Knitasha von Stashenskeins

Dye Job

There is a Fiber Fair in Ann Arbor every fall and I have been attending for years.  I usually go just to browse and shop but this year I signed up for a class.  I've really been wanting to hand-paint some warps for scarves, so I signed up for a class on hand-painting yarn and roving.

It really wasn't all I had hoped it would be.  The instructor was an absent-minded woman who rambled without actually imparting much information.  Her assistant was her grown daughter who insisted on interrupting and correcting her mother as often as possible.  The class was unstructured, there were no handouts, and I didn't learn anything I hadn't already learned with my long-ago experiments with Kool-aid dyeing.

On the bright side, they did provide me with two skeins of sock yarn to play with and they had lots of dyes and all the supplies we needed.  The sock yarn was a mystery wool and not white or cream but a soft brown.  It was interesting to see how the brown yarn made the colors richer.  We squirted dye onto our skeins with plastic syringes and then cooked them in the microwave.

My first skein I used lilac and evergreen and I was careful to cover every bit of the yarn with dye.

In the skein.

Wound into a ball.  Not sure how it will look knitted up, but the green/purple combo is soothing to me.

My second skein I used raspberry and pumpkin dyes.  The pumpkin was a hard clump in the jar and I had a hard time chipping any out.  Even when I had a whole teaspoon, the dye looked way too light to show up on my brown yarn.  I poured a little of my mixed raspberry dye into it to make it darker and then I stuck a portion of the skein right into the jar to soak while I painted the rest with the raspberry.  I didn't like the yarn while it was wet, but it thankfully brightened up when it dried.  There isn't anything there I would call pumpkin, but I stumbled into a gold-brown that isn't too bad.

In the skein. At the top you can see a section which is nearly the original yarn color - that's where I squirted on the pumpkin.  The other more golden sections were soaked in the jar.

Wound into a ball.

I'd really like to cast on some socks to see how this will look knitted up, but Christmas knitting cannot be denied.  I have resolutely set these aside for now and did charcoal stockinette during Sunday Night Football instead.

That's sleeve #1 to the armhole finished and sleeve #2 has passed the 5" mark.  I'm going to use the sleeves as my swatch for gauge, so the body will be next.  Then I'll join sleeves and body for a raglan yoke and leave the charcoal behind for some COLOR!

P.S. Are you wondering where the pictures are of my purchases from the fair?  They don't exist because I didn't buy a thing! IKR??!!  Just didn't see anything I couldn't live without.

 

 

Wait, what?

Just checked and my last post was JANUARY!  That's pretty sad.  It's understandable because that is about when M's senior year took over my life.  Despite all the planning and strategizing, that last little bit of the college decision process was brutal.  Boyfriend chose a school we couldn't afford and that M hadn't even visited, putting us on the hot seat.  In the end, we decided we had put a lot of time and effort into being the worst parents ever and we didn't want to break our perfect record (or live in our cars).  We said no and M had to suck it up and pick a different school.  When the shouting subsided and the smoke cleared, the winner was American University in D.C.

Pros: good journalism school, big and vibrant city, family close by, not Ohio.

Cons: 8 hours from boyfriend and 9 hour drive for visiting parents. (waah waah)

So far so good.  She moved in late August and has settled in nicely.  Lots of nice people in her dorm, lots of fun stuff to do outside of class.  Roomate is grumpy cat in human form, but they have settled on a policy of oblivious co-existence where they barely speak to each other and yet it is mainly peaceful. They are thankfully compatible in being very messy, so the thermostat is all they really have to fight about.

We have been to visit twice now.  The last visit was last weekend for parent's weekend.  Lots of eating out, the requisite Target visit, a dinner with Hubby's family.  We even squeezed in a little sight-seeing.  M hadn't made it to the Washington Cathedral yet, so we had a nice peaceful hour there.

Because it isn't on the Mall, a lot of visitors to D.C. don't get around to the cathedral, but it is really worth the extra effort.  The architecture is impressive and there is some really great stained glass.  My favorite is called the Space Wndow.

Clearer and better photos on Google Images here and here.  M bought a postcard of this window for the growing photo collage on her dorm room wall.  

The whole cathedral is just gorgeous and I highly recommend it as a tour stop.  If you won't be traveling to Washington D.C. anytime soon, there are some wonderful virtual tours available on the cathedral website.

Now that we are back in Ohio, the cooling temperatures and falling leaves are reminding me of the approach of winter (yuck!) and Christmas (yay!) Christmas knitting is in full swing at Chez Knitasha.

But before Christmas comes L's birthday, so I finished this vest for her first.  In real life, the grey yarn is actually more brown and it is HANDSPUN!  It is lovely and soft.  The cream is Lamb's Pride Bulky, which matched the weight of the handspun very nicely.  I used size 11 needles, so it knit up very quickly. Using the cream for the yoke meant I didn't have to steek much of the handspun, so it all worked out very well.  L should like it, even though she can't wear it for now.  She's in Dallas until election day, where they are still having 80's and even some 90's, but she'll be back to the midwest soon enough.

My next project was my Dad's sweater without sleeves.  I've really been trying to knit from stash more, but I have a bad habit of only buying one or two skeins of anything.  For this vest I found three balls of Universal Yarn Classic Shades in Sapphires and one ball in Cedar Forest.  Very simple math told me 6 rows of Sapphires then 2 of Cedar Forest would make the yarn come out even.  I used a ball of Plymouth Encore for the ribbed edges and I'm happy with the overall effect.

There's a broad stripe of green in the center of the body section and the shade of the Sapphires and the Cedar Forest matched up too well in that section.  You really couldn't see the two-row darker stripe at all.  It bugged me too much to leave it, but I didn't want to rip the whole sweater out, so I went back and duplicate stitched on a two-row black stripe.  You can feel the extra thickness, but it is undetectable visually so I'm happy.  Couple more rows on the neckband and then I will weave in the ends and move on to the next!