Posted in: "stash"
It's the last friday before Christmas, and I am sitting in the living room of my parents house with a cup of tea and my knitting. The snow is coming down, and Boston is predicted to get anywhere from 8-12 inches. The girls are wired beyond belief, and my goal is to turn this
into a pair of these before we head up to Vermont tomorrow afternoon to go skiing. Life is good.
So the last time we saw this project, I was bemoaning my lack of competitiveness in the Ravelympics and making myself blind with black beads and fingering weight alpaca.
I'm still making myself blind, but the shawl has grown considerably, and I am now only 50-something rows away from being done. Hooray! Granted, I'm doing one less repeat then is called for, but from my extremely scientific calculations* this thing is going to be at least 40+ inches across. Plenty big enough. The only issue is that the rows are approximately 550 stitches each (and only going to get bigger), so I get maybe four rows done per day commuting to and from work. Which means 5 more weeks of knitting. And Christmas is only 6 weeks away right? So...hmmm...we'll see.
To combat the wear and tear on my noggin from Ms. Isis up there, I cast on a few days ago for something nice and simple - garter stitch.
Devil has decided that she needs a "coat", and due to our impending relocation across the pond, I've decided that I need to do some serious stashbusting, and fast. Enter some stashed Lamb's Pride Bulky (in a barely acceptable purple color, since there was no pink to be had), and a couple of evenings with EZ's The Knitting Workshop and Alias, Season 1 DVDs, and I've gotten almost to the armpits of my first ever Tomten (Rav link).
Look at the squishy garter stitch! Absolutely the perfect brainless evening knitting.
So Isis for the bus commute, and Tomten for after the kids go to bed. Or for Knit Night, since I brought Isis last week but was extremely uncommunicative (which totally negates the entire point of going to Knit Night**, right ladies?).
* I pulled on the center to stretch it out, put it next to a piece of paper for comparison and said "That looks like about 16 inches, and with 50 more rows, I'm sure I can get 4 more!" You know, Scientific and shit...
** Which is, of course, to talk very loudly, share completely inappropriate and embarrassing stories about our children/spouses/pets, and scare the folks who go to Whole Foods to, you know, buy food or something!
Last summer I bought a bunch of acid dyes thinking that I would start doing some dyeing. And then I bought an bunch of undyed top and had great plans for doing my own colorways to spin.
And then, predictably enough, life got in the way and I never got around to it. About a month ago, I came across a thread in the Norah Gaughan fan group on Ravelry about a celebratory sweater - she is designing a sweater for the group to knit as a free pattern. She posted a schematic and I decided to paw through the stash and see if I had anything appropriate.
I found this yarn I got in Italy a couple of years ago and thought “Wow, that might be perfect if only it were a slightly different color.” One thing led to another and I found myself some time later hovering over the stove with lots of little jars with 1 oz samples of yarn/top bubbling away. Now I’ve got a notebook filled with dyed samples, and I decided to give the yarn a try.
Click on this picture to see which color I was aiming for
I pulled out the Italian yarn and got to work.
Now, that there one of two skeins of this stuff, resulting in 815 g of worsted weight yarn. I do not have a pot the appropriate size that I can donate to the non-foodsafe dyeing cause, nor did I want to drop umpteen bucks on something just for this one experiment. Instead I went to the local Target and got myself a large plastic box. Since I live in the South, and it is 90 degrees until November, maybe I could do this outside.
I soaked the yarn with the appropriate amount of vinegar (according to Deb Menz, Dyeing Goddess Extraordinaire) and a whole whack of water. Technically it was supposed to be 31.87 liters, but I didn’t have that much distilled stuff on hand so I just filled up the tub about halfway with the hose and threw the yarn in to soak.
Then I pulled the yarn out and added the dye directly to the soaking bath. Deb Menz has very specific formulas for the amount of water needed per dry weigh of yarn/fiber, but I’ve seen more then one other person say that the amount of water isn’t the critical factor, so I decided to wing it.
Devil wanted to help
I put a big piece of plywood and a Crepe Myrtle log on top to keep out inquisitive squirrels and children and left it overnight.
Much to my surprise, I came out the next morning and found this:
I knew from my 1 oz experiments that with this particular formula, the turquoise didn’t exhaust completely, but I was shocked to see how much of the dye had exhausted!
But...I rinsed the yarn multiple times, and found that it was still loosing a lot of the blue/purple dye. So I put it back into the dye bath/rinse water and added more vinegar and left it for a couple of days.
Then I pulled out each skein individually and wrapped them in plastic bags and steamed them in my very large lobstah pot (which gets lots of use down here, let me tell you). I figured that the dye had gotten into the yarn in the outside step, but still needed to be heated to complete the process.
It seemed to work. So now I’ve got 815 g of dark blue yarn with purple undertones. It turns out that the NG pattern calls for DK weight yarn (perfect for the bag of purple Silky Wool I have hanging around), so this will get to be something else. But I'm definitely more excited about it now!
Back in March, I joined the Sock a Month knitalong. It's been a great group to be a part of, especially since one of my (unstated) goals for the year was to knit a pair of socks every month. The bonus of doing the knitalong is that they have prizes. Every month, they draw out a winner from the people who finished a pair, and at the end of the knitalong (June, although it's now running for July-December), they draw out the monthly winner, a winner from the folks who did a pair every month, and a winner from the group of people who knit at least one pair during the six months.
I was one of the winners for June! And last weekend my package arrived.
The prize as posted was a skein of sock yarn and some stitch markers, but when Prize Lady Zonda sent off the package to me, she included one of her gorgeous box bags. So what I got was this
with some lovely green and purple sock yarn
The box bag is really gorgeous - I got to pick out the fabric, and Zonda did a great job. When I was growing up, my Crafty Aunt Laura used to make marbled paper that looked just like this fabric, so I had to pick it.
If anyone is interested, she has an Etsy shop where she sells needle cases, and she will make up box bags to order - you can also email her at zknitter @ gmail dot com.
Now I need to find a pattern for that yarn. Any suggestions?
While my unspoken pledge to not buy yarn has been going pretty well at home, something happens when I go on vacation that blows my inhibitions out of the water. I guess it's something along the lines of "well, I'm on vacation, so it doesn't count!" Just like cookies that you eat standing up have no calories.
This tendancy coupled with the fact that my parents live around the corner (I'm not kidding) from Windsor Button means that trips home are rough on the plastic. And since my in laws are up the hill (again with the not kidding) and a 20 min drive from Grafton Fibers and Green Mountain Spinnery respectively, going up there gives the bank account no respite. But I do come away with some cool stuff.
I've already knit up one of my purchases into the Spiraling Coriolis socks, so I'll skip the Fixation and Cat Bordhi opus description. But Boston also yielded
Cherry Tree Hill Sockittome in "Blueberry Hill" which I couldn't resist, because one of Devil's favorite books is "Blueberries for Sal"
and a skein of Handmaiden Sea Silk in "Mineral" for Tuscany. Or some other wrappy type thing. We're off to a wedding in Colorado* in a couple of weeks, and if I put down everything else and cast on tonight, I might get this finished by then. Or I might not.
That was the total damage in Beantown. But then I went to the Spinnery and, after a tour of the mill in action, felt obliged to drop a large hunk of cash on two hanks of sock yarn.
GMS Sock Art Forest and Meadow. Forest (the purple skein) is 70% wool/30% tencel and absolutely the softest yarn I've felt in a long time. Meadow (the blue-green skein) is 50% wool/50% mohair and should make some really well wearing socks. I've got plans for the Forest for a watery type sock for Project Spectrum - Water which starts next month, but that lovely purple is going to marinate for a while. Becuase there is a lot to be said for high potential energy in the stash.
* Hmmm...maybe an opportunity for further stash enhancement? Bad Porpoise, bad!