Score!

As I've mentioned, I've been reading through the Cat Who series and trying to collect the books. Well, I managed to score the entire series in on Ebay for less than $20 including shipping!! All but one are hardback. 2 of the short story collections were missing, but I already had those. I am thrilled to bits. I'm still on Post Office since I've had almost no time to read this last week. And when I do sit down to read, I invariably fall asleep. This should keep me busy for months!

Finally, progress on the Drops Tube Socks.

Although I've got to come up with a new name since they are no longer tube socks. I did, in the end, decide to put in a short row heel. I'm also only going to put the pattern on the top side of the foot so the sole is nice and smooth.

Jaywalkers in Jack.

I'm so thrilled with how this yarn is knitting up. I fell in love with it when I dyed it and am even more smitten by it knitted up. And this pattern is great. I can see why so many people have knit these.

I spent my weekend dyeing. Here's 5 skeins of Patons Classic Merino Wool, originally Winter White, dyed up for the Mr. Greenjeans sweater.

I had some issues with this yarn. Originally it was too bright.

So I overdyed it with a small amount of black and brown dye. Now it's perfect.

I also dyed up the last of my sock yarn for my friend's shop.

From left to right: Americana, After the Rain, and Shire. I'm going to have to dye up another Shire for myself, love those colors!

The skin of my teeth

Talk about cutting it close. This is how much yarn was left as I completed the Opal footies42 inches. I had actually dyed up one of the tiny skeins of Treadsoft I had to more or less match in case I ran out. But I didn't need it after all. The socks have been dubbed Low Rider

They sit delightfully low, not even reaching my ankle bone. I think they'll be perfect with my clogs. I really dig the short row heels.

No holes on the second sock. I think I did one too many rows on the heel of the first, resulting in holes at the corners. The short row heel went way faster than the standard heel/gusset. I may just be converted. They also seem to be fitting a bit better too. I struggle with getting my heels to not be baggy. I'm sure there's an adjustment to eliminate the bagginess, but I haven't run across it yet.

All of the yarns I had dyed for Etsy have sold! I'm so happy other people are liking what I've dyed. It's hard to let some of them go because I love the colors so much myself. But I know I can always dye more. This weekend I dyed up the last of the undyed yarn I have (more is on the way). Here they are pre-reskiening.
Blue JeanBats in the belfryPoodle SkirtThis brings up a question. In my journeys on the Internet, it looks as if most dyers do reskein their yarns. But some leave them as dyed (the famous Socks That Rock are not reskeined). I'm just wondering what you all prefer. Reskeining is a pain, but I think it gives a better picture of how the colors will blend and show up when used. "As dyed" gives a great view of the individual colors, but I just don't find it quite as appealing for some reason. Thoughts? I think I'm going to list this batch as is and see how they sell. These should be up on Etsy by the end of the week.

I was very busy this weekend. Not only did I finish the footies and dye yarn. I also made these fab-o Halloween candle holders.Canned a whack more tomatoes. Finished another Cat Who book. Started another Cat Who book. Got started on the punchneedle.I know it doesn't look like much now, but it's coming along nicely. I'm finding it very hard on the eyes. I'm trying to get a feel and rhythm going so I don't have to look as hard, but it's pretty detail oriented so pretty close attention is required. It's a lot of fun and goes pretty quickly. I don't see this becoming a top of the heap craft for me, but certainly one I'll keep in my repertoire.

Weekend update

New yarns are up on my Etsy store. "Bushel of Tomatoes" (tomatoes are EVERYWHERE right now!)and "Dragonfly"This is the new Treadsoft yarn I got recently. The yarn seems to me to be much finer than the KP Gloss I was using. I have that small ball of the Treadsoft I'm keeping to try for myself. But just by feel alone, I think I prefer the Gloss. If only Gloss were superwash, it would be perfect. The search for perfect dyeable yarn continues.

Yesterday, in addition to dyeing yarn, I put up a batch of tomatoes. They are coming in so slowly this year. Which in a way is good since I can do them in smaller batches and not have to spend whole days working at canning. I froze the batch of sauce I made earlier this week. These I canned. I'm in the market for a good food mill which should greatly speed up the sauce making process.

On tap for today,
sorting through Granny K's craft box. I've been wanting to learn punchneedle embroidery since first seeing it at the Lancaster quilt show a few years ago. Mom got grannie's sewing and craft stuff after she died. When we were going through the boxes we found her "Pretty Punch" supplies, which mom graciously let me have. I'm hoping to find needles and instructions so I can finally learn this craft. If it looks promising, I'm going to get a book or 2 of folk art designs from Amazon. Because, I just NEED another hobby! Yeah right. Have you SEEN my Ravelry queue? I think it's up to 12 now (oops, no I just looked. 17). That's not including the 5 WIPs in my knitting basket. And the fabric waiting to become sock bags. I better get busy!

RAVELRY!

I finally got my Ravelry invitation yesterday. Hooray! Ravelry is a website for knitters and crocheters to post about all things knitting & crocheting. I got on the waiting list as soon as I heard about it (maybe 2 months ago) and thought I'd never get on. They are still in Beta and controlling the number of registrations. As of today, the waiting list is over 9,000! I didn't really know much about it except what others were saying on their blogs and podcasts. Now that I could actually get on the site, I agree. It's awesome. You can track your projects and stash and needle inventory. You can connect with other knitters and see who's knitting the same stuff you are. I envision spending hours over there, just looking at everyone's cool projects. I need to get photos taken and get my profile up too.

I was working in the garden today and lo and behold...Our first tomato of the season is almost ripe! Everything is coming along so nicely. And with 90+ temperatures predicted the next few days, things should get a boost. We had our first peppers this week and will have eggplant before long. We still have cucumbers coming out of our ears. Anyone want some? Next year, one cucumber plant. Two are overwhelming!

I cast on the Sea Silk this week. Yummy! I decided on the Huck Lace shawl from the Morehouse Farm Merino Knits book.

I haven't had a chance to go through this book real thoroughly, but at a glance it looks like there are lots of cool patterns. I like the Huck Lace shawl because it's very plain looking and I think will show off the colors of the Sea Silk very well. Plus it's not too lacy. I'm not really into lace all that much and it's hard to find shawl patterns that aren't lacy.

I dyed up another skein of Gloss this week.

This is called Moo Cow. White with black and gray spots. Love it. I'm so into dyeing. Ideas keep popping into my head. With KnitPicks being out of the dyeables that I won't for a while yet, I've still been search for other sources. I found Catnip Yarns and ordered a pound of Treadsoft Superwash. It's a bit different than the Gloss I've been using. The twist is much tighter and the yarn is a bit finer. Unfortunately, I've been having trouble with my swift when I re-skein yarn. I think it's creating too much tension on the bars and the ties keep breaking. It's easy enough to fix, but I don't want to damage the swift. Dad is going to make me an actual skein winder, which should make my life much easier.

Before & After

I'm still not going to rank this NZ yarn among my favorites because of the prickliness, but I must say, it sure did dye up pretty. Here's a small swatch knitted on US 7 needles.

Before felting...After felting...
I'm very please with the results. The fabric is dense but not stiff and should make a great belt. The sample was 15 stitches wide and after felting is about double what I need my finished belt to be. So I figure 8 stitches should do it. It shrank very little in length. But even if I knit it too long, after felting it shouldn't be a problem to cut it off.

Tonight I skeined off 4 100g hanks of the tan wool to dye to make the Stag Bag from yesterday. Although I'm sure it would be fabulous to knit the bag in the alpaca yarn called for, I've got this on hand and am anxious to find a use for it. I realized, on further reading of the pattern, that the colorwork chart is worked back and forth. I loath purling in stranded colorwork, so that's just not going to happen. The pattern as written has the colorwork panel on the front and a plain solid color back. This creates a problem if done in the round since my 2nd color will be on the wrong side of the work when I get back around. I know there's some way to do it with slip stitches, but that's way more complicated than I want to try for now. I could work the back of the bag in a two color pattern as well, maybe a checkerboard or something. Or I could just cut the yarn and reattach at each new row. This would mean a ton of ends to weave in, though. These are all problems for another day. For now, the yarn is in the dye pot. Results soon.

SoS report: I knit an inch or so on the Horcrux while listening to Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians audiobook. In addition to SoS, I've signed up for the library's adult summer reading program. With the aid of audiobooks, I've gotten 2 books "read" already. And my hands are free to stitch away.

The result

The new yarn dyed up fabulously. The colors are vibrant.

These photos are a bit washed out because it is seriously sunny out today. But I think you get the idea. The yarn softened a bit in the process, but still not what I would consider next to the skin by any stretch of the imagination. I do think this will felt up wonderfully so I'm trying to think along those lines. I'm considering a belt or maybe hotmats or a placemat for the cat's food dish.

Knitting Daily featured this pattern yesterday for the Intricate Stag Bag. Add one more project to my "I HAVE to knit this" list!

I finished the gusset on the first Horcrux last night, but not much more before I fell asleep. I'm feeling discouraged at my progress. Yesterday on the SoS blog, they posted pictures of several pairs of socks people have already FINISHED! Urgh. I now I'm slow, but it's very disheartening.

The new yarn

I hated going back to work today. Normally weekends don't really effect me like that. But losing that freedom to pickup Horcrux and knit at my leisure was tough. I shall treat myself to a good long knit tonight after dinner. Unless this keeps me to distracted...2 cones of New Zealand wool. Each is over a pound of dk weight yarn. Purchased from Ebay. You'd think I'd stop buying this unknown yarn after my recent experience of Ebay yarn that didn't meet my expectations. But it's actually not bad, for what it's intended for. It's very scratchy wool indeed, at least too me it feels scratchy, but I'm pretty sensitive to that kind of thing. My intention when buying it was to try dyeing it, and that's what I'm going to work on tonight. I wound off 100 g of the gray wool and it's soaking now. I haven't decided what colors I'm going to use, but I'm thinking greens and blues. Since the wool is so scratchy, it will most certainly end up being knitted into something felted. I'm really horrible with this part, coming up with ideas on what to do with x amount of yarn. For now, I'm just interested to see if I can get something I'm even going to want to knit with!

Also in the mail today, more inspiration for sock yarns!Apparently I'm not the only one bitten by the dye-your-own sock yarn bug. It's becoming increasingly hard to find affordable undyed sock yarn. I've still got 2 skeins of Knit Picks Bare merino/silk. I'm jonesing to get some superwash, but their site still shows it's back ordered until the end of July. Now the merino/silk is back ordered until the end of September! I did get some of my yarn from Socks that Fit and it's very nice. Just a bit more expensive than Knit Picks. Most places sell by the cone and I'm not ready to commit that kind of money just yet. At least I've figured out how to get the yarn off the cone into a hank without too much trouble. I mount my swift on it's side so it spins like a ferris wheel and set the cone on my scale so I can see when I've wound off the appropriate weight. I've also marked the swift and calculated the amount of yarn per revolution. All I need to do is count the number of strands in the hank and I've got the yardage.

I'm off to dye now. Oo, that didn't sound very good!

Dyeing and gardening success

Yesterday I enjoyed a day off from work by going to the movies with my family to see Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End. Loved it. I'm not much of a movie-goer but action movies are so much better on the big screen.

I got in some more dyeing as well. I hit the mark this time on the Halloween yarn.
I've named it Jack.
This one is Sweet Tooth.I'm addicted. I keep thinking of color combinations I can't wait to try and I've got more yarn coming!

Look back at this post. See the garden? That was only 3 weeks ago. Look at it now!The June-boom never ceases to amaze me. How plants can triple in size in only a few short weeks.
The zucchini plant has already yielded several meals worth of vegetables. And although its hard to see in this picture, there's more for tonight's dinner waiting to be picked. Our weather has been exceptionally good so far this summer. Not too hot, a good amount of rain, just perfect. I'm thinking that for once we might even get by without all of our tomatoes cracking from the erratic rain we've had in past summers. I guess it's early yet to tell, but my fingers are crossed!

Big news...my Etsy shop is now up! It's at http://peacecat30.etsy.com. There's not a lot on it just yet. There's soap and a few sewn items. I hope to list some of my dyed yarns, if I can bear to part with them. But I'm not ready to let them go yet. Please stop by and check it out. Comments and suggestions welcomed!

The plunge into hand dyeing

All of the hand painted sock yarn I've discovered since I've started listening to Lime & Violet has inspired to try my hand at it. If you remember a while back I did a skein of kool aid dyed yarn. Although I loved the results, the selection of kool aid colors available here is very limited so I bought me some acid dyes and several skeins of undyed yarn and decided to have at it. I did order a book on yarn dyeing from Amazon, but haven't had time to read it yet. There's plenty of instruction and inspiration online, though. Just search yarn dyeing. Here's a quick look at how I did it (and what I learned in the process).

I started with a skein of Knit Picks Bare merino/silk blend fingering weight yarn. I love their yarns. Their fingering weight is a bit heavier than the other undyed yarns I've got waiting to dye. Some people suggest reskeining into a longer skein so I did that first.Stuart insisted on "helping". The chairs were set about 2 feet apart and I ended up with a skein about 40-something inches long. This process took forever and killed my back (not to mention the constant cat wrangling). Next time I'm going to try painting as skeined or winding it on the ball winder and then reskeining onto the swift set at a wider diameter. Then I soaked the yarn in warm water with some vinegar while I mixed the dyes.
These are Cushing dyes. I only had yellow, turquoise, crimson & black. I was aiming for yellow, purple, orange and black and figured I could mix colors to get the right shades. I didn't succeed so well with the purple. I know from grade school you should be able to mix blue and red to get purple. Apparently turquoise is not close enough to blue for this to work. My ultimate goal was to emulate some cool Halloween yarn I saw someone else do. Their's was mostly orange with touches of purple and black. I drained the yarn and squeezed out most of the water and spread it out on plastic wrap. I must get wider plastic wrap and make sure I tear off a long enough piece. I tried piecing my plastic wrap and ended up with leaks. Which brings up an interesting observation. This dye did not seem to stain very much. I splashed yellow dye all over my shirt (a cotton/poly tee shirt) and from the leaking plastic wrap there was a big splotch of black dye on the counter. The counters cleaned right up with a little spray cleaner and I used a bit of stain spray on the tee shirt and washed it later that day and there's not a bit of stain on it. Perhaps the acid dyes truly do need the acid and heat to make them stick. Anyway, back to the story. Here's the yarn after I applied the dyes.I ran out of orange and rather than mixing more I just decided to just use all the colors a little more evenly. At this point I had abandoned the Halloween yarn (I've got more dyes & yarn coming so there'll be plenty of opportunity to try again). I wrapped the yarn up in the plastic, plopped it in a glass dish and microwaved it in 3 minute bursts, letting it rest for 5-15 minutes between, for a total of 9 minutes. Then I let it cool completely before rinsing.Most of the dye had absorbed so there was very little discharge in the water. I used just a bit of Eucalan in the water to give the yarn a nice scent. Then it was out into the sun to dry.
When it was dry, I looped it back over the chairs and rewound it onto the swift. Again, this took forever and I had even more trouble with Stuart (apparently the colored yarn is even more enticing than the white.) In the end, although it's not what I originally intended, I'm very pleased with the finished yarn.
I haven't come up with a name yet. It seems like most of the hand dyers come up with cute and witty names for their yarns. Me? Not so good with the cute and witty. Now I'm just interested to see what it will look like knitted. Damn, another project in the queue!

Isn't this the most awesome fabric?This is my Death Eater bag. The shadowy skulls and sick green lining immediately put me in mind of the Death Eaters in Harry Potter. I'm working on making these little project bags (among other things) in the hopes of starting my own Etsy shop. I'm excited to have a potential outlet for some of the crafty things I like to do. More on that another day.

We rounded out the weekend by attending my aunt Linda's retirement party. Her daughter's threw a big picnic and a lot of the family we don't often get to see came for the occasion. A great time was had by all.