…but a little bit to start.

The SOS’08 Cafepress store is running strong! Thanks to all that have made a purchase so far. I’ve recently added several products including Plus Size T-shirts, Notecards and Jr. Raglan T-shirts and a Tank. Go check it out if you haven’t already!

There was a small typo in the pattern that Wendy wrote for us. She was kind enough to send me a corrected file which I have uploaded to replace the old one. If you think you must have the corrected copy, you can find it at the same exact link that you were e-mail with last weekend.

When I haven’t been dealing with SOS stuff I’ve been hitting the dyepots pretty hard lately.

There’s about two pounds of fiber there. It’s mostly superwash merino with some Romney and some Wensleydale. Most of that was dyed last Friday on my day off, but I have figured out how to work dyeing into my week when I’m working too, which is a good thing indeed.

Along with the dyeing there’s been a fair amount of spinning too. I finished a second bobbin of Mocha the other night:

And a first bobbin of more Cloverleaf BFL whose colorway I can’t seem to remember:

I’m very much looking forward to doing more spinning amongst fiber folk at the Hudson River Knit and Spin (.pdf) this weekend. Who else is going to be there? Me and the Ladybug will be there spinning some freshly dyed fiber if anything dries by then.

And finally, I must admit that I am addicted to Plurk. Want to join me? I can send you an invite if you like. It’s a ton of fun. I can finally blog all the crazy little things in life without boring the audience here that might not be interested.

You know. Things like seeing a guy with bewbs tatooed to his shoulder yesterday. Yeah. Seriously.

There are apparently several random things on my mind, so how about a Random Wednesday post?

Random thing #1 – The moon must be retrograde in the customer service house or something. Between non-delivered train tickets, hotel reservations gone astray and reimbursements from large educational institutions that never showed, it’s a wonder I have any money or sanity left lately. Is it just me?

Random thing #2 – I really hate knitting the sleeves of the Boatneck bluebell.

They are done flat instead of in the round and it is driving me crazy. I’m also not ever on the right row it seems although they are coming out just like the picture. Go figure. If I wasn’t so far into the first sleeve I would rip it out and do it in the round. I don’t get why the designer chose to do things this way. The only thing I can think of is that the bell sleeve needs the support of a seam. Thoughts?

Random thing #3 – HWJF has the flu. Rather badly in fact. While being concerned for his well being I am also somewhat afraid for my own. I certainly don’t need to be coming down with it as I drive to Rhode Island next week. So far so good. I’m going heavy on the vitamin C and trying to get some good rest. Keep your fingers crossed for us both, will ya?

Random thing #4 – Since HWJF was coming down with this on Sunday we didn’t go out so I decided to hit the dye pot. I got my dye kitchen set up.

And went to work. I dyed some superwash merino that I plan on spinning and knitting into a sweater for my best friend’s first kid who should be arriving in early May. They just found out it’s a girl, so I wanted to do something with pinks and purples. Wouldn’t you know, I screwed up the first batch.

The one time I *don’t* want blue, what do I grab?

Blue!

Luckily I had more fiber so I fixed the mistake on the second batch. I just hope it’s enough fiber to make the sweater. Here’s how it came out:

Clicky to biggie as always.

I drafted up a little bit of it and I think it’s going to work out pretty well. Here’s how the “mistake” came out:

Simba decided the fiber couldn’t hog the spotlight alone. I actually really like how this came out, just wasn’t what I wanted for this particular project.

Random thing #5 – I started the hat the other night. It has a bit of a braid that was a serious PITA. No pics just yet.

I think that’s enough for today. Hope you are warm and doing fun fibery things wherever you are!

Thank you all for the kind comments on Cobblestone! HWJF reads the comments and I’m sure I may just have to redo that bindoff again after all those kind words.

In other news, I’ve had some dyeing adventures that I haven’t had a chance to share lately. I’ve really been enjoying working with fiber and dye, especially on days where I’m home and on my own and needing a creative outlet. I haven’t done much playing since I moved to NJ, so dyeing is filling a creative urge for me these days.

I’ve done some more work with the kettle pot dyeing.

That’s about 4 oz. of Cheviot. I used the blue and red from the bottle and mixed up the green. It should make for interesting color changes in the finished yarn. Another 4 oz. of Cheviot (which I’ve never spun before come to think of it) ended up being this:

An attempt at achieving Neapolitan colors. The brown was straight from the bottle and I mixed the pink. If the drafting doesn’t totally wash out the colors, this could end up being pretty cool.

A while back I bought some superwash merino and got a little extra thrown in on my order because the fiber was wrinkled and looked like it might have gotten stuck in the carder or something. I figured that couple of ounces would make for a good experiment in painting. I used a very standard foam craft paintbrush and dipped it into the dye, then pressed it into the fiber. For inspiration in color combinations, I went over to flickr and looked for pictures of sunsets. Some of the colors mother nature provides are just amazing and I don’t think I could pick a better artist to emulate. The finished rovings turned out like this:

In a couple of places I made some “mistakes”, but with the paintbrush method it was pretty easy to just go over them with another color and try and “correct” them. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not so much.

Want to see how it spun up?

How about a close up?

One more? Ok.

I took each roving and split it in half along the length. I spun up one half and then spun the other half in the opposite direction and plied the two together. There’s about 200 yards there and I have absolutely no idea what the heck to do with it other than stare at it and pet it occasionally. Sometimes, the yarn is the FO I think. I’ve just been having too much fun playing with color to care if it gets knit. Besides, how often do you get to spin the sunset?

P.S. Congratulations to Beth who won a secret contest! She left my 3,000th comment on this here blog!

This summer I took a dye class. I had a ton of fun painting skeins of yarn and even working with some roving which I even managed to spin up. But if you read that post about the day, at the end I had decided that it wasn’t possible to incorporate dyeing into my current living situation.

See how long that lasted?!

After my success at the skien competition, I decided to buy myself a little present. Enter Pro Chem and the fact that they had kits to go along with the book Color in Spinning by Deb Menz which I had purchased during the Interweave hurt book sale. It also didn’t hurt that I had acquired some pots and other supplies on a past visit home (is there *anything* a Mom doesn’t have when her kid wants it?!). The stage was set and I was ready to get some color into my life.

I have to say, I was pretty nervous when first mixing up my “stock solutions”. After all the warnings about how dangerous this stuff could be, I knew it wasn’t the time to be timid, but it was definitely intimidating. I ended up doing it outside on our balcony. That day turned out to be raining but fairly still and I think it actually made for good “mixing weather”. I measured out my dye powder into each of the bottles you see pictured above, added a bit of very hot water to get it all to dissolve and added cooler water to finish off each bottle. I did all this while wearing a dust mask and gloves and while it wasn’t easy, I was able to stay pretty mess free. The rain helped me mop up a couple of little spills and I was set to start dyeing! I’m most interested in dyeing roving for spinning these days, so that’s what I used.

I did a little bit of two different methods, Cold and Hot pour. Cold pour is when you pour and/or paint your colors onto fiber that is then steamed to set the dye. Hot pour is when the fiber is already hot and the dye is poured in and allowed to exhaust (or completely soak into the fiber) before the next color is poured on. I couldn’t take many pictures while I was doing the actual work (hands in gloves and liquid near the camera being a not good idea and all), but for the cold pour I did the usual covering of the workspace with paper (bags in my case), putting down a layer of plastic wrap, and then pouring on the colors. When I finished I wrapped it all up in the plastic wrap and threw it in the steamer (pictured above) for about 30 min. When each package was cool, I rinsed it well and hung the rovings to dry. The two packages I did came out like this:

The top I’m calling “Cotton Candy” and the bottom is just “Purpley” to me. I left a lot of white areas because I wanted to see what effect it had when the fibers were drafted for spinning. I already spun up the “Cotton Candy” into this 150 yard skein:

I really like the way it came out! I have yet to spin any of the other stuff I’m going to show you through this post, but I’m anxious to do so (after I finish up the spinning for another project anyway).

The other stuff I did all using the Hot pour method. All of the rovings were soaked in a solution of vinegar (to get the proper acidic environment for the dye to take or “strike”) and water. They were slowly heated on the stove until steaming but not boiling. Each color was added one at a time. When the dye exhausted or the water around the area where the dye was poured was clear again, I poured the next color. You can see the application of the first color in each of the first two pots in this picture:

It took a lot of time for each color to exhaust and I did a bit of poking around with a bamboo skewer in each pot, so each roving felted just a little. It wasn’t so bad that it wasn’t spinnable though. During the day I did the dyeing, I did three more batches and put them in the fridge in between to get them to cool faster (patient, I’m not!). All of the dyeing I did on this first day involved using the colors pretty much as they were, straight from the stock solutions, without mixing two more more colors together. Here are the results:

I call this a “Study in Red” because I used the three different reds I had available and diluted one to get pink.

Similarly, this is a “Study in Blue and Purple” because I used all of the different shades of the blues I had available to me and threw in a little purple for good measure. It wouldn’t be me without blue, right?!

These next two were kind of interesting. It was late in the day and I wanted to overdye some “Black” BFL (incidentally, all the fibers shown to this point are BFL). From what I’ve been able to gather on the ‘net, this brown color for this breed is called black. Don’t ask me why. I choose bright colors since I knew the natural color of the roving would tone them down. I was also a bit tired and impatient at this point and didn’t really let the colors exhaust completely. You can see that there is some interesting variation in the colors in this one. I also put the original fiber color in the bottom of the picture for reference.

This one was done the same way. It’s a mixture of red and purple. I may take these last two rovings and draft them together with the undyed roving when I spin them up. Might make for an interesting effect that way.

Finally, I did some merino that I had bought at Morehouse Farm last year.

This was the only time I mixed colors in advance, to get the green. Once again, I was a bit impatient and my green, yellow and blue got mixed together a bit more than originally planned, but it worked out pretty well.

Here’s a shot of it all drying. I just love how this all looks together!

What you see here basically took me an entire day to do. I’m inexperienced for sure, and you can bet I was tired, but it was so much fun! And I feel like I have a whole new level of artistic control in what I can do with fiber. I definitely have a lot more to learn, but I feel like this is the most truely creative thing I’ve done in a long time. The session where I did all this was actually a couple of weeks ago. Since I had the day off Tuesday and HWJF had to work most of the day, I did another session and I think I got much more interesting results and did a little bit more experimenting. I will share that with you just as soon as things are dry and I can get some pictures.

In the meantime, if you want to try dyeing but don’t want to go the full blown chemical route, definitely look around online for articles on dyeing fiber with Kool-aid and Wilton Cake dyes. It’s a ton of fun!

Thanks so much to everyone who left a comment about my incarnation of the Monkey socks last Friday! I decided to soldier on and they ended up growing on me. I’ve nearly finished the first sock in fact! I had a really lovely weekend that I just can’t do justice to in the little time that I have to write this and I still haven’t finished telling you what I did on my vacation! So here’s a post all about the dye day I did on my last day of freedom vacation (two weeks ago already)!

Before I had to go back to work after my vacation, I savored my last few hours of freedom by taking a dye class with Suzie from Woolbearers! I could think of no better way to end my vacation then by learning something new related to my love of the fiber arts. As you’ve read here before, I’ve done a little dabbling with Kool-aid and Wilton’s Cake dyes, but I haven’t done anything with the “real” stuff as yet. That was something I wanted to learn from an experienced professional, and that’s exactly what I did!

Suzie mixed up dyes in the primary colors while explaining about dye safety to me and the two other women who were working with the chemical dyes during the class. Since we were outside, no one needed to wear a mask while working with the dye powder, but that would not have been the case indoors. She also explained how the dye powder should be added to hot water, and not the other way around, for the best mixing. It seemed fairly simple to do. She mixed 1% solutions of the colors and then explained how to work the dye into the yarn on our plastic wrap covered trays. The yarn had been soaked in a mixture of water and white vinegar for several hours before we arrived. After the explanations, it was time to go to work!

Suzie had several extra bottles available to us so we were able to use primary colors and then mix up our own combinations. It was almost like being a mad scientist, mixing a little of this and a little of that just to see what we would come up with along the way. It really was interesting to see what types of changes we could make by mixing just small amounts of the different colors and how they changed when they met the yarn.

When we finished each skein, we wrapped it up in the plastic wrap and put it into a metal tray which went into a boiling bath of water to steam for about 30 min.

After they cooled down, we unwrapped them, rinsed them, and hung them on the fence to dry. Just look at the amazing colors!

While three of us were working with chemical dyes, there were another three ladies there working with natural dyes. They were much more scientific, taking notes and being very specific about how they did things because they wanted to be able to reproduce their results with a coop they were working with in Africa. Just look at the amazing range of colors they got.

So, yet another gateway drug has entered my life! It was a ton of fun and I even have more color combinations and experiments floating around in my head already, but I’m still not sure this is something I can see doing in my apartment kitchen. There may be other opportunities to go do some dyeing at Suzie’s house, and if there are, I’ll certainly be taking advantage of them. For now, I think I have more reading and investigating to do before I go full steam ahead and buy some dyes for myself. I’m sure you’ll hear about it here first if I do!

First, I must thank you all for the overwhelming response to my completed Kiri! I think that was a comment record for this here lil’ ole blogger and it is very much appreciated. You all really made my week.

While I was finishing up on Kiri, my brain just kept screaming one thing at me – must have COLOR! I was marking favorite pictures in Flickr and they all had colorwork in them. I was looking through patterns and could think about nothing but fair isle knitting. Colorwork was obviously going to be my next project. But before I got there I decided to express my need for color with a little experiment.

Last Sunday morning I decided to have a little fun with some Wilton’s cake dyes and some wool roving I got at the Green Mountain Spinnary this past January. The more I looked at this roving, the more I didn’t think it was probably of the highest quality, so I figured it would be good to experiment with. I decided to use the hot pour method with it, but I would do half in a bowl in the microwave and half on the stove.

I gathered my supplies.

While the wool soaked,

I mixed my dyes.

When everything was ready I poured red and blue dye in the bowl to go in the microwave.

While that was being alternately heated for 2 min. and let to stand for 2 min., I poured my dyes in the pot that had been heating up on the stove.

Isn’t that weird? When I poured the purple in it started to separate. (I remember something about convection in a science class way back when and how molecules will bop around when hot. I guess that’s what was happening to some point.)

I used the rest of the red and the blue too. It took about an hour on the stove for this batch and several sessions through the microwave for the other with some additional vinegar, but the dye finally exhausted and I let it all cool down before rinsing in the sink and hanging to dry. The result?

That’s the one that was in the microwave.

That’s the one that was on the stove.

I really like how the second one worked out. I wasn’t entirely sure I had enough dye in the pot to get all the way to the bottom and I also thought I may have had too much water in there initially, but I guess it was a happy accident. I really can’t wait for my class where I get to learn how to do all this with *real* dyes.

So how will this all spin up? Well, I tried spinning the first and just couldn’t stand it. I guess I’ve been spoiled by working with some really nice fiber lately. But I think this was a good experiment for me and I may bring this stuff and a CD drop spindle to bassoon camp with me just in case anyone who sees me with my wheel wants to give spinning a try themselves. I won’t feel sorry if they mess this up at all!

Next time, more color in my life!

Since some of you asked rather loudly for the conclusion of my dyeing adventures, here is the final installment. Enjoy!

I took my Kool-aid madness to the next level by giving handpainting a try. But first I have to tell you about the yarn that I used.

This is a new skien of handspun that I actually completed last Saturday. The roving came from a vendor at the CT Sheep and Wool festival this year, whose name I cannot remember for the life of me. All I can tell you about this fiber was that it came in a 4 oz. ball of roving and that it is wool. I originally bought it to use on the drop spinndle and never got around to it, so I figured it would be good for practicing with the new wheel.

Well, I was semi-right. It was good practice. Good practice with *awful* roving. I really wish I knew what this was, because I would never buy it again. First, it smelled funky while being spun. It certainly never was stored improperly and it didn’t smell musty, but it had a distincly odd odor. Not a pleasant one either. The other big problem? It felt like I was trying to draft nylon when I worked with it. It had the weirdest stretch and took a lot of muscle to get it to work. It spun up fairly thick because I was just too hard to draft. Has anyone had this kind of experience with a roving before? Obviously it was undyed so it couldn’t have been that, but maybe it was just processed badly? I really would be interested in hearing from anyone with thoughts on this because I would really like to steer clear of something like this in the future.

Since it was just “practice yarn” I decided to try navajo plying again, this time with the lower wheel ratio (which I now know how to do thanks to Risa!). The ratio changed helped a bit, but as you may be able to tell in the pic above, the spots where the loops change didn’t work out too well. I’m going to blame that on the yuckyness of this yarn and not on myself since my first attempt wasn’t so bad. Incidentally, after plying this and having a lot of frustration with stopping and starting the wheel, I rubbed a little paraffin on the scotch tension cord and it starts and stops like a dream now. Go figure.

So I figured this skein would be big enough for handpainting and I didn’t really care what happened to it! I assembled the tools and colors I needed:

Plastic bags to cover the counter, three different flavors of Kool-aid, and a Turkey baster. Despite what HWJF says, I really did buy the Turkey baster for the upcoming holiday cooking and not for this purpose!

The process was fairly simple. I picked up color in the baster, squirted it where I wanted it to go, then pushed the yarn into the color to make sure that it went all the way through all the plies. I started with the darkest color on the end, the blue in the middle and the green at the end. When I felt like everything was saturated enough, I picked up the skein and put it in a microwave safe dish.

That’s where I ran into a bit of trouble. I couldn’t fit the whole length of yarn in the microwave dish without bending it and then the biggest dish I had wouldn’t fit in the microwave! The transfering to different dishes made some of the colors run so my nice separate areas of color got blended a little more than I really wanted. The dark red being the biggest offender. Considering this was all one big experiment, I really didn’t worry about it too much.

After a nuked the yarn for 2 min. it was plenty hot, so I let it cool. When all of the yarns that you saw yesterday and this one were cool enough to handle, I rinsed them out, gave them each a bit of a wash in some Eucalan and hung them up to dry.

Ready for the final results? Here are the three solid colored skeins:

I didn’t stir the pink much so there are varying degrees of color in the skein. The black cherry came out really well on the gray Lincoln! And the grape penetrated the two ply skein quite well.

And here is the final result with the handpainting:

Not terrible for a first try. The red is overpowering and I (of course) would have liked more blue, but I’m fairly pleased with the results. The colors are fairly accurate on my monitor (they lack a little brightness), despite the lack of sunlight when the pics were taken.

I had so much fun with this and I can’t help but think about trying some “real” dyes now. I’ve even picked up the “Twisted Sister Sock Workbook” by Lynne Vogel in the last couple of days and I think the chapter on dyeing is fascinating. But I have one major question that perhaps some of you out there might be able to answer: How do you do this in a small apartment kitchen with limited equipment? Everything in the book talks about space and equipment that I just don’t have. Is there a way to do dyeing on a small scale? Or do I just have to win the lottery and buy a huge house asap? Any feedback on this whole dyeing thing would be much appreciated!

I’m probably the last person in blogland to try Kool-aid dyeing, but I finally did it!

I thought I’d take some odds and ends of handspun this weekend and see what all this Kool-aid fuss was about. After reading this article on Knitty I assembled what I needed:

From left to right the yarn is: Small skein of two ply wool from roving that came with my wheel, a skein of singles from the same wool, two small skeins I decided not to use, one skein of Lincoln that I spun on the drop spindle and navajo plied on the wheel which I talked about in this post.

I decided to use Black cherry for the Lincoln, Grape for the plied yarn and pink for the singles. Here they are in thier respective dyebaths:

What you can’t tell in these photos is that each bowl is significantly smaller than the last with the pink being the smallest. I decided to use the microwave method described in the article linked above. I started out with the Lincoln in the black cherry and after several two min. cycles I wasn’t seeing a lot of change in the color of the dyebath. I decided to set that one aside for a bit and then started the same process with the plied yarn and the grape. After about 6 min. of microwaving, look what happened:

Sorry for the blurry pic, but you can see a significant change in the color of the water! That gave me hope and also taught me something. The smaller amount of water obviously got hotter than the larger one and the yarn behaved better. Obviously the first batch wasn’t hot enough because after one more cycle I ended up with this:

Now that my friends is an exhausted dyebath! I put the black cherry back in for several more cycles and it eventually behaved itself too. I also ran the pink through and noticed that the singles took up the dye *much* faster, but that may also have been due to the significantly smaller quanity of water.

With all that good experience, I decided to dive into handpainting. But you’ll have to wait until next time for that story!