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!

Snippets

Last week no joke just about killed me. My kids were horrid, I was exhausted, and then it was my longest weekend on. Too little knitting was fit in around all the junk, so here are a few snapshots of what I was doing when I wasn't wanting to light myself (or my students) on fire.

Many mistakes were made trying to dye this cotton yarn; too much dye was used, I tried to save it with a citric acid soak and heat in the slow cooker, but I sort of accidentally burned it. Yup, I now have burned, almost colorless yarn. I now know how NOT to dye cotton.

I started my second brioche baby hat to use up the other oddments Berroco Comfort Sock; simple and happy!

I made pom-poms to adorn the top of both hats! A) I LOVE Clover pom-pom makers. B), more yarn in a pom-pom is better.

I got almost to the end of the first ball of yarn in my morning bible reading hat project,

and I picked my Coraline socks back up and found that stripes make an excellent antidote to puerile stupidity. There is a time and a place for neon green yarn!

Here'e hoping this week is better. At the very least, there is a weekend off on the other side!

If at first you don’t succeed, dye, dye again

Sorry, couldn’t pass up the pun! I have been going through my stash mentally and physically over the last few days, and starting to make decisions about what I’m okay leaving behind (as little good stuff as possible), and how I might use up some things. I had a skein of yarn I had dyed with sunflowers a few years ago, and wasn’t wild about the results. It was a weird yellow color, and I wasn’t very inclined to actually use it.

Then, this weekend, the dying bug hit. First of all, I made up some dye, froze it into ice cubes, and put it out in the sun with some cotton yarn I had lying around. The randomness of this method appealed to me, and if it hadn’t rained this afternoon I think it would have worked better. I ended up cooking it in my crockpot all day Monday to set the dye; I’m very interested to see how that works when I go rinse it…

Then, as I was sorting through my dye tablets, I thought about overdying that weird yellow, and figured that purple might work well. So, 4 purple tables, a blue, and a red later, I threw it in the pot and got this lovely result:

I LOVE it when a gamble pays off like that! I want to play around with a self-stripping and some more tie dye, but I think that will have to wait till later. Dying takes a lot of time and space!

On the knitting front I have finished not one, but TWO hats! First, the Sausalito. I didn’t read the decrease directions carefully, thought I could live with it, tried it on, and then realized that I was going to have to FROG back and do it right. I’m pleased with the results; it just needs a bath now.

The second hat I finished was the super basic brioche baby hat. I also managed to mess up the decreases on that the first time through, so out they came and I tried again with better success. Still not sure how I managed to follow the simple directions so badly… I think I’m going to top this with a pom-pom to use up the last little bit of the yarn. Not sure how it will look, but I don’t have to actually put it on, right?

I finished the ribbing on my Sockhead hat over the course of my morning bible readings last week--yay! The stitch marker shows my total progress. Little bits of time add up!

Lastly, I've been having fun with a new level of madness--non-mirrored double knitting. I'm slowly working on a cotton potholder that has the character for tiger, my zodiac sign. It took a little getting my head around, but now I'm enjoying it so much I'm considering how to have two totally different pictures charted for double knitting!

Parting shot: I tried string art! I might re-string this floss as it is a gift and looks more leaf than feather like, but I'm loving the results!

In which I make pretty things!

It has been a long time since I puttered about with a dye pot, but since it’s half-term this Monday and Tuesday, I figured I could splurge and take one afternoon and evening completely off from marking. I had the remnants of a dried out food coloring paste from the kitchen that I wanted to play with, so I soaked some yarn and a bit of alpaca roving in water and vinegar while I mixed up the food coloring with some more water and vinegar.

I soaked one skein of yarn properly for over an hour, and the other one I didn’t soak as long as I wanted it to take up the dye unevenly. The less soaked yarn went straight into the pot to kettle dye, and the more soaked yarn I wound around a stick of bamboo which I put over the top of the pot. I wanted to try my hand at a gradient dye job, so about every five minutes I would go in and turn the stick to let a little more yarn into the dye bath.

The alpaca roving I had was stuffed in an old nylon, also thoroughly soaked, and I just let that cook away in the hot dye. Overall, I am quite pleased with the results! Too bad that was the last of that food coloring… I tried to make sure to heat it for long enough for the dye to set properly, and when I rinsed the yarn very little washed out.

Now I have the yarn I want for the project that I have been desperately wanting to cast on…

And cast on I feel I can since I finished two things this week!

On Halloween night Beth and I really pulled out all the party stops…or something like it! I was a pirate for the evening,

and we made lattes, ate Nibbs, and watched Ghostbusters while knitting. Do we know how to party or what? Neither of us had seen that particular part of pop culture before…can’t say that it was life changing, but for what it was, it was fun!

In knitting news I finally finished the everlasting mittens! I had enough green to do the thumbs in the checkered pattern, so I ripped out the first one and fixed it. Not bad; I’d do that pattern again, but not for awhile…

I also finished a little hat with cat ears for a friend’s new baby—adorbs! I might have to make a few more of these… I opted out of embroidering the cat face on the hat; I think that puts it over the top. I have another one that I tried that involves fun fur…picture to follow.

I'm hoping to do a bit of spinning over half-term, but we'll have to see how things go. Signing off for now!

Parting shot: Java is too adorbs sometimes for her own good...

In which I find out some interesting things about dying with dahlias

So, before the 'hoards' descend on the school again tomorrow, I decided to try dying some yarn with dahlias as they are blooming right now. So, first I went out and harvested 28 flower heads (no particular reason--that's just how many red and pink ones I felt I could get away with cutting). Into a pot they went to start being simmered for their dye.

After about half an hour, the dahlias were all bleached of color, and the water was a nice Kool-aid colored orange.

After soaking my yarn mordanted (pre-treated) with alum, I got the bright idea to throw a little alum into the dye pot to see if it darkened the color. Oh, boy, did it ever!

Oops. Well, after all that I decided to put the yarn in anyway even though a quick paper towel test revealed a rather nasty yellow was actually the color the yarn would end up. Sure enough, despite the merlot colored dye, the yarn went a rather limp hay yellow. I think I'll over-dye it after it dries...

I was rather interested to see how unexahusted the dye in the pot was, and that it had returned to something close to the previous orange color. (The picture makes it look more red than it really was) Another paper towel test revealed that it would still be yellow, so I dumped it out rather than use it again.

So, now I know that alum creates shocking and drastic color changes when dying with dahlias, that dahlias look really gross when all their color has been extracted, and that I should have left well enough alone. Who knows what I'll find out next year?

Oddments

I really missed my cat while I was away. Yes, I had my family's three cats to enjoy and brave little Claudia, but I missed my own crazy kitty.

I know it's a really silly little thing, but I LOVE this new color of nail polish that I brought back with me. And yes,I have a dirty missionary foot!

Last week for handwork we dyed some yarn with Kool-aid; in case you're wondering, 2 packets will do a pretty good job on 100g of fiber, but I think that 3 would be better for pink.

A new garden was put in just over the ditch that divides my yard from the soccer field, and because things are bone dry around here it needs to be watered every other day at least. I came home last night to find this:

I ended up with three buckets of water to use in my own garden and without a lake on my porch. Waste not, want not!