and then maybe damaged my shoulders or my hands.  Should I feel as guilty as I do for playing cards for that amount of time?

Now I have come across Zooniverse, a community website that seeks people with time on their hands to view scientific or historical information and analyse it in some way.  One of their current projects is Operation War Diary, where they need people to transcribe key information from handwritten diaries kept by British military units during the first world war.  So I shall cut back on the cards, and do a bit of transcribing instead!