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dyeing for spring break!

What do knitters do when they want instant gratification? No doubt the answer varies. For the confirmed fiberphile, it's hard to get much more instant than dye. Take some plain yarn and a bit of coloring agent

and a few hours and many gallons of water later, you can have this!

(I swear on my favorite set of dpns I did not read Claudia's blog before undertaking this project. Must be something in the NE springtime air!) That was Monday's entertainment. It was so much fun, I decided to repeat the exercise on Tuesday with a different color and different yarns.

The yarns are from my stash: two wool two-plies, approximately 2/20, one in white and one in bright yellow, and one skein of a tweedy taupy shetland. I love sticking different yarns into the dyepot, they take up color differently so you get extra entertainment from one bath. Because that was so much fun, and because I had wound a few extra skeins on my nifty skein winder (designed and built by me)

I decided to do another batch of dyeing on Thursday. At the last minute I threw in some extra skeins found in stash: one white laceweight, one lavender laceweight. The lavender came as part of a shawl kit, and while lavender is a fine color in the abstract, it does not fit into my wardrobe and I knew I would never like it enough to sit and knit a whole shawl with it. Before dyeing the yarns looked as if they were part of an Easter basket.

I was hoping for pastel shades, but when the moment came I found myself seduced once again by saturation, so I have more fuschia-pink yarn.

But that's ok; the lavender is at least knittable this way, the yellow turned out to be bright rollicking red, and the tweed turned into a lovely almost purply hue. Fair isle with the green from Tuesday? Maybe... now I have piles of newly colored yarns and for the time being I am enjoying seeing them in a bright heap. A few technical details:

This is my first time using Gaywool dyes. When I had a non-kitchen dyeing space, I did a lot of cold-water dyeing on plant fibers, and I enjoy the mixing and measuring and blending. For a while I got technical about it, with graduated cylinders, syringes, and a plethora of little jars and jugs. Now, alas, I don't have that kind of room so my dyeing is of the hmm let's see! rather than the replicable variety. Somewhere I picked up the vague feeling that dyes like Gaywool are a little like cheating--all the mordants and other chemicals are included, you just measure, dissolve and go. Certainly this doesn't allow as much control, but I just wanted easy color on wool, and I was pleased with the results. For one thing, the shades are truly saturated! Often a challenge on cotton.

Monday's batch: 5 skeins of KnitPicks color your own merino fingering. Gaywool dye "orchid", 3 capfuls (recommended is one capful per skein for full DOS, so you can see the colors are quite deep even without full saturation). If gauge is at all close, I'm planning to use this to make the scalloped jacket from Jean Frost's book "Jackets".
Tuesday: 2 skeins white wool laceweight, 2 skeins bright yellow laceweight, 1 skein taupe shetland. Three capfuls of Gaywool "lucerne". I love this color, but some caution is required when dissolving: the different color crystals seem to dissolve at different rates. I accidentally had some undissolved blue crystals, and as a result these skeins are a bit blotchy in places. The yellow turned out a bright deep green, the white a nice pale teal, the tweed a subdued greeny teal. The laceweights will likely either be woven, or used for shawls. I've been wanting to knit the La Traviata stole from the Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting for some time. The green may be just perfect.
Thursday: 1 skein bright yellow, 1 skein taupe shetland, 2 skeins white laceweight, 1 skein lavender laceweight. Gaywool "orchid", 2 1/2 capfuls. That was still too much for the colors I was aiming for, but luckily I like the result anyway. What was lavender is now fuschia with a purply hint. Likely it will be used for the original shawl pattern it came with, a Eugene Bugler design. The red will probably become a shawl too at some point. The shetland, well, I love the idea of a fair isle sweater, I'm just not sure I can make myself knit the whole thing. We'll see. I have several other colors in that weight, it would be fun to play around with shaded gradations.

Bright colors = happy me. Let's hear it for spring break!

loving it.

Not sure where my patience is coming from, but as long as it's here, I am thrilled with the results. My aran sweater is coming along nicely, though slowly. I don't enjoy knitting cables as much as I enjoy lace. Lace is so easy and tension-free; everything is loose and ethereal. I love to wear cables though, and I find the twiny twisty sculptured effects endlessly fascinating. Lately I am almost obsessed. I have taking to browsing through Barbara Walker over the breakfast cereal, looking for the patterns that truly intrigue. When I can't fall asleep I try to divert myself by imagining new cable patterns, and how to arrange them on sweaters and skirt panels. This green cably will be very, very big on me even though I am almost on gauge. It is oversized to begin with and I am small. This is not at all in style right now--not to mention drop-shoulder sleeves--but I will wave the "classic" flag and wear it anyway. It would be nice to finish it before warm weather is here for good, but that seems unlikely.

Meanwhile, I've become intrigued by something else. That's the thing about Barbara Walker--you pick up the books looking for a cable, and you come away with must-try ideas for lace or texture or mosaics or whathaveyou. It all started with capelets, and the idea for a knitted suit, which led me to thinking about tweeds, which led me to slip stitch patterns and my stash of wool weaving yarns.

Slip-stitch patterns are something I have never played with at all, and I feel the investigatory urges coming on strong. This stitch makes a tweedy pattern of little triangles in three colors. I'm fascinated, because I couldn't figure out how to do it by looking at the picture! I love a challenge. The fabric is very stable and doesn't curl at all, but it still stretches a little. It seems as if it would be good for a tailored sort of garment where tweed-like subtlety was desired. I wonder what would happen if you used yarns of radically different weights or fibers? Or a boucle? I love structure...

something to watch

My Mom has a blog!

croneway

Mom is a knitter and a weaver of Navaho Rugs. She is trained in massage therapy, zero balancing, and other mind-body techniques I don't know the proper names for (I should remedy that). She is a practicing bhuddist and makes a mean frozen chocolate mousse. My Mom travels with her awesome partner of many years, and loves the annual sailing trip in the Carribean. She loves opera, good books, and anything yummy to eat. She is definitely an extrovert and has a flair for the dramatic--she has spent many hours in and around theatrical productions of all sorts.

And she is a polio survivor.

I've been encouraging my mom to get a blog for a while now, because she has a great gift for communication, and she works so hard to live with the results of her childhood disease. We don't hear much about polio these days, because it is supposedly eradicated. Adults who survived childhood polio face a myriad of trials as they age. Often they experience impaired mobility and lots of pain. I know there are others out there who can benefit from my mother's knowledge and experience. I am very proud of her for setting sail into the blogging world.

So please, if you have a chance, watch her site and leave a friendly comment if you see something that appeals to you. And if you know of other polio survivors, please pass the word to them.

I love you Mom!

another beginning

Thanks everybody for your thoughts on knitted skirts. I would like to try one someday. I'd probably line it; maybe that would take care of the bulging seat problem? And it could be made with neutral shaping, so that any side could be worn in back to even out the wear. Of course I am thinking about this just as spring is about to burst forth.

While that idea simmers, I have started another Big project:

A Fisherman's Sweater by Alice Starmore. It is either Inishmore or Inishmann, I can never keep them straight. The one with seed stitch diamonds all up the front. The yarn is the same yarn I used for the recent yellow beastie, in a color called sage which to me is gorgeous. At the point this picture was taken, I was unsure about continuing. The yarn is not smooth; it's a bit rustic. To look at it in the skein, you might wonder whether it would obscure all the intricate cabling. Now that I've gone a little farther, I am reassured. The pattern reads well from all the way across my living room. I will carry on.

I tried a swatch for a self-designed Aran

Realistically, it will be a long time before I have the mental space to sit down, chart everything out and make the calculations. Maybe I can do it in the late summer and knit it next fall. It would be nice to think I'd knit it over the summer and have it ready for the first cool days, but I am never that organized! I have old sewing books of my grandmother's which say to always sew a season ahead. I've never been able to follow that advice.

pushing on

I decided to keep on going. Maybe that is Not Wise. I do like long socks. In the winter especially I wish for socks that will help mediate the temperature between the bottom of my coat and the tops of my boots. If they are long and they fit, that's ok. So I'll keep going and get used to the idea of wearing knee socks. What you see above is the original sock with the heel just turned. Also my attempt to prevent onesockitis. I am subject to particularly virulent strain, and you would be apalled at the number of hand-knit socks around my house that have no soulmate. I figure if I cast on for the second one before the first one is finished, I will have a much better chance of ultimately having a pair. I bought an extra set of dpns for this purpose. Let's hope it works.

Yesterday was a brilliant misplaced day. Someone shuffled the deck and we got a June weekend in the middle of March. I walked up the hill to my local library and returned a bunch of books and shuffled through their small shelf of knitting things. I found IWK's Scarf Style and Wrap Style. I know I am way behind the times here--these are books I would never have considered buying based on catalog blurbs, but they are surprisingly interesting. I am charmed by the capelets! I love the idea of a little thing to put around your shoulders. I have to pinch myself--I cannot, unfortunately, imagine myself wearing one. I think it would be cute, but capelets and backpack are not a winning combination. I wish I could ditch the pack, I really do, but ergonomically carrying many pounds of books around in a hand tote is simply painful. Also I have to wonder, what does one wear a capelet with? You can't wear it under a coat, you can't wear it over a coat, so it must be for those halcyon early fall or late spring days when it's not truly cold but you just want a little something. Counting up the number of those days I've had in the past few years when I had free time to go out in a capelet and didn't have to carry a backpack, I am reluctantly forced to conclude that capelets do not at present fit into my wardrobe.

But I still think they are adorable and quaint and I want one. I was wondering about making a matching skirt. Wouldn't a capelet and matching skirt make a charming suit? Somehow rather British 1930's -ish. Has anyone out there ever knit a skirt? Have you worn it? I am intrigued by the idea but it is a little hard to imagine a hand knit skirt that wouldn't look terrible unless modeled by a toothpick figure that didn't have to move.

utter idiocy

So it is late on Friday night--at least, getting towards what I consider late--and I am at the office. My code keeps crashing and I'm mad. But I had a post prepared, all about how I went through last weekend in that uncomfrotable tweeny state that occurs when I don't have an obsessive knitting project. Especially not an obsessive knitting project that can be worked on in dark lecture halls. Because this week I had a lot of lectures, and the idea of wasting all the knitting time was getting to me. I made several false sock starts, and finally decided to try "Evening Stockings for a Young Lady" from Vintage Socks. At last, my project karma started working. I did the ribbing, white merino looking very nice, pleasure to work with, easy to carry around. I started the lace pattern, finding it blissfully simple to memorize. All set for lectures!

I had a whopping three extra lectures here this week. Jared Diamond was visiting the area. He is widely discussed and it was highly recommended that we attend. No problem! I've got my sock. I knit through the first lecture serenely and started the calf decreases. This is a long sock, about 12" long, so there's lots of round and round. I knit through the second lecture, completing most of the calf decreases. Happiness. This afternoon, I knit through the third lecture and noticed that my ball of yarn was getting decidedly squishy. Also the sock--or stocking? seemed a little long, but then I have short legs, so quite possibly a normal mid-calf would seem long on me. I wasn't worried.

I got back to the office and started to seriously try to pull apart some nasty code, and during pauses (while things get retrieved from a database--you don't want to know) I decided I could be extra efficient and work on my sock. Getting up to the heel flap would be a great way to round out a productive week. Just think, if I could knit a sock a week, I could have six pairs by summer! I did the final calf decrease and read ahead a little bit to figure out how far to knit until the all important Heel Turning event. Blah blah blah, there should be 20 pattern repeats before starting the heel.

Huh. Oh yeah? I already have 25. Hah! Says I to myself. This is the first time I have found a mistake in a Nancy Bush pattern. Because, says I to myself, I followed the instructions to the letter and there is no way you could end up with 20 5-row pattern repeats unless you are on crack or can't add. There's got to be at least, like, 24 or so. Then I tried the sock on and friends, it goes all the way up my calf. Already bumping up against the knee joint. Which is odd, because most sock patterns as written are for kind of short socks, if you know what I mean. Still confident, I re-read the pattern to see if I could figure out where the author made a mistake. (Go ahead, laugh; we all know she writes the best sock patterns out there. Who am I! Just another lousy knitter.) There is a line near the beginning which says

"Work in patts as established until 14 rnds of openwork patt have been completed...."

Abundantly clear. Obviously. That's 14 ROUNDS, as in rows, as in only ONCE around the sock for each of those 14 "rnds". You know what I did? I did 14 REPEATS, as in 14 5-row repeats, as in a whole SEVENTY rows where she wrote 14. No wonder my sock is long.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with my version of the sock. It's just... ample, in the length direction. Serves me right for thinking I could accomplish something useful in a darkened lecture hall. Wouldn't life be so much more pleasant if we didn't have to multitask to fit in the things we love?