Taueret

FO Jaywalkers, and some horrible dyeing

It's hard to take a picture of your own feet.  Jaywalkers by Grumperina, yarn was merino-cashmere from The Knittery.  I will knit this pattern again for sure, it's the only way to use that nasty fake fair isle sock yarn that I stashed for some reason, and the only stitch pattern I have ever been able to memorise (go on, laugh).

Last night, my hubby being away and me being free to desecrate the kitchen however I like, I decided to dye the superwash merino and nylon I had on hand to try and spin some sock yarn from.  I made up my dyepots and went to bed full of optimism.

Guess what honey, I got some dye on the benchtop, and I didn't even wipe it up til morning. And you're in Germany and can't make me ;-).  Muahaha.

So I got up and rinsed my fibre.  There have been many discussions over the l;ast couple of years on the fibre lists I read, about how best to dye black.  Apparently it's not easy.  I have found a solution though, just give your fibre to me, and ask me to dye it purple, or brown, or any darkish colour.  I get black every time.  AGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Ok.  After rinsing and mostly drying, it's not too bad (pic looks lighter than the actual colour), but NOTHING like I imagined it would be.  The talented and skilled Mandie reassured me that all I was doing wrong was using too much water in my dyepot.  Ok, that was AFTER I started this orangey -red dyepot (which came out pretty, but you know, not as pretty as it was in my imagination)

So following Mandie's instructions EXACTLY I made a pretty purple and a pretty green and painted them sparingly onto a barely immersed roving:

And the colours broke and I ended up with CLOWN SPEW:

At which point, in my best Cartman voice I declared "screw this, I'm going home" (althought I WAS home, my point was the same).  When I was a network geek, it was a fact of the trade that some people just couldn't crimp coaxial cable without ruining it.  They could try and practice and so on, but just never get it.  I think dyeing with any amount of artistry is kind of like that- I just don't got it*. (not to take anything away from the hotshot dye artists- I take my hat off to them in 47 different ways: art, science, tenacity, talent, skill.  and um, 42 others ;-).  I think I'll go back to koolaid.  You can't make things black with koolaid. Right??

*not to compare dyeing artistry to crimping a cap onto a piece of coax. I made myself cringe when I read that!

going batty

Spent Thursday dyeing several batts- great fun, some came out really well.  I think blending the ones that came out a bit 'eh' will make them quite beautiful too.

I did this post last night and somehow lost the whole thing, so sorry for terseness.

here's probably 500g of ? leicester and white alpaca that I simmered in a huge pot with about three different shades of blue dye poured on.  The very pale blue was what I threw in the next day to try and exhaust the dye pot (it's alpaca).
Thisstuff is VERY beautiful, I'm afraid the photos don't do it justice.  I see it carded (alpaca + wool) and spun to about a DK weight.  I'd like to knit something for my nephew and he has these blue eyes...

Ok, here are the other batts I dyed.  The rainbow one was meant to be brown, green, gold!  I need to get better at dyeing!

I guess I will run these back thru the drum carder (maybe) and set them aside to spin.

I have also finally had a go at needle felting and it is FUN.

Also finally tried wet felting, and made these booties from the resulting sheet of felt:

dyeing to knit

a little dyeing.  I don't think I mentioned the MOUNTAIN of plying I got thru just before my swift and ball winder arrived.

projects

I've had to take a deep breath and calm down.  I veer between days where I feel pure delight at having my choice of projects and materials, and days where I don;t know where to start and time goes a wastin'.  I hate wasting time!  Right now is the one time in my life where I have enough- if I play my cards right.  I can probably find at least a couple of hours every day to spend on fibery pursuits- as long as I have a plan.  Then I can go straight to work when someone goes to sleep or whatever.

I think I am soakered out for the moment, but perhaps having a pair OTN is not a bad idea as they are nice mindless knitting.  Let's see what I am up to and what I want to be up to:

OTN:
green heartstrings sock #2 (yes I finally finished sock #1, and I am a few rows into the lace cuff of the second.  Thrilled, I am!  These are fun to knit and I will like wearing them lots.  Not mindless for me tho, til I get to the stockinette foot).

- sari silk shawl:  I have had 500g of recycled sari silk since I bought it a few months ago, possibly for a clapotis.  It has resisted incorporation into ANY project- it's strange yarn, unbelievably beautiful up close, not so lovely from a distance.  VERY roughly spun.  I finally settled on Glampyre's City Shawl for it, as it is a SIMPLE garter stitch/open lace shawl in which the yarn can star.  It's coming out okay... while I am still not as in love with the yarn knit up as I am in the skein, at least it is the best use I have had for it so far, and it is GETTING IT OUT OF MY STASH!  Yay.  It also qualified as mindless knitting so I think I will keep it as my car project for the moment. 

That is all I actually have OTN right now.  Reid is started, but I will re-start from scratch when I get to it, because I have gained a little confidence from knitting the green socks and I think I'm ready to tackle that lacy little devil again.

I was inspired by the felted crocheted, embroidered hats in the current Spin-Off which I picked up yesterday in Borders for TWENTY DOLLARS.  Sorry, I lose my mind a little bit whenever I remember that I am on the island of 20 dollar magazines.  I feel better now.  Deep breath.  Anyway these little crocheted beanies and just lovely and I am going to make some.  The magazine is upstairs next to a lseeping baby, so if anyone doesn;t know what I mean you'll have to wait to see a pic, sorry.

I was thinking about how we Australian knitters are at a disadvantage due to seasonal things- not only is it rare to get really truly cold here (BUT our houses are a lot colder inside than the average centrally-heated American house, so that kind of evens out, I think)- but seasonal gift giving is affected by the heat we have around Xmas- you're really not going to give a wooly scarf or hat to someone when it is 40 degrees C outside.  Do you?  And it's a shame, because I think knitting as a saleable craft would be so much more viable here, if it was cold 'round Christmas time.  Those embroidered hats would be fast to make and I bet would sell like hotcakes at the markets- but theywould sell a lot better if people were thinking "gift" when they saw them.  So, on my list now are these hats.  They looked GREAT in natural colours like tan and brown, which is good because I have about 100 kg of tan and brown fleeces to spin up, and no intense urge to wear a tan jumper :-P.  Crochet is so fast too... I can;t wait to get stuck into some of these babies.

So we have
green socks
city shawl

coming soon
embroidered beanies
Reid

spinning:
the grey fleece!
and soon, some tan or brwon, worsted weight to make those hats!

I also asked my dad's wife to measure him up for socks and a jumper as I would like to knit him something... to complain about!  LOL.

dye another day...

I had the most depressing conversation I have had in a while last night.  My 13 year old's parent teacher night was on, and like a dutiful mum, I went.  It was fine, his teachers like him, the criticism was constructive.  The conversation that depressed me was with his art teacher.  I want to believe that she's older than me, but we're probably a similar age, maybe I'm even a couple of years older.  She started by saying how R's breaking his arm halfway through the term hadn't helped his marks, but that he was really talented, creative, and unusual thinker- one who questions authority.  I was nodding eagerly, perhaps the migraine I had been nursing all day made me look less pleased than I felt to hear this evaluation of my firstborn- but I was pleased.  His teacher looked up at me and said "well, art teachers value that sort of thing".  I mumbled something like "so do his parents" but I went away wondering HOW DID I END UP LOOKING LIKE A SOCCER MOM?  Don't they KNOW I'm a skateboard-punk-rocker?  Oh woe, HOW did I end up looking likie someone who would take "questions authority" home as a BAD thing?  Appearances!  Aggghhhhh!!

Over the last couple of years I have made a conscious effort to dress a little more conservatively- I've retired most of my hippie crushed velvet and patchouli, my more "flamboyant" jewellry, and taken to wearing what I guess you'd call "classic" items.  I just got tired of people making assumptions about me based on my taste in clothing... who would have thunk that the OPPOSITE assumptions would offend me even more?  Perhaps it started when I qualified as a Breastfeeding Counsellor, I made an effort to try and look "together" at least in public, simply to not come across as a "hippie" or like breastfeeding was something "alternative".  It's normal and I wanted to look that way, willing to put fashion aside for the greater good.  I don't mind being mistaken for a more mainstream kind of parent etc than I am- it's part of my subversive disguise!  I'll infiltrate and seed the idea that it's ok to feed your baby, to pick your baby up, to birth at home in private.  BUT...BUT....but!  Being mistaken for someone who wouldn't understand the "ARTISTIC TEMPERMENT"?  That really, really HURT.

I always felt that the "old lady" knitters who feel that younger knitters shouldn't assume anything about them had a great point.  AFter all, the grammas knitting today were young women in the 60's, they were some of the  feminists to whom we all owe a debt today.  Today I gained real EMPATHY- I went home and looked in the mirror and thought "Don't you judge me!".  I may LOOK like a soccer mom, and a very, VERY pregnant soccer mom at that- but inside I am AN ARTIST.  And anyone who doesn't SEE that can bite my bum.

So- I got up this morning determined to BE what I feel I AM.  I washed and dyed three lots of the corriedale fleece I bought a while back.

I did low-water immersion, with vinegar splashed in at random... using a mix of kool-aid and food colouring, and kitchen vinegar, in zip loc bags, in the microwave.  I then let it stand til it cooled and the green and pink were exhausted.  Yay!  I've never exhausted a dyepot before, I guess I alwasy rinse too soon.  The blue did not exhaust- either the blue food colouring takes longer to strike, or I didn't add enough vinegar, or...???

  I am happy with the shade I got though (mixed blue with black FC)- and I intend to card it with the swimming-pool blue wool that I koolaid dyed the other day.

Mostly I'm pleased because thie is the first time I have gotten the variegated shades that I like- uniform colour is not that fun, to me.  I can BUY yarn that looks like that.  Well tops that looks like that anyway... my spinning doesn't QUITE look like bought yarn -heh!

I think I'll spend some time carding these, as soon as I can.

Ok, I won't be beaten by this!  (Or maybe I will, but I had to have one more go.)
I couldn;t stand sending the lairy traffic-light roving to my swap-buddy.  So I had a nap and slept on it, and decided to have one more try.

This time I decided to make much more dilute dye solutions.  Crazy isn't it.  I've always wanted LOUD intense colour, and I wouldn't even mind loud and intense right now, it's just that the wrong colour (magenta) was making all the noise.  So I immersion dyed the whole roving in yellow first, and nuked it.  Then I made up about 100ml of yellow and added a few drops of mixed-up magenta, until the solution was orange.  Same with the green.  I mixed up some yellow, and added a couple drops of the green food colouring (which does a FABULOUS job of dyeing wool... too good!).

Here's a pic as it goes into the microwave:
I decided to put the glass there so that the green and the orange wouldn't run together in the middle and overdye all the yellow.  I'm not sure if this will work.  It's in the microwave right now.....

Okay, I declare swap-dye III a....SUCCESS!  I finally got the subtle colours I was imagining.  YAY.  Now whether or not this will be to the taste of my buddy, at least I went to the trouble of doing the best I could, so I feel okay about it now.  If she turns out to prefer traffic lights or greige... then we can swap back!

Here it is, all rinsed and spun dry.  I'm still not 100% happy but I have already used 300g of roving, and it's starting to get a bit silly.  I hope she likes this.  I could add a bit more green...

This morning I dyed the second lot of roving for the 'dyeing for spring' exchange in Spindlers'.  I am still disappointed with the outcome, but I am out of time.  I got some BEAUTIFUL oranges and greens in my rainbow yarn, so this time I wanted to get those into one place, with a little yellow between them.  Think of citrus colours.  Well, I did my best but I'm afraid I got traffic lights :-(.  I'm tempted to do ANOTHER one, maybe after I think about this one a bit.  I obviously could have diluted the green more (or made green by adding blue to yellow).  The magenta overpowered the yellow, so I didn't really get orange.  I guess I'm going to have to have a play with the other food dye reds that I have, trying to find one that works.  Anyway here are some pics.  Colour me disappointed.

Here's the final roving, drying.

No power in the 'verse can stop me!

This is a long story, but it has a happy ending:

I set out this morning to dye the roving for the exchange, and the yarn for Tara's rainbow jumper.  I went and got food colouring.  After dyeing with J at her place the other day I thought I could get some good colours with the food colouring.  Well, boy was I disappointed.  The red almost washed out (I used cochineal, so I will have to try the cherry pink and the pillar box red- but the cochineal was most disappointing).  Anyway, after rinsing out the roving, I almost gave up in disgust because I didn't want Tara's rainbow to be all pastel and greige.  Here's a pic of the roving, which I will overdye later, unless it's already too felted?

Ok, so next I had this mountain of undyed yarn to dye, and no confidence in food colouring to give the effect I wanted.  I decided to try the Procion MX dyes that I use on cotton, with vinegar as the mordant, and see if it was worth persisting.  So I mixed my usual 200mls each of turquoise, chrome yellow and magenta, mixing the dye powder (about 1 tbsp per 200ml) with a glug of vinegar and topping it up with water.  Then I mixed individual colours in cups and applied them with syringes:

wrapped it in glad wrap (something I will do from now on, when dyeing anything!) and nuked it:

And this was the result:
YUK.  The procion red was GREAT.  The yellow was ok (at least, there is an orange in there).  The blue was totally washed out.  I was SO disappointed.  Then I remembered that the food colour dyed roving was brightest in the blues and yellows... and I decided to try overdying this, with food blue and yellow where the procion blue and yellow hadn't worked properly.

So I got the food blue and diluted it with vinegar and applied it, and some food yellow... and back into the microwave it went.

This was the result:
As you can imagine, at this point there was jubilation!  Satisfied that I would get the kinds of colours I was used to getting, I got ready to dye each skein using the food blue and yellow with the procion magenta.

At first I put on way too much dye, which only mattered because I used more than I needed to.  I am used to cotton needing to be really saturated to not leave any white, and wool kind of sheds the dye, it's not as thirsty as cotton (at all), yet you don't need as much dye because it doesn't get soaked up by the first fibre it touches.  So with each skein I used less dye and got a better feel for the blending or not that I was trying to get. 

Finally, I ended up with this:

I am very, very happy.  I want to experiment a bit more, especially with the procion black- it would be good if it works as well as the red.  The food dyes worked GREAT in the blue/yellow shades, and at 1 dollar a pop I am happy to use them.  I must also have an experiment with the other reds, maybe cochineal was just the worst one to choose.  I guess the dyes made for wool will work even better than this, but I am very happy to have managed to achieve what I wanted this time without having to spend squillions on new dyes (not that I mind buying them, but sometimes it's nice to use what you have on hand!).

Here's the pattern I think I'll knit: it's just very simple and will show off the groovy yarn:

It's from http://www.berroco.com/184/184_brenda.html

Thursday I went to J's place for some spinning/fibre lessons.  We played with blending differently dyed fibres on the hand carders- now that hadn't occurred to me!  I also had a look at her copy of "color in spinning" (or something like that) which I will have to get my hands on.  There are so many ways to do this, to get different effects!  I have been thinking about somehow reprocessing the fabric in mum's old silk blouses so that I can spin it (into something, probably not by itself).  I posted a question about this on several of the spinning lists I have subbed to and got a variety of answers, none that definitive so I will have fun experimenting but I am encouraged that it's not impossible.

J and I also had a play with dyeing some roving with food colouring!  We just splotched red yellow and blue on, cooked it in the microwave.  Soaked the roving first in vinegary water.  Came out nice.  It was pretty easy and very low fuss compared to dyeing cotton or working with the reactive dyes.  I am going to haveto try the procion dyes on my wool anyway just to see what happens, because I have a good sized stockpile of those dyes.  Anyway we came out with a pretty piece of rainbowey roving with very little effort, so I am feeling psyched now to dye the 110g of roving that I need to do for the 'dyeing for spring' exchange that I jumped impulsively into on the spindlers list!  I am thinking about red and purple, with a little orange.  So I might try dyeing the whole thing red (immersion) the striping on blue and yellow, with red spaces in between.  If that works that should be nice to exchange.

What else?  Oh, I bougyht some knitting needles on ebay (ok, 40 pairs), as well as a bunch of DPN that will come from China as soon as I pay for them.  THere are a million needles in that set but it was as cheap as buying two pairs here, so I figured I'd go for it.

Here are the normal needles (stole the pic from ebay)

and here are the DPNs:

I'm just waiting for the 'knitting socks' book I ordered at the library to come (oh and to have some yarn to knit!).

In other news, I also bought a Babe drop spindle and some little bags of sample fibres that come with it- I have been really craving to spin on a drop spindle, even to the point of dreaming about it.  It's crazy but there you go.  Here it is:

Anyway I have to stop buying new toys now and get to work spinning the wool I have!   I have been working away spinning the rest of that icky unwashed stuff I started to learn on.  I am committed to making something out of it and at the end of this I will have enough to do so.  I think a lil cardi or something for Tara, or even a a baby blanket for the new one would be good.  But i gotta finish spinning and plying it first.  Oh- I plied two bobbins full and skeined it today and it is pretty balanced.  One twist in the skein, only.  I am pretty happy with that because plying is still giving me headaches.

Well what a busy day!  Emailing with a lady in the US about dyeing cotton fabric has momentarily distracted me from my new obsession with spinning.  A friend had a baby a few weeks ago and I haven;t given them a gift yet, so I decided to drag some baby clothes of of my to-be-dyed stash and tie dye them for a gift.  I rang my friend Jenny (I have to differentiate her from J my partner and J my spinning teacher!) and she came over to play dyeing.

Here's a pic of the baby clothes and a blanket I dyed:

Anyway then we did a rainbow for Jenny, who has never dyed before. I only use cyan, yellow and magenta dyes to get all these colours.  I think they are so much more brilliant than the colours you get from the red/yellow/blue primaries.  Here's our work in progress:

And while I forgot to photograph Jenny's resulting fat eighths, they came out similarly to when I dyed this rainbow last year here's that fabric made into a quilt top that I may finish one day.

And here's a pic of my beautiful assistant, in her top that I dyed for her today.  I am going to try and find some pics of the dyeing I have done in the past and upload the pics to a photo album on here.  So have a look and see if there is a dyeing album, if you're interested.