Sprang - an actual result

 Well I couldn't wait to try more sprang. I found that I had a purple yarn of unknown fiber in my very small yarn stash. It felt like wool and it was definitely thicker than the red and brown yarns I had tried in the first projects. So I set up a new warp, once again winding it around the plastic board for the picture frame. I also decided to go back to the basic sprang stitch, not the one making larger holes. I felt that I needed to understand better what was going on, and I needed to learn how to deal with the sticks and endings, and with the basic pattern I could concentrate on that. I also tried to once again make a wider pieces, so I used 60 loops again.

The first rounds didn't go well. I got large holes and I tried to work with lifelines rather than sticks, but kept on failing. The 60 loops just fit my hands when working on them. Then something fell into place and I understood how the threads were supposed to be moving around each other, with the thread that I picked up tugging on two treads and not just one. With that I started to get row after row without having to redo as much. I gave up on the lifelines, but I could use just four sticks, which what was I had in knitting needles, for this piece the chop sticks were too short. Also when I made a mistake I could see it and if it wasn't too close to the start I didn't have to unravel the whole row but could just go back to the mistake.

Here is as far as I could work the piece. On the last row I did drop a few threads because it was too fiddly to work them, so I decided to quit. When the threads started to get tight I worked with one of the sticks that I removed and then I twisted a few threads, put the stick there, went on another few threads and so on. I had a tendence to make mistakes and drop threads when I took a bread to insert the stick and then continue, but it made it possible to work until there were only a few cm between the top and bottom. I then chained the bottom, top and middle to prevent everything from unraveling. After some wriggling with the piece the weave evened out, so that there were no large holes in the middle.

This is the finished piece after blocking it. There are holes in it, especially the large on in the middle of the first rows, before I had understood how the threads were supposed to move. There are also holes close to the middle, and that is where I dropped threads when it got too fiddly, the next time I can probably finish even earlier and the weave will still even out. I did close the large hole by just tying it together with more of the same yarn. I then treaded the bottom edge with a piece of yarn to gather it together, and used the same yarn piece to whipstitch the sides together, but not quite to the end of the side.

The finished net cap, sitting on my very small styrofoam head. I have threaded a fingerloop braid through the corners of the front edge so that I can close it. The length is probably good enough that I would be able to use it with a wulst under it, but it is too narrow for that. I can get it around my head, but I would not be able to have anything under it. Now when wearing it it feels a bit like a net gnome cap, since I don't have enough hair to fill out the bag part.

So the next thing I need to do is come up with a way of making a wider piece.