It's a delicious soft orangey-pinky-yellowy skein called "Tuscan Rose over Lemon". I take it out and pet it several times a day.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Stash Enhancement Experience
I love to share photos of my delicious yarn. This one is another skein of Sundara's hand-dye, preordered months ago:
It's a delicious soft orangey-pinky-yellowy skein called "Tuscan Rose over Lemon". I take it out and pet it several times a day.
It's a delicious soft orangey-pinky-yellowy skein called "Tuscan Rose over Lemon". I take it out and pet it several times a day.
China is back where it belongs
Dear Readers, who have patiently stayed with me for the past year-and-a-month while I wrote up the happenings of Dad's and my trip to China:
1. Thank you! I hope you had fun!
2. I'm done now. It's all written up.
Therefore,
3. I've moved the entries back to the real dates when each one occurred. If you want to read them in order, click here and just keep clicking "Newer Post" at the bottom of each post until you get tired!
1. Thank you! I hope you had fun!
2. I'm done now. It's all written up.
Therefore,
3. I've moved the entries back to the real dates when each one occurred. If you want to read them in order, click here and just keep clicking "Newer Post" at the bottom of each post until you get tired!
Thursday, July 23, 2009
The Fruits of our Labours
My friend Sarah and I are Craft Buddies. She's the one who started me knitting and crocheting, and has made determined efforts to get me into beading which I have mostly resisted except for a mild earring addiction. (Really, you have to love a gal who, after you tell her you don't need another craft, gives you a box of yarn and four sizes of knitting needles for Christmas!)
The other problem with crafts is that, like gateway drugs, one leads to another. Hence, our mutual love of knitting and all things yarny has led us to adventures in dyeing our own yarns.
A couple times each summer we get together over at her house (she has an enclosed deck that is an ideal outdoor workspace) and have a Dyeing Day. It usually starts around 10:30 AM and continues till it's too dark to see.
Actually, before dyeing day even starts there's a lot of prep work. First you order yarn and dye if necessary (we had dyes left from last year so we don't have to buy more for a while.) I get most of my undyed yarn from either knitpicks.com, elann.com (a yummy DK-weight cashmere blend, now apparently discontinued - a national tragedy) or wool2dye4.com. All of these outlets sell very nice, soft undyed wool and wool-blend yarn. Since I'm all about the sock, I usually get fingering weight.
The yarn mostly comes wound in skeins, but if you are doing something special you may need to rewind it. For example, this
is how I wound a skein to dye self-striping sock yarn. The path around the lamps and door handle (and around the old sleeping dog in the shadows back there) is about 40 feet, which gave me a repeating stripe pattern about three inches tall on the finished socks.
The day before dyeing we set all the yarn to soak in big cauldrons of water. The superwash yarns wet pretty easily, but some of the non-superwash wools take forever to soak through! If we had added synthrapol to the soak water it would have wetted faster, I believe.
On Dyeing Day, we set out our stock solutions
(we use Jacquard acid dyes, 1/2 tsp dye powder to one cup hot tap water, or 1 tsp in the case of black.) You dye the fiber, then set the dye by spraying with vinegar and heating the dyed yarn. Mostly we microwave it.
We are scientists - both of us have Chemistry degrees from the College of Wooster - so we are very precise in our measurements. We also dyed samples of yarn with each color to use for planning our final skeins. We are very anal.
This past Saturday I managed to dye 16 skeins of yarn, and Sarah did - let me think - five, eight, ten: Ten skeins of yarn and one sock blank, plus several yards of silk ribbon. That's one busy day, let me tell you!
I don't have pictures of hers, but here are some of mine:
Two skeins of Knitpicks' Bare laceweight merino, kettle dyed with Jacquard "Scarlet" plus a little Russet and Black for intensity. This didn't come out the way I planned at all; I wanted an intense red color with slight color-on-color variation but I couldn't stir the dye bath to even out the color because the yarn wanted to felt so easily. The skeins are moderately felted even so; I'm going to very gently wind them into balls and see what I think of the result. I'd really like the variegated pink I ended up with if it weren't that back in April I bought yarn for three other pink shawls. We'll see - maybe I really need four!
A set of four gorgeous tone-on-tone brown skeins in Elann's Superwash Merino and Cashmere Sock Yarn. This yarn was a little pricey but it feels unbelievable. I really hope they start selling it again. I handpainted all four skeins at the same time, using different dilutions of our brown stock solution, but each skein came out a little different.
One skein of Wool2Dye4 Surino, a sportweight Suri Alpaca/Merino blend. This one was handpainted in shades of Burgundy and Chestnut - I like how they look together and several people have complimented me on the color of this skein. This one may be a hat and/or a pair of mittens. Or maybe mittens and a headband at least - I have 327 yards, so we'll see how far it goes.
Two skeins of Elann's merino wool-Seacell blend, wound off and reskeined with two strands held together, dyed in denim blues. I painted half the skein and just threw dye randomly at the other half for a speckled effect. I love the cream with this blue! The blue itself is Jacquard's Sky Blue plus a little black.
The next four skeins are attempts at rescuing previously dyed yarn that I didn't like. I overdyed them to produce colors I would hopefully like better. Successes first:
Here's the original skein, which was intended to be a "fall leaf" colorway, but which had way too much blechy yellow.
The same yarn overdyed with a couple dippings in dilute black. I love the richness of the color. I did the same thing last year with this skein:
which started out an obnoxious orange-and-fuchsia combo and ended up looking like gourmet raisins.
Here's the second:
The original skein was dip dyed in pink and yellow ocher. The pink is too strong and the yellow too dull for me here. I overdyed it with diluted brown followed by several dips in dilute scarlet and ended up with this
which I like much better.
Thirdly, there's this:
Another dip-dyed skein in Turquoise and Hot Fuchsia. I did that a lot last year, but it turns out I don't really like the ones that are dip dyed in just two colors. They don't have enough interest for me. For this one, I used a sprayer filled with dilute Midnight Blue plus a little black and sprayed varying amounts on about two thirds of the skein. Here's what I ended up with:
I really like the shading you can get with the sprayer; I'm going to try it for more things next time.
My last overdyeing experiment was an attempt to get more olive green into this skein:
Here's the result:
I consider this last one to be kind of a failure, but other people keep telling me they like it, so maybe it'll grow on me. Most of the overdyed skeins are Knitpicks' Bare "Essential" (now renamed Stroll) - 75% merino, 25% nylon, but the last is Wool2Dye4's Socks2Dye4 100% merino yarn.
I tried another kettle-dye skein. At least this one was superwash so I could poke it around without fear - it's also that Socks2Dye4 yarn.
I think I've decided that kettle-dyeing is not for me. I am too much of a control freak to like the randomness.
The rest of my skeins are experiments in pale pastels. I dyed a lot of really intense colors last time and the overdyes tend to be dark, so I wanted some light things for balance. I'm really pleased with these!
Pale pink, gray and natural. The base is Wool2Dye4's Platinum Sock, a very bright white nylon/merino blend.
Neapolitan sock yarn, good enough to eat! This yarn base is brand new: Wool2Dye4's "Sheila's Sock". It's a very tightly-twisted superwash merino; due to the twist I think it'll wear well even without nylon. The next one is the same yarn base:
an ultra-pale dip dye in Hot Fuchsia, Pumpkin Orange, Lilac and Golden Yellow.
The last one uses Knitpicks' Bare "Imagination" (merino wool, nylon and alpaca) as its base:
I'm calling it Peach Sorbet - I have a lot of ice-creamy colors this year. It's really fuzzy and soft and I adore it.
I mentioned sock blanks earlier. While I don't have photos of this year's sock blank, I have some we dyed last year.
The rainbow one is Sarah's; the zig zag and the pond-scum stripes are mine. I already finished socks from the zig zag; here they are:
Sock blanks give you the same amount of yarn as Knitpicks' skeins of Bare Essential, but they use a knitting machine to produce a flat which you dye and then unravel to make your socks. The flats are double stranded, too, so you automatically get matching socks!
The other problem with crafts is that, like gateway drugs, one leads to another. Hence, our mutual love of knitting and all things yarny has led us to adventures in dyeing our own yarns.
A couple times each summer we get together over at her house (she has an enclosed deck that is an ideal outdoor workspace) and have a Dyeing Day. It usually starts around 10:30 AM and continues till it's too dark to see.
Actually, before dyeing day even starts there's a lot of prep work. First you order yarn and dye if necessary (we had dyes left from last year so we don't have to buy more for a while.) I get most of my undyed yarn from either knitpicks.com, elann.com (a yummy DK-weight cashmere blend, now apparently discontinued - a national tragedy) or wool2dye4.com. All of these outlets sell very nice, soft undyed wool and wool-blend yarn. Since I'm all about the sock, I usually get fingering weight.
The yarn mostly comes wound in skeins, but if you are doing something special you may need to rewind it. For example, this
is how I wound a skein to dye self-striping sock yarn. The path around the lamps and door handle (and around the old sleeping dog in the shadows back there) is about 40 feet, which gave me a repeating stripe pattern about three inches tall on the finished socks.
The day before dyeing we set all the yarn to soak in big cauldrons of water. The superwash yarns wet pretty easily, but some of the non-superwash wools take forever to soak through! If we had added synthrapol to the soak water it would have wetted faster, I believe.
On Dyeing Day, we set out our stock solutions
(we use Jacquard acid dyes, 1/2 tsp dye powder to one cup hot tap water, or 1 tsp in the case of black.) You dye the fiber, then set the dye by spraying with vinegar and heating the dyed yarn. Mostly we microwave it.
We are scientists - both of us have Chemistry degrees from the College of Wooster - so we are very precise in our measurements. We also dyed samples of yarn with each color to use for planning our final skeins. We are very anal.
This past Saturday I managed to dye 16 skeins of yarn, and Sarah did - let me think - five, eight, ten: Ten skeins of yarn and one sock blank, plus several yards of silk ribbon. That's one busy day, let me tell you!
I don't have pictures of hers, but here are some of mine:
Two skeins of Knitpicks' Bare laceweight merino, kettle dyed with Jacquard "Scarlet" plus a little Russet and Black for intensity. This didn't come out the way I planned at all; I wanted an intense red color with slight color-on-color variation but I couldn't stir the dye bath to even out the color because the yarn wanted to felt so easily. The skeins are moderately felted even so; I'm going to very gently wind them into balls and see what I think of the result. I'd really like the variegated pink I ended up with if it weren't that back in April I bought yarn for three other pink shawls. We'll see - maybe I really need four!
A set of four gorgeous tone-on-tone brown skeins in Elann's Superwash Merino and Cashmere Sock Yarn. This yarn was a little pricey but it feels unbelievable. I really hope they start selling it again. I handpainted all four skeins at the same time, using different dilutions of our brown stock solution, but each skein came out a little different.
One skein of Wool2Dye4 Surino, a sportweight Suri Alpaca/Merino blend. This one was handpainted in shades of Burgundy and Chestnut - I like how they look together and several people have complimented me on the color of this skein. This one may be a hat and/or a pair of mittens. Or maybe mittens and a headband at least - I have 327 yards, so we'll see how far it goes.
Two skeins of Elann's merino wool-Seacell blend, wound off and reskeined with two strands held together, dyed in denim blues. I painted half the skein and just threw dye randomly at the other half for a speckled effect. I love the cream with this blue! The blue itself is Jacquard's Sky Blue plus a little black.
The next four skeins are attempts at rescuing previously dyed yarn that I didn't like. I overdyed them to produce colors I would hopefully like better. Successes first:
Here's the original skein, which was intended to be a "fall leaf" colorway, but which had way too much blechy yellow.
The same yarn overdyed with a couple dippings in dilute black. I love the richness of the color. I did the same thing last year with this skein:
which started out an obnoxious orange-and-fuchsia combo and ended up looking like gourmet raisins.
Here's the second:
The original skein was dip dyed in pink and yellow ocher. The pink is too strong and the yellow too dull for me here. I overdyed it with diluted brown followed by several dips in dilute scarlet and ended up with this
which I like much better.
Thirdly, there's this:
Another dip-dyed skein in Turquoise and Hot Fuchsia. I did that a lot last year, but it turns out I don't really like the ones that are dip dyed in just two colors. They don't have enough interest for me. For this one, I used a sprayer filled with dilute Midnight Blue plus a little black and sprayed varying amounts on about two thirds of the skein. Here's what I ended up with:
I really like the shading you can get with the sprayer; I'm going to try it for more things next time.
My last overdyeing experiment was an attempt to get more olive green into this skein:
Here's the result:
I consider this last one to be kind of a failure, but other people keep telling me they like it, so maybe it'll grow on me. Most of the overdyed skeins are Knitpicks' Bare "Essential" (now renamed Stroll) - 75% merino, 25% nylon, but the last is Wool2Dye4's Socks2Dye4 100% merino yarn.
I tried another kettle-dye skein. At least this one was superwash so I could poke it around without fear - it's also that Socks2Dye4 yarn.
I think I've decided that kettle-dyeing is not for me. I am too much of a control freak to like the randomness.
The rest of my skeins are experiments in pale pastels. I dyed a lot of really intense colors last time and the overdyes tend to be dark, so I wanted some light things for balance. I'm really pleased with these!
Pale pink, gray and natural. The base is Wool2Dye4's Platinum Sock, a very bright white nylon/merino blend.
Neapolitan sock yarn, good enough to eat! This yarn base is brand new: Wool2Dye4's "Sheila's Sock". It's a very tightly-twisted superwash merino; due to the twist I think it'll wear well even without nylon. The next one is the same yarn base:
an ultra-pale dip dye in Hot Fuchsia, Pumpkin Orange, Lilac and Golden Yellow.
The last one uses Knitpicks' Bare "Imagination" (merino wool, nylon and alpaca) as its base:
I'm calling it Peach Sorbet - I have a lot of ice-creamy colors this year. It's really fuzzy and soft and I adore it.
I mentioned sock blanks earlier. While I don't have photos of this year's sock blank, I have some we dyed last year.
The rainbow one is Sarah's; the zig zag and the pond-scum stripes are mine. I already finished socks from the zig zag; here they are:
Sock blanks give you the same amount of yarn as Knitpicks' skeins of Bare Essential, but they use a knitting machine to produce a flat which you dye and then unravel to make your socks. The flats are double stranded, too, so you automatically get matching socks!
Thursday, June 25, 2009
SAVE OHIO LIBRARIES
DEADLINE: MONDAY, JUNE 29
I've worked for ten years at the Stow-Munroe Falls Public Library in Stow, OH. We're a small stand-alone library, but even with our small size we provide excellent service to our community.
This week we received news that Governor Strickland proposes to cut library funding drastically - more than $200 MILLION over the next two years. This would force many libraries to close.
I urge anyone who has a stake in Ohio's libraries to contact your state senators and state reps and urge them to vote against this cut, which strikes hardest at the Ohioans in most need. If you can help, please do.
Here is a link to my library's press release and contact forms for the reps.
Here is a link to where you can find out who your state senator is and who your state representative is, if you don't know.
And here is the letter I wrote to Governor Strickland. He didn't get to see it in its full glory; his contact form only gives you 1000 characters so I had to trim it a lot. However, I think somebody should see it!
Dear Governor Strickland,
I am writing on behalf of Ohio Libraries to ask you to reconsider the severe library funding cuts you have proposed for the next biennium budget. Ohio’s libraries have been enduring a steady decrease in state funding over the past decade, and we have coped with this change very well – to the extent that Ohio’s libraries are still the best in the nation. However, no organization is equipped to cope with a 50% drop in income, and the proposed budget would devastate the library system, forcing many closures and losses of service.
Ohio libraries preferentially serve the sector of our population who need the most help: job seekers, our children, especially students, and our senior citizens. I am employed at the Stow-Munroe Falls Public Library in Stow, Ohio, and our small library alone sends outreach librarians to day care facilities, senior citizen homes and homebound individuals to bring these people materials they need as well as human contact. We teach 15 to 20 computer classes per month, helping jobless Ohio workers upgrade their technical skills to improve their chances of finding employment, and enabling formerly computer-illiterate people to navigate the Web well enough to accomplish many necessary tasks. (Such as filing for unemployment benefits.) We assist students on everything from locating summer reading books to solving algebra equations to filling out FAFSA forms online, and we proctor college exams for the students taking classes online.
Ohio needs a balanced budget. But she also needs her library system to continue to function. I urge you to find another solution for the best interests of Ohio’s citizens.
Diana Parker
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
FO
I finished up my "Vanilla Socks" today, though going by the colorway they'd be more like grape/lime/blueberry socks.
I love, love, love this yarn. Knitpicks Imagination, fine merino wool blended with alpaca and a bit of nylon, gorgeous colors on my needles doing a cool little rhythmic quasi-striping thing.
I've been knitting these at every opportunity for the last week. Why?
I needed the needles back for this!
I'm FINALLY casting on with some of my beloved Sundara Sock yarn. This colorway is called "Basil over Buttercup". I have this idea for a cool pair of socks... we'll see how it works with the yarn. With luck, more soon!
I love, love, love this yarn. Knitpicks Imagination, fine merino wool blended with alpaca and a bit of nylon, gorgeous colors on my needles doing a cool little rhythmic quasi-striping thing.
I've been knitting these at every opportunity for the last week. Why?
I needed the needles back for this!
I'm FINALLY casting on with some of my beloved Sundara Sock yarn. This colorway is called "Basil over Buttercup". I have this idea for a cool pair of socks... we'll see how it works with the yarn. With luck, more soon!
Monday, June 8, 2009
Adult Surprise Jacket Calculator
Several people have asked me to share my ASJ calculator to help do the math for Elizabeth Zimmermann's Adult Surprise Jacket pattern. I emailed it to a bunch of people, but now I think it's easier just to post it.
Feel free to download this calculator and put in your own measurements and gauge. You will still need to get the pattern itself (you can order it from Schoolhouse Press, or it's in the book The Opinionated Knitter) but this will do the calculations for you.
Click this link to go to a page where you can download the spreadsheet. Let me know if there are any problems!
Feel free to download this calculator and put in your own measurements and gauge. You will still need to get the pattern itself (you can order it from Schoolhouse Press, or it's in the book The Opinionated Knitter) but this will do the calculations for you.
Click this link to go to a page where you can download the spreadsheet. Let me know if there are any problems!
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Feeding the Habit
Five reasons why this doesn't count as going off my yarn diet:
1. It's sooooo pretty! Who could resist?
2. It's only a little bit of yarn.
3. It's from my very favoritest indie dyer, Sundara. She puts up several colors each month, and then - vamos, muchachos - those colors are GONE for at least 24 months. So buy them or live in regret, eating your heart out for two whole years.
4. It's sock yarn! Sock yarn is methadone for hard-core yarn junkies. You get just enough to take the edge off. Heck, I could probably get a prescription for it! "Take 100 grams of sock yarn PRN; call the office if you need more than three doses per month."
5. I ordered it BEFORE I went on the diet. So there! Nyah, nyah! It was bought and paid for long ago and just arrived this weekend. Hah!
1. It's sooooo pretty! Who could resist?
2. It's only a little bit of yarn.
3. It's from my very favoritest indie dyer, Sundara. She puts up several colors each month, and then - vamos, muchachos - those colors are GONE for at least 24 months. So buy them or live in regret, eating your heart out for two whole years.
4. It's sock yarn! Sock yarn is methadone for hard-core yarn junkies. You get just enough to take the edge off. Heck, I could probably get a prescription for it! "Take 100 grams of sock yarn PRN; call the office if you need more than three doses per month."
5. I ordered it BEFORE I went on the diet. So there! Nyah, nyah! It was bought and paid for long ago and just arrived this weekend. Hah!
PS - there's more in the pipeline, too (*wink*)!
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