New Website Y'all!

Hi all,

Fall semester has wrapped so I have a few weeks of time to check back in with you again. Lots has happened over the past months, but I won't take the time to recap them here. If you want to check my Ravelry projects to see what I've been up to, that's cool. If not, also cool.

For now, a quick check in to tell you the exciting news that over the last month I've put in some quality work in what little bits of spare time I could grab creating a new website. It combines the hand-dyed yarns and project bags from my two Etsy sites (girlwhocrafted and 223people) with (eventually) the posts you all see here on my blog. In the future it may also do other things, I have no idea. It was super easy to set up (unsolicited plug for Wix.com) and will hopefully allow me to better manage everything in one space and not pay fees to Etsy for listing and selling items.

For now, the blog posts will also remain on blogger and on Tumblr (until I can figure out a good way to re-direct to the new blog, which likely won't happen until I've got more time) and the two Etsy sites will also remain open for a while as I figure out a way to drive traffic to the new websites. For anyone following me on Twitter, links to new listings will all take you to the new website.

If any of you find any issues with any aspect of the site, please send me a message (there's a contact form on the site, or feel free to leave a comment here) and let me know and I'll see what I can do to fix it.

I'm going to try to resume my 3-days-a-week posting schedule for at least the month I have off school (no promises beyond then, although I'd like to keep it up). There's still crafting going on (LOTS  of project bags!) and I have all sorts of ambitions for the new year. Let's hope these ambitions go better than the last (more on that next week!)

Thanks for those of you who stuck with me through my hiatus and sporadic posting schedule. For those of you just finding the blog, I have ambitions to update regularly, but I'm currently working half-time while getting a masters degree while running a crafting business, so blogging is often the first thing to get pushed to the wayside. At any rate, thanks for being here.

New Year: A Look Backward and A Plan for the Future

Hi there. First of all, wherever you are in the world, happy 2015. I wish you and yours a safe, happy, healthy year.

Now...down to business. First, a little look back at 2104.

I know I've been pretty bad about blogging regularly, and there were a lot of things I wanted to share with you that I simply didn't make the time for. I hope to get better at that in the future (see the plan for the future section), but for now, let's do a little recap of the year and then talk about what I have planned for crafting and blogging in 2015.

Video Game Swap Part 1: Yarn Dyeing

So, now that it’s over and the recipient has received all their things, I can talk about the most recent yarn/knitting/crafting swap I got myself into on Ravelry.

There’s a group called the Odd Duck Swaps of Ravelry, and they organize thematic swaps every single month of the year. The way it works is you generally have about a month to sign up, two months to actually craft/shop/mail the swap package, and then you post a thank you when you’ve received your package and the swap is completed. After hearing about how much fun people were having doing this, I decided to scope out the group. On my first visit there, I found out they were just starting sign-ups for a video game swap.

Now, (without getting into the whole ri-fuckin-diculous gamergate situation) I’m not the sort of person who has ever considered myself a “gamer”. I mean, I usually (but not always) enjoy games when I play them, but I didn’t grow up with video games and I don’t keep up with the latest releases and I don’t have a steam account or any of that. It’s just that it so happens that my first “real” fandom, and the fandom that just won’t quit and I never want to, is for a series of video games. So I’m basically SUPER into one video game and have played a few more and have a general knowledge of even more than that. But still, I thought the swap would be fun and I felt like I was comfortable enough with video games to be able to participate. So I signed up. And it was fun. And I will do more of them in the future, because it turns out I really like making things for someone else and the excitement of seeing their virtual excitement over receiving the items I crafted them.

This post is going to be the first of a two-parter on two of the new(ish) undertakings I began with this swap package. I included more than these things (I knitted this Zelda Triforce Scarf that was easy enough to make, but still deserves mention, for one thing), but these are the two things that really stretched into the crafting me of the future, if you will (and I will . . . sorry, that’s a reflexive inside joke that zero of you reading this will understand.)
Without further ado . . . yarn dyeing!

My recipient mentioned that their favourite game was Baten Kaitos, which is a Dreamcast (I think) game that I had never heard of, but my far more knowledgeable gamer husband and his college roommate had spent time playing. Because this game is old and I think it has a pretty small fanbase, there isn’t any merchandise out there for it AT ALL. This is okay, since my recipient also mentioned that they like Zelda and Skylanders and all sorts of things that have way more popularity than Baten Kaitos, but as a person who’s only into video games that have next-to-no crafting fanbase (as in, there aren’t indie dyed yarns or fabrics or patterns or any of that) I sort of knew how excited the recipient would be if something from a fandom you don’t expect to see anything from showed up in the package. So, since I’m newly immersed in a commitment to yarn dyeing, I decided to make my first real yarn dyeing adventure something inspired by my recipient’s favourite charater in Baten Kaitos, Kalas.
 
So, going off the photos I could find online, it seems like the character wears a light blue and darker blue armour set offset with brown leather strappings, so I decided that my yarn was going to be the dark blue transitioning into brighter blue and then the leathery brown. The bare yarn I selected to dye was a fingering weight 75% superwash wool, 25% nylon yarn. I had three 50g skeins, but this was my first time dyeing and I didn’t want to screw up three skeins of yarn in the event that everything went horribly wrong, so I only dyed one of them. I knew this would mean that I was giving the recipient barely enough yarn to do anything with and really it would be better if I could dye two skeins at once and at least give 100g, but I was really afraid of messing it up. Turns out I had no need, because this yarn is one of the best I’ve made to date. That could be because I’m a sucker for the blue/brown variegation, but all reports from those who’ve seen it in person are that it’s pretty badass.

I dyed the whole thing with Wilton’s Icing Gels using a plain stainless steel kitchen pot. Minimal mess, no harsh chemicals, beautiful colour. I highly recommend this method for anyone who might be thinking about dyeing some yarn, but doesn’t have a large kitchen or space for extra equipment or is even just a little nervous about the harsh chemicals in a working kitchen like I was. I’ve since dyed 20 more skeins of yarn in various colourways using this methodology, and the only thing I haven’t been able to get right so far is grey. Not a bad track record, and I hope you’ll all follow along with me on my yarn dyeing journey as I grow into this and figure it out and post all the pictures of my progress here for you to see. If you follow me on Instagram, you'll probably get a quicker peek at what I'm working on, but I'll make sure that everything eventually gets posted here as well!

To start . . . here’s a few photos of the special edition Baten Kaitos – Kalas yarn I did for this swap. Not bad for a first start, if I may say so myself!

 


Stay tuned for part 2 of the swap, where I give you a detailed tutorial on how I made a project bag!