WIP Wednesday: Socks and Hats

Well... part of a sock and one hat. Still, I know it's a bit weird to see me with more than one WIP. It happens on occasion.

The sock is yarn that I dyed inspired by one of my favourite football teams (Real Madrid) and their amazing pink/black/white kits they've been wearing all season. They were (until today...) competing for a second straight European championship, and I dyed the yarn while watching them beat their in-town rivals and cast on the sock during their match last Wednesday then knit some more rows on it today. They lost, but I'll still wear my socks proudly.

The colourway is "Real Fans Wear Pink" and the base is my superwash sock base, which is 75% Superwash wool and 25% nylon in a fingering weight.

The sock pattern is from Socks a la Carte by Jonelle Raffino and Katherine Cade. It's a pretty cool book that gives you a bunch of different cuff options, a bunch of different leg options, and a bunch of different foot/toe/heel options that you can combine together to make your own unique socks and hopefully will inspire you to design your own. There's even a cool flip book part in the back that lets you see how the cuff/leg/foot combo you choose will look together.

Since Real means "Royal" and the Real Madrid logo has a crown in it, I went with the top that looks a bit like a crown. Since they're one of the most high profile teams in the world, I chose the cuff called "eyes on you" since I thought it was only appropriate. I still haven't decided on a foot/toe/heel, but I'll let you know when I get there.

Second...return of the stochastic hat. I first posted about this two weeks ago and then subsequently finished the hat. However! It was way too small even for my tiny head, so I knew it wouldn't fit a regular-sized adult. I left it alone, figuring I'd finished what I needed to for the challenge, but over the weekend I found myself project-less and having just completed another Turn-A-Square to use up some acrylic I bought for a different project (more on that when I talk FOs), I ripped back and re-started this hat. This time I changed some things.

For one thing, I'd run out of the red yarn when I got to the crown shaping, so all of a sudden there was a hard grey line against the red. It didn't look as bad as I thought it would, but it still wasn't what I wanted. For another I knew I needed to be sure to control the floats. So, what I did was rip back to where I'd joined the ribbing together, then knit 10 rows straight in grey before jumping in to the stochastic pattern at row 11. I've now knit 11-25 in the stochastic pattern and will begin the crown decreases in straight red. Hopefully I have enough. I'm playing yarn chicken right now. I'm hoping to wrap up the crown decreases tonight or tomorrow.

FO Friday: Do Not Speak to Me of Dragon Fire Socks

I know I said I was hoping to have these done by last Friday so I could show them off, but (1) it takes a longer time to knit the feet portion of socks than I think it does and (2) I was taking a class at the local fibre festival that specifically said I needed a project to knit and it occurred to me that if I finished the second sock on Friday night then I wouldn't have anything to knit during class, so I stopped working on them and swatched for the hat I posted about on Wednesday instead.

Anyway, they're done now. I wore them the other day and I LOVE them. They fit so incredibly well and were absolutely lovely to have on my feet all day. Fantastic pattern. I highly recommend it.

 

It remains difficult to take a picture of my own feet, but I tried to give you a sense of the chain mail cable pattern on the front, the unique foot detail that's actually a really cool alternative gusset placement, and the leaf detail on the back of the leg. 

They look complicated, but the patterns are all super easy to memorize and they knit up really fast. The yarn does hide the pattern more than I wanted it  to, but it striped up in a fortuitous way and I feel like you can see the pattern well enough.I'll probably knit another pair with a more solid yarn sometime because it's such a great pattern, but I'm happier with these socks than any of the other handful of socks I've knit.

To recap:

Pattern: Do Not Speak to Me of Dragon Fire by KnottyKnerd (I was test knitting, but will link the pattern as soon as it becomes available.)

Yarn: My own custom dye that I made just to knit these socks "Elvenking", but is now available in my Etsy store.

My review... buy this pattern as soon as it's available. These socks are awesome. (And the yarn's not so bad either!)

WIP Wednesday: Stochastic Knitting and a Sewing Project

This week's WIPs are a bit different than some week's WIPs in that they're not my typical crafting project.

First, a colourwork hat. Which isn't at all out of the ordinary for me, but the "pattern" is definitely not my typical thing.

A bit about what this is. To start, the pattern is more or less based on the Turn A Square Hat by Jared Flood, which is sort of my go-to standard hat pattern at this point. It's a great unisex hat with an easy construction (except the Channel Island cast on, which I find beyond tedious and almost never do), it's basic and easily modified, and it's free. All wins in my book. The yarn is stuff I pulled out of my stash that I've been "saving" for "making random hats"...which is my way of justifying not getting rid of the yarn. Good thing that's finally paying off. The grey colour is most of a ball of Lion Brand Wool Ease leftover from a Fourth Doctor scarf. The red is Knit Picks Wool of the Andes left over from a sweater I made my mom a few years ago. None of that is odd.

What's odd is the "pattern", which I keep putting in quotes for a reason. The Knerdgirl Knits podcast (you hear about them alot around here!) is doing a cool event this year that's a year-long bad-ass women craft along. Four times (two months each) this year, they're doing a set of challenges to celebrate women in STEM (science, tech, engineering, and math) fields (of which I am one). This round is the Women in Tech/Education KAL, and one of the challenges is to knit something with a stochastic pattern generator that Kris (Geknitics on Ravelry) found. The very complicated explanation that I don't understand behind it can be found here, but suffice to say that this uses all sorts of computer math formulas and generates random patterns of colourwork depending on a variety of things you input. It basically generates them on the fly and you then knit the block of stitches, hit next, knit the next block of stitches, hit next, etc. I should warn you that I hear the site only works in Firefox (which I happen to use), so visit at your own risk or whatever. It's pretty fun to not know exactly what's coming next or what this is going to look like when it's done, actually. That's not normally at all how I roll, but the way the pattern generator works it's making it very easy.

It's going slowly because it's colourwork and I have to sit at my laptop so I can generate the next steps, but it's a worsted weight hat, so it shouldn't take too much longer. Any rate, I need a project to take to geek knitting night at the LYS tomorrow, so I want it to be at a place where I'm knitting straight red and doing crown decreases by then, otherwise I'll have to bring the laptop with me, which I don't want to do.

Second...a sewing project. I'm making the top left dress from this Butterick pattern for my first day of grad school classes.  It doesn't look like much yet, but I'm hoping if I can squeeze out some time this Saturday before I go on a work trip and then maybe the weekend after I get back, I can make real progress on it. It's allegedly an easy project, and I don't think it should be too much more work. I just had to stop because I need to think about lining fabric and buy a zipper.

Anyway, just for funsies, here it is in progress!

 The long piece is the skirt. The contrast pieces go on the midriff. And the bodice pieces are the things you can sort of see on top. Here's hoping I'll have something more tangible to show you soon!

Stash Confessional: Minnesota Knitters Guild Yarnover 2015

So...I acquired some yarn this weekend. I was so proud of myself for knitting a whole sweater out of worsted weight and using up yardage this month, and now I've more than negated all of that for another net gain of yarn. Although, admittedly, the bulk of it wasn't really my fault.

Here's the situation:

Looks pretty bad, right? It is, but I can explain.

Game of Thrones Swap--recieved

So apparently I'm hooked on swaps now. Or, rather, if people keep coming up with swaps for shows/fandoms I really enjoy, I'm going to keep doing them!

We'll do this like we did the Downton Abbey Swap and put it in two parts so this post doesn't get hellaciously long, yeah?

Let's start out with the MOST AWESOME swap package I received all the way from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia from Ravelry user QTR. It took a long time to get here, but it was well worth the wait! And it came last Friday on a delightful 80F sunny afternoon just when I was thinking things couldn't get much better around here... and then they did!

Here’s my full haul:

WIP Wednesday: Sock (and a quarter)

Here's the completed sock as it was on Monday. Since this I've managed to get another 48 rows done on the next one, but I didn't photograph it. Lots going on around here today.

(Mo)FO Friday: Giant Orange Stockinette Sweater for Jonas

It's not DONE, done, but the giant orange stockinette sweater is blocking and awaiting seaming (and then re-knitting).

Sorry for the terrible photo. It's still blocking and it's too huge for me to take a proper photo of it yet.

To recap: The pattern is Joukahainen by Krystel Nyberg. The yarn is Berocco Ultra Alpaca in colourway 6268.

I started this sweater for Jonas on March 23 and wrapped it up on Tuesday (April 14), so it took me just over 3 weeks start to finish. It's an easy pattern, being predominantly stockinette, so even though Jonas is huge and has a giant long torso and huge arms, this still knit up really quickly. That said, the bit just after joining the sleeves and before you get a good way in to the raglan decreases is probably best described as a slog. I had 300+ stitches on the needles and was working to reduce (every other row) to 92 stitches. It took me 15 minutes to knit a rest row and 20 minutes to knit a decrease row. The good thing about working it in decreases is that it got better from there, but gosh was I ready to just throw the sweater down and walk away once I realised what I was in for while knitting the full chest measurement. But I got through it and it's over.

And it needs re-knitting.

Don't panic...it doesn't all need to be re-knit (I hope), I just need to re-shape the neckline. It came out way more like a mock turtleneck than the crew neck it looks to be in the photo (plus it's way too wide for Jonas to wear as a mock turtleneck even if he wanted to). It seems like this is a common problem with the pattern and I've looked up people's fixes and have pulled out my sweater design books, so I'll devise a solution for re-knitting just the very top and the collar as soon as it's dry (it's been blocking since Wednesday and is still pretty soggy). The bigger problem might come if Jonas thinks it's not long enough. When he first tried it on, he definitely didn't think it was, but based on how much the yarn stretched when I knit my Tauriel, I'm hoping it will block out long enough for him. If not... well, I told him to expect the sweater in a few years when I can muster up the Can to rip it back to the sleeve joins and knit more onto it before doing all those raglan decrease rows again. I'm not even sure I'm going to get to re-doing the collar for a while, since I've got other projects I need to commit to now.

Good news is, he had it on in the house on Tuesday night for less than five minutes and was already too hot in a wool/alpaca sweater, so I'm betting he won't be clamoring for it until September at the earliest. So I have some time. Which is good, because this sweater and I need a break.

It's not even that I mind that much stockinette, really. It's easy knitting and I can do it while doing pretty much everything else, so it was actually good... it was just A LOT of sweater and I'd like to knit something else now.

The yarn was lovely to knit with as always. It's got a great hand and it's not at all splitty or difficult to work with, even when I had to cable it to do the raglan decreases. Lovely all around. The only complaint I had is that a lot of dye leaked out into the water when I was soaking it. The basin was a delightful tangerine colour when I pulled the sweater out and it still wasn't rinsing clean. If I remember correctly, the green yarn for Tauriel did the same thing. So... a bit of caution if you're using this yarn and want to wash the item with other things. It looks like there will be a significant amount of excess dye for the first few washes.

Jonas is weirdly allergic to Eucalan, so I had to use regular laundry soap, but I don't think that will affect the blocking process too much. I just really hope it's long enough after blocking because as lovely as it was to knit, the only challenging part is at the top, and that's the bit I'd have to do again. No thank you, please.

It's a good, basic stockinette sweater. Nothing fancy, but certainly a blank canvas for colourwork or easy design changes and a good place to start if you need to just knit a sweater with no frills. I *might* knit it again. In a smaller size. In a few years. With a different neckline.

WIP Wednesday: Swatching for Socks!

I promised you wouldn't see the orange stockinette sweater again, and I'm making good on my promises. It's currently blocking. It's got some fixes needed, but we'll talk about that on Friday. For now, we're going to talk about the new project I started today.

To be fair, this is barely a swatch at this point, let alone a WIP, but it is what it is and it's sure pretty exciting to me.

Stash Confessional: Minnesota Yarn Shop Hop 2015

Well, you know how I was saying that I had a new way to keep the stashdown resolution and how I was going to do better? Well... I am doing better with knitting. I'm doing less well with not buying yarn.

So, every year several of the local yarn stores get together for what we call "Minnesota Yarn Shop Hop" over one weekend in April. The ultimate goal is for people to go around to all of the stores on the list (there are 17 this year) and there's a free pattern and an exclusive yarn and perks for donating to a local food shelf and prize entries and a grand prize entry for people who go to all the stores. It's good exposure for the stores and the indie dyers they work with and it's a good cause and it's a lot of fun. This was my first year participating. I wasn't going to really go all out, just have Jonas drive me to some of the stores that are closer to us, but one of my knitter friends ended up having Friday off and wanted to go, so I took the day off and went along, foolishly telling myself I wasn't going to buy things no matter what.

And then it ended like this:

FOs: House Stark Fingerless Mitts and Fifth Doctor Socks!

It's still not Friday (but it's kinda close) and these have been finished for two weeks now, but better late than never, right.

In my post about my resolutions for March, I alluded to these finished objects, so I should probably show them to you. Plus they're pretty awesome.

First: T.A.R.D.I.Socks by Anna Richardson (round 2)

It's really hard to photograph your own feet.

So... I mentioned above that this is round 2 of these particular socks. I also mentioned in my resolutions post that these socks resulted in a net gain of yarn. Here's the story.

You can first start here with the story of how I decided to knit myself knee-high socks for my Fifth Doctor (Doctor Who) costume even though I had never knit a single sock before in my life and previously had no desire to do so. So I knit myself knee high socks out of a cotton/bamboo/spandex blend yarn (because the costume was originally for summer) following a pattern that's lovely and beautifully charted, but presumes you've actually done some moderate amount of sock knitting and are using wool and know how to adjust socks to fit your feet. Needless to say, I was setting myself up for failure before I even started. So I knit them over the course of 6-weeks desperately trying to finish them in time for the convention I needed my costume for (the only time in my life I've ever knit more than one thing at a time. I will never do it again.), and I was pretty proud of myself. For one thing, I've heard many people who attempted these socks either don't finish or take forever to finish since there's a lot of purling and cabling and charting and they're REALLY LONG, so I was pretty impressed that I not only managed to make socks that look like socks, but that they were also socks that experienced sock knitters don't even finish. So I put them on for the convention and they were HUGE. Four inches too long, too big in the gusset, bunchy in my shoes and didn't stay up if I took more than 10 steps. So...they were socks, but they weren't socks that fit.

Fast forward to now. I needed to re-wear the costume for a Doctor Who panel at a convention in April, and I knew I needed to re-make the socks. I'd been trying to knit my way through the basic sock patterns in Wendy Johnson's Socks from the Toe Up book so that I could have some knowledge of how to make socks fit my feet, and I'd also knit the (still don't fit) butterfly knee-highs to try to figure out the calf sizing. Armed with this knowledge, I ripped out the socks (3.5 balls of RIDICULOUSLY SPLITTY YARN), re-wound, and started again with a modified pattern. I dropped a needle size so I didn't have to modify the width, but I took out a portion of the chart and recalculated the row count so I could shorten the socks and still keep the calf shaping. I managed to use about 55 fewer yards (50 fewer meters)/15 fewer grams of yarn this time, which is where the net gain came in. But the socks are the right height and fit better around my calf (though still not perfect, but I devised a solution with a ribbon that holds them up just fine) and I'm much happier with them. They are a bit of a slog though, so I can definitely see how people who don't need them for a specific purpose on a deadline would get tired of doing it. The only reason I made it through without quitting was that I knew I needed them for the costume.

In addition, this yarn is terrible. I won't mention what it is here (although you can see it if you look on my project page), but I don't think I'll ever knit with it again. I chose it because I wanted lighter weight and hopefully cooler socks to wear with the costume in the summer, but the cotton and bamboo don't have the memory to hold the socks up and the spandex makes the yarn INCREDIBLY splitty, making it very difficult to work with, especially when you're knitting and purling and cabling with yarnovers. I'm not impressed and it definitely wasn't fun to knit it twice.


Second: Game of Thrones House Stark Fingerless Mitts

These are for the Game of Thrones swap package I put together (which I'll tell you about as soon as a package actually arrives for me and I can do a sent/received post like I did for the Downton Abbey swap). These are my own design, modified from a very basic fingerless mitts pattern. I've done the same sigil on a hat and on an eReader case, so it was just a matter of modifying the stitch count and re-charting it. The grey main colour is Knit Picks Palette in Ash and the sigil colour is Knit Picks Imagination Hand-Painted in the Castle Walls colourway, which screamed Winterfell to me from the moment I saw it.

These were super quick and easy to knit up and my recipient loved them. I'm not really into fingerless mitts (I find them hugely impractical) but I'm thinking about modifying the other designs I have (Targaryen, Lannister, and Night's Watch) into the fingerless mitts too. Someday I'll write up the patterns for actual. I started writing up the hat pattern, but I never finished it. These are super fun and a great way to show your support for various houses. If you're interested, I sometimes list the hats (and may eventually list the eReaders and the fingerless mitts) on my Etsy page. Let me know.

WIP Wednesday: Continuation of the Giant Orange Stockinette Sweater

This week's WIP is the same as last week's WIP, which is to be expected when you're knitting a size XL men's sweater for someone who's 6'1" tall on 3.75mm needles.

As a reminder, this is Joukahainen by Kristel Nyberg and I'm knitting it out of Berocco Ultra Alpaca in colourway 6268, which is a lovely burnt orange colour with a bit of depth to it.

That said, progress has been made! Noticeable progress! Much thanks to me working a 4-day convention that left me with hour-long chunks of time to sit and knit, the entire sweater being stockinette, and sleeves having SO MANY FEWER STITCHES than the body of the sweater.

So... since you saw it last I finished the main body section, finished one sleeve, and have started the next sleeve. I had to make the slightest of modifications to account for Jonas having dainty wrists compared to the size of the rest of him, so basically I dropped down to 3.5mm needles and cast on 4 fewer stitches (the amount for the size L), did the ribbing, then switched back to the 3.75mm needles and increased until I had the amount of stitches for the XL, then knit to the length of the L. It's based on the Elizabeth Zimmerman percentage formula so it's pretty easy to make changes like this on the fly, especially since the whole sweater is just stockinette in the round.

Still loving this yarn. It's super easy to knit and has a really nice hand even before washing. The biggest thing I have to remember is that when he tries things on they need to be slightly on the small side (fitting, but with slightly less ease than he might like) because it will stretch out when blocked.

I'm hoping to wrap up the sleeves before the weekend and then maybe get the yoke done over the weekend or early next week. I'm currently dyeing some yarn so I can use it for a sock test knit I agreed to do, so hopefully the next time you all see this sweater it will be in an FO photo.

Resolutions Check-In: March

I think the fact that it's currently April 7 and I'm just now getting to this post speaks VOLUMES about how well I did on my resolutions this month. But the current run of Do All The Things is behind me and I'm hoping to make some headway as I gear up for the next round of Do All The Things. Maybe. I hope. I've got some new strategies, at least. But, let's check in anyway. If only because even though I know I'm failing, I have a scientific need to quantify how hard I'm failing. Or something like that.

WIP Wednesday: Giant stockinette sweater of awesome

So, back in 2013 Jonas and I (along with LAP) were at one of our local yarn (and fabric!) stores for Small Business Saturday (that's the Saturday after US Thanksgiving in case you don't know) and for some reason I decided to purchase ALL THE YARNS.

That day, I bought myself a sweater quantity of Malabrigo worsted in the "Garden Gate" colourway (which I am still ABSOLUTELY in love with and I hope you'll get to see knit up soon), the Berocco Ultra Alpaca I used in my Tauriel, and seven skeins of the same Berocco Ultra Alpaca in a sort of burnt orange heathered colourway with the intention of making a sweater for Jonas. Probably for our anniversary, which is in May. He looks really good in that orange colour and I know I'd found a pattern for a basic pullover (which, I note, the sample page is pretty much the same orange colour, so that probably influenced my decision) that I thought he'd like, so I got it for him. Not really thinking that he runs naturally very warm so an alpaca/wool blend might not be the *best* decision ever, but, you know.

Well, I'm finally getting around to knitting it. Now that it's more than a year later and it's almost summer. Yep. Nobody ever said our knitting had to make sense.

Hand-Painted Yarn: Game of Thrones -- Wolves of Winter

Hi all.

Lots to talk about in the crafting world (re-finished a pair of knee-highs, designed and knit some fingerless mitts for another swap, knit a project bag for said swap, started a sweater for Jonas) but I want to talk about the latest yarn I just put up in my Etsy shop.

I'm in a Game of Thrones swap with the Odd Duck Swaps of Ravelry (see swap referenced in previous paragraph) and my original partner (story on that later) said that they were a fan of Arya Stark. I had been meaning to create some Game of Thrones colourways anyway so I pulled two skeins of yarn and decided to use my favourite new gradient yarn technique and create a colourway inspired by House Stark.

Downton Abbey Swap 2015: Sent!

So, in my last post I told you all what I received in my AMAZING Downton Abbey swap package from Ravelry user goodstuff via the Subway Knits Downton Abbey swap. Now it's time to tell you all about the package I put together and how much fun I had doing it!

Teaser photo--here's what I sent to my partner moxydawg:

Downton Abbey Swap 2015: Received!

If you've been following over the past month or so, you'll know that I was involved in a Downton Abbey swap via the Subway Knits podcast. I've shown you all some of the items I've made, though not all, but now that I've gotten my swap package and my partner has received their swap package, I thought I'd take you through what I received (I'll talk more about the package I put together in a later post). It was an awesome swap and super fun and I definitely plan on participating if Maria decides to run it in future years.

First--Here's what I received from my swap partner:

Intrigued? You should be! Let's talk about all of this below.

FO-ish: The Great Knee-High Sock Saga of 2015

I alluded in my last post to not having made very much progress on my resolutions because I spent pretty much all of February that I wasn't in the dye lab or doing freelance design work knitting the same 400yds of BFL into socks. Which still don't entirely fit, by the way. I don't regret my decision to rip out what I had and re-knit the socks, and I learned a lot of valuable things about sizing knee-highs to fit that are coming in handy on my current project, but still... I just took a month to knit pretty much nothing but a pair of socks and I kinda feel like I've let my overly ambitious self down.

So here's how it went:

Resolutions Check-In: February (or when I fell hard off the wagon)

I suppose while I’m sitting here thinking about how I should be writing all sorts of blog posts and then not actually writing them (and digging myself into a bigger hole of “I have to write about all these things and I don’t know where to start” while accumulating more things I have to write about) I may as well start with my February resolutions accountability post.

February. I really dislike February. For so many reasons. First, it’s almost always the point at which I just start to get 100% DONE with winter around here. It’s cold, it sometimes snows but not that much, and all the holidays/my birthday are done. Plus, I was raised to think “March = spring” but around here, it doesn’t. So there’s this part where February feels like a neverending Thursday before the weekend starts and then Friday never actually happens. For someone like me who suffers from the whole reduced photoperiod/Seasonal Affective Disorder business this is bad news. It basically means that although I know there are things I want to be accomplishing, my brain just doesn’t have the motivation to actually accomplish them. And then I feel bad about not accomplishing them. Which leads me to more inability to accomplish things. Add to this that I have (for the past eight years) had a major freelance design/layout project I do for a local non-profit and all the work for that happens in February. Which means that in addition to my regular job and my other hobbies (and now my yarn dyeing job) and my real life, I have to put all that together. Ordinarily, I take a week off of work and I knock most of it out in a week, but this year I had to head to an out-of-town work conference the week I’d be doing that, so I quite literally spent all of February trying to work this in to my spare time. Which means that things like blogging and knitting suffered. Oddly enough . . . yarn dyeing didn’t. Hopefully you’ll be hearing about all of that soon.

So. I’m going to make references to some things here that I meant to blog about and didn’t. It’s my sincerest hope that March and I can make a fresh start and I can actually tell you about all these things in the coming days so you can fill in the gaps. I was trying to put off this post until I managed to post about all the things I’m going to reference, but I realised that if I did that, I’d never get anything posted, so I just have to start here and work backward through time.

All that is a long way of saying, sorry I fell off the posting wagon, I’ll try to be better now. Words you’ve heard before. I really do mean them every time.

Yarn Dyeing: Downton Abbey Exploration

As you know, I’ve been part of a Downton Abbey swap via the Subway Knits podcast since the end of January. As such, I knew that I wanted to dye some yarn for my swap partner that was inspired by her favourite character. I happened to have a random undyed skein in one of the yarn weights she likes that I bought at a sale back when I was still just thinking about perhaps getting started in yarn dyeing, so I didn’t even have to acquire anything . . . except dyes.

I’d fairly exhausted my options when it came to the Jacquard acid dyes and while I know now that I can mix many colours to get what I want, I didn’t know that when I started thinking about colourways. Each of the Crawley women has always had their particular colour (or colours in the case of a few) to me and I knew I wanted to represent them as such. So I spent some time on the Dharma Trading Company site, at the recommendation of someone . . . though I couldn’t say who at this point . . . and found that they had the perfect colours for what I wanted to do: A peach, sage green, rose pink, and a lavender purple. I ordered them immediately and began the wait. After shipping issues (caused by my inability to type numbers in the correct order) and a phone call to Dharma by Jonas (in exchange for ice cream, as per our standard agreement) the order was re-placed and sent with newer, more expedited shipping. I received it last Friday and after acquiring new tester yarn last Saturday, I was on my way.

I first used the test yarn to just find out what the colours were when I mixed them straight, then I began building my colourways. I had a vision for all of them and with minimal mixing/effort on my part, I had produced colourways for Lady Edith, Lady Sybil, Countess Cora, Lady Violet, and Lady Rose by the end of Sunday. I had a brilliant time and everything was filled with fun and magic and I wished ever so much that I could just make this my life full time.

It took me a bit longer to get the yarns finally listed on Etsy (they still need better photos and not all of them have example swatches), because I do actually have a real job and a real life that needed handling, but those five (plus another that I’ll write about later) are now available for sale in my new Etsy shop that will be dedicated to my hand-dyed yarns from here on out.

Here’s a few teaser photos to entice you to purchase!

Yarn Dyeing: Buy All the Undyed Yarns!!!

After my morning in the textile centre dye lab on Friday, I convinced the lovely Jonas to take me back there on Saturday morning. Not for dyeing this time . . . but for a related cause.

I’d gotten an email, I remembered after getting a verbal reminder, that the textile centre was doing a fundraiser on Saturday morning/afternoon. Apparently they’d gotten an incredibly large donation of yarn and fibre from an estate and they were selling it en mass to raise some money for the centre. I had thought about going, but then immediately forgotten that it was happening until the instructor in my dyeing class mentioned it. She went to scout what was available and let us know that there was quite a lot of undyed/white/light coloured yarn on offer. This, of course, piqued my interest, and I asked Jonas if he would mind driving me back over there the next morning so I could see if I could replenish my stock of tester yarns. I’d previously (when I first started dyeing) bought a bunch of yarn on super sale from my LYS that I used as colour testers and practice skeins, but I’d run out and now if I wanted to test a colourway I needed to dye a full skein or else sacrifice a skein that I could be selling as a tester, and neither of those things tends to gain me any money back for a skein. I get that this is part of business, but if I can get non-marketable skeins and use them to experiment then more’s the better, right?

Jonas agreed, because he’s amazingly supportive of my somewhat ridiculous hobby that I pretend is a business, and drove me to the textile centre at 10:30am on a Saturday morning. We got our number and waited for the sale to start, then immediately rushed to the table labeled “wool” in the yarn section. There was far less there than in the “cotton” or “other” sections and far less yarn than fleece and of course far less undyed yarn than already dyed yarn, but! What I found were two LARGE bags of undyed or very light coloured wool for $3US per bag, a box of various skeins of silk for $5US per skein, and a FULL BAG OF 100% SILK SKEINS for $50. There are probably 10 skeins of pure silk in there. Since I’m working on a bunch of Downton Abbey yarns and I figure the Downton ladies would love to be represented in silk, I decided to buy the bag and another tester skein that I can split into 5 parts and try to create the Downton colourways in a bit of luxurious 100% silk. 

The process was quick, painless, fun, and $65US later I came home with this:

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