Etsy and more official news

I have officially opened my etsy shop!!!!!!!! So far, I just have my hand dyed yarns listed, but I have some fiber batts ready to go up there as well. I just got my new digital scale today so I can accurately advertise these now. Hooray! Please stop by and let me know what you think! Isn't it exciting?! I would also like to make another "official" move and announce to the world that my Marm and I are opening a yarn/spinning/knitting shop in late April/early May. We are so thrilled to have this opportunity and since we both have a blog, we want to write about store stuff too. We have decided to merge the three into one big coop blog for her, for me, and for shop goodies! I will post here a few more times, since we are still getting the new blog up and running, but I will eventually be moving to this new address. Thanks to all of my faithful readers, and I hope you will join me over there. It can only be even more fun with my mom contributing as well! :) Hope to see you there, please join us on this adventure! P. S. How do you folks out there in blog land pronounce etsy by the way? I have heard it etsy and I have heard it eetsy...just curious! :)

Dyeing self striping yarn and other adventures

As I mentioned in my previous post, I wanted to dye some self striping yarn to knit myself up a pair of socks. I am at a stopping point and can now share my progress with you! I started out by making a gigantic skein, dyeing the yarn, and then re-skeining this huge skein to wind onto the ball winder. Here is my yarn, freshly dried and waiting to be put into a ball and knitted with.


And here is this same skein on my very professional skein winder that made this skein the exact dimensions I was looking for. Exciting, huh? As you can see, one of the stripes will be a mottled blue and white...my Marm's idea :) Brilliant!

Now, I split up the skein into two equal balls, found the same point on both of them This is to get a result of socks that will stripe at exactly the same points...this is very important to me! By no means do I look down on you folks who like mismatched stripes, (on the contrary, I envy you your freedom, LOL) or knit one sock at a time! I only know what I like for my socks, and I do it ;) I also have found that I enjoy knitting toe-up, so that's what I do. I have fallen in love with the Turkish cast on method (tutorial here) because it's SO easy, makes an incredibly seamless toe-up cast on, and looks great to me! Here's what my socks are looking like after the toe increases are all completed.


I love, love, love how this yarn turned out and how the stripes are forming! The colors in the above picture are exactly how they look in the yarn (at least on my laptop). I decided on a simple 2x2 ribbed pattern for this pair. I love the simplistic beauty of ribbed socks, and they hug your foot so nicely! I just realized something- Congratulations are in order! I am knitting something for myself!

Ok, here's the back-

And the front-

So, onto the other adventures. I have been dyeing some fiber lately and wanted to try blending! I started out with about 1 ounce each of pink, teal, blue, white, and a grape color. This is what I got! The colors look pretty well blended, but they spun up very distinctly. My Marm spun it up, knitted a sample, so look for that upcoming bit of loveliness on her blog soon!


Ok, now this is not totally off the topic of knitting (these would show off some hand-knitted socks beautifully!), but I saw these and had to add them to my mental "buy as soon as possible" list :) Aren't they to die for? They're Keens and their shoes are one of my weaknesses. *sigh* I have had a pair of their tennis shoe type shoes all year last year and they have become a staple in my wardrobe. These shoes are addicting!

Noro Silk Garden Scarf

I finally finished my scarf, here are the details:

Pattern: Free Noro Silk Garden Scarf
Yarn: Evening Forest hand dyed (I am not sure which store, my Marm got it for me from Etsy), fingering weight...I made mine 7 feet long, it took about 475 yards to knit it to that length.
Needles: Size 1 circulars, Harmony from Knit Picks
Started: December 18, 2007
Finished: February 8, 2008 (keep in mind that I only worked on this at out weekly Barnes & Noble knitting group, so don't be dismayed...it's so easy!)

So I am very excited to have this scarf done, but now I have to start something new for Tuesday nights at B&N! I am planning a pair of socks for myself, still unsure of the pattern. I do know that I want to hand dye the yarn and I have a very specific idea of how I want it to look. Keep an eye out for that, I want to get that done in the next day or two.

Speaking of dyeing, check out the newest addition to our hand dyed family!


Isn't she beautiful?! She's still waiting on a name...I haven't named any of my yarns so far, but that will change :) Have a great weekend everyone!

Dyeing 8 skeins!

I have had a busy dyeing day today! I have set a new record for myself at 8 skeins in one day :) These are all 60% bamboo/30% merino/10% nylon. The only drawback to this whole process is the drying! I can't wait to see what they all look like dry and put on the niddy-noddy into 1 yard skeins.


I have been trying a new technique, putting the yarn into a ball with the ball winder, then dyeing wedges of color...so far (after 2 attempts) it has been unsuccessful. The middle never takes the color, no matter what I try to do! The ironic thing is, after rewinding these 2 "failures" into skeins and overdyeing them...they are some of my favorite yarns! LOL Isn't that just the way?! These skeins that I did today were all done with dip dyeing rather than squirt bottle-ing. My wrist got really sore the other day after a couple of hours of the squirt bottles, so I went back to this method.

Now, for my knitting, I have been working tirelessly on my attempt at pieces with the cardigan I mentioned here. It's coming along nicely, only 9 more inches to go on the back...whew! I am thinking it might have been worth it to translate the pattern to circular. Oh well, next time I will :) Plus, I get the benefit of practice putting pieces together. Wish me luck!

My sister, Aubrey, is in Australia right now for 3 months...she will be back in early April and I am feeling her loss keenly. Fortunately, we get to talk almost every night. She is 16 hours ahead of me, so the timing is difficult to work out so that it's good for both of us to talk! Can't wait 'till you're home Aubrey!

Well, I have another post for tomorrow, so until then...Knit on!

Excursions into the unknown

Firstly, the most exciting event to occur recently was a trip to the salon. I have red highlights! It's not blatantly obvious in this picture, but there are chunks of deep red wine color there. I love it! There is still a little bit of blonde left over from my last coloring, but I didn't want any new blonde this time. Getting your hair changed is so much fun! I am really loving mine this time.

I have been busy dyeing and have three new skeins to show off. The first two are bamboo/merino/nylon blends and the yarn is so shiny and luxurious! I used my acid dyes on this yarn and it doesn't seem to take the color as thoroughly as an all wool yarn would. I still like the result, but there is one skein (not pictured) that I will be over-dyeing due to it being such a pale color. I think I will try adding more vinegar next time I dye with this yarn. I have been trying new methods of dyeing, and these were done with squirt bottles rather than dipping. I really like the effect that it gives. It makes the shades of color vary a lot so its not such a definite block of one solid color for each section. This is what I personally, prefer in a handpainted yarn and I am so excited to be able to get mine to do this.

This is a 100% merino yarn and I really loved how the colors vary so much.

So, moving on a bit, I wrote in my last post about the sweater I was starting for myself...well, please disregard all of that! I got a couple of rows into my sweater and realized that I didn't have enough yarn to complete the project. No problem, I tell myself, I will just head over to Knit Picks and order some more...no such luck. Turns out that is one of the colors that they are sold out of and won't be reordering until May! So, back to the drawing board and onto a new project that requires less yarn. I have been trying to work on some of my previously undeveloped knitting skills and I have combined some in my new project. I am knitting a child's cardigan, in pieces, with cables! Now, I have only knit a project in pieces once and it was many years ago. I haven't done cables before, and I am really enjoying that!




















I chose a Debbie Bliss pattern, from her book Great Knits For Kids, that is so very cute it called out to me. I intended this to be for my youngest sister, Mallory (since she is the smallest, lol), but I am not sure who it will be for now that I have almost finished the back. It may be too big for her, but it will fit someone in my family! :) This is an exciting adventure into the unknown...I will keep you posted!

This weekend was a great chance for me to get all this knitting done. We were watching the Buick Invitational all day Saturday and Sunday. It was so great, not only did I get the chance to watch golf while knitting, but Tiger Woods won! Now, for those of you non-golf ethusiasts that may not mean much, but it makes my weekend complete :)

More dyeing results

My skeins finally dried today at about 2:30 so on to the niddy noddy they went! My personal favorite is the brown yarn there on the left. It's difficult to see on my computer screen, but there is some burnt orange in there as well. These were done with a combination of Jacquard and Gaywool dyes, both are acid dyes. These are in fingering weight merino and, after being dyed, fluffed out very beautifully. I am working on streamlining my dyeing techniques so that I can speed the process up a bit.
This is really fun to do, but I know that my mom eventually needs the kitchen back, lol.

More Dyeing

Today we got our order of bulk yarn to dye. It's so exciting! This is what I have done so far...more pictures will follow when they are finally dry :)

Kool Aid Dyeing

As promised, here are the details of my kool-aid dyeing process.

I don't have any pictures of this part of the experiment, but the skein of yarn is soaking in warm water with a drop of dishwashing detergent. Meanwhile, we mixed one packet each of strawberry, grape, lemon-lime, lemonade mixed with orange and strawberry lemonade, with water. Be sure to use the unsweetened kool-aid. We used tepid water this time, but I think it's more effective if the water is warmer. It doesn't matter how much water you mix the kool-aid with, the yarn will absorb the dye out of the water. Oh, and by the way, although we didn't discover it this time, kool-aid does stain granite...especially the berry blue flavor, lol.


We then draped the damp skein into the bowls, separating as much length as we wanted between each of the colors. I found out that you need to be sure to move the strands around in the kool-aid mixture to be sure that the color gets to the inner layers. I also had to move the skein to make the colors overlap each other...the colors didn't bleed into each other like I had anticipated they would.


Next step is to either wait until the water is clear, or until you can see that the yarn has taken the color as much as you want. Surprisingly, this only took about 3-5 minutes, and I was using cool-ish water. It varies from color to color, but it's pretty obvious and the colors stay true to what you see there.
The skein can then be wrapped in plastic wrap and the dye has to be set. I have found two ways to do this...you can steam it or microwave it. I chose to microwave it on high for about 4 minutes. They say that if you microwave, it should be in one that you don't use for food preparation, but I think that is more for the acid dyes than for kool-aid. This isn't a problem at my house, but it may be a concern for you. If you do choose to steam, be sure and line the steamer basket with newspaper so the plastic wrap doesn't melt to the metal of the steamer. With the steaming method, it should take about 30 minutes.



After setting the color, be careful because the plastic is very hot. I unwrapped my skein and let it sit out to cool on its own. When it's cool, rinse with cold water until the water runs clear. Amazingly, I never had any color rinse out of this skein. Even on the very first rinse! I was so surprised! Now, I have discovered that a bit of time in the dryer removes the fruity smell. I have put some of my kool-aid dyed yarn in a mesh bag and thrown it in there for a few minutes, but be sure your yarn is superwash before attempting this :) I took this yarn and made the hats that I talked about here. The dyeing was so fun, easy, and and really colorfast. I didn't re-skein this, but you could get it to be more striping if you re-wound it into a really long skein first, therefore dyeing longer sections at a time but still having enough room to dye more than one color.

Now, to be completely off topic, I had a request for my finished puzzle picture. Yes, June, I was going to post it, but the picture wasn't on my laptop yet. Thank you so much for reminding me! Just for you, here is the completed puzzle...a thing of beauty!

Dyeing, knitting...catching up!

I know that I haven't been much of a blogger lately, but I have been busy nonetheless! I have been working on perfecting my dyeing and knitting skills. My first project was a kool-aid dye experiment with sock yarn. Here's what I have left of my 500 yards :)

I was very pleased with how it turned out and I subsequently used it to make two hats. As you can see here with my very first fair isle, I think you are looking at strawberry, pink lemonade, lime, orange and grape LOL. I will be making a separate post about the kool aid dyeing process itself. It was really fun! The only thing to remember is that your project will smell like kool aid for awhile!















The fair isle hat is a blended version of two different hats in the book Hats On by Charlene Schurch.

My next hat with this yarn was a modified version of the free In A Flap Cap that that I found on ravelry. I added a ruffle around the edge an then put a flower on it as well. Doesn't it look so cute on Mallory?!















So then, moving right along...I have also been dyeing using Louet's Gaywool Dyes and I am enjoying the results of those as well. Here's what I have done so far. This is merino superwash, fingering weight yarn. The one on the left is kool aid, the other two are Gaywool. It's so fun! All the yarn I have used to dye so far is from Knit Picks, the bare yarns that they sell to dye. They turn out pretty well, and I would recommend them for small dyeing projects.


Now, as I mentioned before, I am wanting to get some experience with knitted items that I have not done before. So, I started a guernsey sweater for my younger brother. It is exposing me to several unknowns, the first being the cast on that I used...Channel Island cast on. It's supposed to make something like a picot edge and it did, but I am not that thrilled with it.


The details are difficult to see, I know, but it will be easier once I have it completed and he tries it on. I only have a little bit of this sleeve and then on to the second sleeve! I am using a basic guernsey pattern from Knitting in the Old Way by Priscilla A. Gibson-Roberts. So, that's what I have been up to lately...at least what is worthy of mentioning here, lol. Please forgive me for the length of time between posts (especially you knitting gals from B&N!). I hope to be a lot more consistent in the future :)

Be sure not to miss The Complete Jane Austen going on right now on PBS. They just aired Persuasion this Sunday and it was fabulous! They are showing so many great classics, you have to see them! The versions of Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park and Sense & Sensibility are all brand new adaptations. Here's the schedule for these exciting films!