In Search of Stars and Speckles

Oddly enough, teaching once again has massively sabotaged my creative endeavors. Minutes in the evening are mine, but I have been working on setting a BOUNDARY--at 10pm I will no longer work on school things unless it is an emergency situation. I started to tell a co-worker yesterday that I felt that was reasonable, realized I was saying working from 7am to 10pm was reasonable (it's crazy town actually!), but for my life it is a new little line of reason, so we're going with that!

I have been loving Hunter Hammerson's new star pattern, Scintillation, and have been blissfully off in little star land since the pattern came out right before term started. The sad thing is that I have a whole box of odds and ends I'd love to be 'starring' right now, but alas, they are in Texas. So, I'm making do with the few bits of fingering I have left. Interestingly enough, they are my bits for HP house stockings, so naturally I ended up deciding to do two-color house stars too! In case you haven't been following my Instagram, here are most of my stars-

The other creative thing I did since I was doing Kool-aid dying with my handwork girls anyway, was to play around with making some speckled yarn using Kool-aid. I found ChemKnits very helpful tutorial, and got started. I wanted to do a warm and a cool colored yarn, so first I did my green-blue-purple,

then the red-orange-yellow. I found the 'jelly rolls' ridiculously charming, and walked them over the Admin for a nuking.

While not what I was anticipating, I'm pretty happy with the results!

I realized that I had put down too much dye, so I tried again and got a much more subdued skein.

Much more the speckled look I was going for, but not as vivid as I was hoping. This is worth further investigation when I'm near some undyed yarn again. I think if I let the yarn dry out more after soaking it, the speckles won't spread as much. Also, I've been wondering about splatter painting it instead of using a fork. Next year!

Parting shot: My spare room once again became a yarn drying station!