Which-Crafts?

So I snagged the bosses camera (an EOS!!! - now I am totally spoiled) and took some pics of my recent playing with hand-dyeing. I was a bit in a rush so haven’t edited the pictures much, but the colors are pretty accurate as is. For all of these there are more pics on the tab labeled Hand Dyeing at the top of the page.

[singlepic=41,320,240,left] The first pic here is of one of the 2 skeins of Knit Picks Bare sock weight merino/tencel yarn I dyed this way. It is incredibly squishy and feels great. At the risk of sounding conceited, I am very pleased and a bit surprised at how the colors turned out. Right now I am not hand-painting the yarns, but using my own version of kettle-dyeing. The results are turning out very cool, and not at all regular and stripey which is exactly what I want. I have 1 skein from the earliest dye batches (my test skein) that I am currently knitting into mittens. It ends up knitting up with a sort of watery heathery affect. I hope to get these in front of the camera soon.

The next two pictures are of over-dyed skeins. This one was the last one I dyed from the holiday batch and really - I think [singlepic=44,320,240,right] my inspiration had sort of temporarily burned out. There were two skeins of a merino-silk blend that ended up sort of this sad sickly pink with dullish purple splotches. So I decided that seeing as they were already sort of miserable, I would use them as my test skeins for trying out the warping board. I reskeined them in these big long skeins and then over dyed them. I do have to admit that once I reskeined them and then soaked them to prep them for dyeing, they looked very pretty - all sorts of multilayerd grapey colors that just didn’t show up when dry. So they got over dyed, and I tried very very hard for a nice multilayered color spread - but mostly ended up with 2 colors. I am not sure I am able to create the same color subtlety over-dyeing that I can when I start bare.

[singlepic=40,320,240,left] This yarn was a fabulous freebie give-away yarn and has a whole long story behind it. But mostly for our purposes here, the important part was that it was ugly. Inho REALLY ugly. Sort of a dull, pastel, but still olive and not sage green. It is 100% Alpaca and wonderfully soft. And I didn’t want to let it go to waste, so I took it and knew that someday I would over-dye it. I was a little paranoid dyeing it, because a lot of what i dye is Superwash and I don’t have to be too careful about it felting. I KNOW this yarn felts and so I had to be v.v. careful to prevent ending up with a beautifully dyed lump of useless fiber. Once again I didn’t quite get the color depth that I wanted. But it is still about 500% better than it was when it started, and now I am trying to dream up what I can do with 1lb of DK weight 100% Dark green alpaca.

First Craft day of the new year is right around the corner. I realized late last night that even though Craft day is next saturday, I hadn’t actually told anyone.

Sorry for the late reminder!

Saturday Febrary 23 - 1 pm

Alyse & Evan’s House (email me or comment if you need directions or more info)

Feel free to bring any hand-craft project that doesn’t need a whole room to do. Most seating is “couch-like”, but if you need a table, or a more straight backed chair just let me know ahead of time and we’ll set one up. Please also bring a small “potluck” item for everyone to snack on. I will of course be providing “something” and drinks.

For those who still remain at dinner time, we generally order in dinner later in the evening.

PLEASE RSVP!!!

Future Craft Days:
You can find the public calendar of events here.

The dates for this years events will be:

March 16th Hypertufa
March 29 - Craft Day
April 26 - Graham Leather’s Concert
May 24 - Craft Day
June 28 - Craft Day
July 26 - Concert (I think)
August 30 - Craft Day
September 6 - Yarn dyeing day
Sept 20 - Craft Day
October 25 - Music

You can find out more about events at our house at my website. You can also find out more about Craft-Days.

If you want to get these announcements in your email you can go to here to sign up.

this is one of those times i REALLY wish I had a camera - so i could show you some of the awesomeness that I created this weekend.

Over the holidays I dyed some yarn for gifts, and got a really good response. This has been the first weekend since then that I really had time to play again.

A few weeks ago, I was talking about some of my future dyeing plans to a friend of mine. I was waxing rhapsodic about all the ways I could experiment once I made myself a warping board type thing to wind yarn on.

“You know i have a warping board in the basement? Right?”

“Huh?” (I am very cogent when surprised )

“Ya know, from when I used to weave. Do you want it?”

“!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

I spent some time this week reading up on warping boards (there isn’t a lot of info out there) and then went to town. Up until now skeining yarn has been a bit of a pain. Winding on to my umbrella swift hasn’t been thrilling me - it is ungainly and my inner mechanical engineer (who is a 2nd grader) can tell that it is wildly inefficient. The warping board, while having its own amount of inefficiencies, is WAY better and much easier to use. As far as I am concerned it is a total win.

I had 2 skeins of KnitPicks Bare merino/silk fingering yarn that I had dyed at the end of my holiday dyeing and had ended up a drab pink and dull purple. They got reskeined and over dyed. They are now still pink and purple, but now its more of a deeper purple with some pink glowing out of it. It still isn’t my favorite, but my roommate, is trying to steal it while my back is turned.

I had 2 skeins of KnitPicks merino/tencel sock yarn - they are now a fiery blend of light golden yellows, deep oranges, and burnt chestnut.

7 skeins of puke light olive Plymouth Baby Alpaca DK got completely re-skeined and over dyed. They are now drip drying in the bathroom, I am hoping that they are a a dark green/teal with light green overtones when dry. This was my first attempt to make 2 separate pots of yarn turn out the same, when they are dry I’ll be able to judge better - but I think I did a pretty good job.

Which is exactly what I have done for a while. I am not quite sure how much back on earth I am yet - but I thought I would mention that I am at least in orbit these days.

One of the things that has kept me away from posting is a lack of camera. I purchased a brand new one last fall, and after taking a number of great pictures of projects that I hadn’t had time to munge and post - I lost the camera. GRRRRR I am currently brainstorming ideas for posting knitting and spinning content without any actual pictures of what I am doing. I do plan on getting back here and posting more often about stuff.

I have about 8000 knitting projects on the needles, many of them seemingly close to being done. I hope by the time I get there I’ll have a way to show them off.

At this point I am not sure if anyone is even reading this anymore - But seeing as I don’t have any content of my own for today, I thought I would show off someone else’s creativity. I don’t know if you readers have ever seen what is called a “FanVid”, this is an excellent example of one.

Firefly and Serenity: Defying Gravity