Projects Started and Projects Updated

Before I talk about anything I'd like to remind one and all, before Monday:

Do Not Forget to enter my Yarn Giveaway to
celebrate my 100th post!

I'll draw probably about 5:00pm EST I think, and I'll count all entries up until I've run the numbers through random.com.

So, on to other cool business! I've been a busy bee so far this weekend! On top of a TON of homework that needs to get done, I've been taking time out to both finish up a few projects around the house, and then to start a few new ones.

Remember when I posted about my room change around? You've seen pictures of how the dining room came out, but here's the other end of the house where the credenza came from and the chest got moved to.


The picture was there originally over top of the credenza; we just swapped out for the chest in the same spot. The peg rack we made and hung last weekend out of just a 1x4 and some wooden pegs painted green. Just 10 minutes ago I finished throwing together that little no-sew slip cover for the piece of foam on top of the chest. Now I have a cute spot for people to take their shoes off and hang up their coats! All in all this project cost me maybe $20 in fabric (entry and dining room together) for a look that has really made me feel like the house has been jazzed up!

Does this little bird guy look familiar? He was a left over scrap from the blinds re-do that is in the picture above. I liked him so much I put him in a frame and hung in the next room!


So that was tonight. hehe LAST night I decided to take my own advice and I started to unravel one of the sweaters that was in my frog pond. This one was 50/50 Wool and acrylic and it's VERY bulky. I've been enjoying knitting in bulky lately so I thought this would energize me. And has it ever!


As you can see I'm not quite done and I already have a whole lot of this stuff. I love it! This morning I decided to try and see if wool/acrylic blends could take colour and the answer is well... yes. But not how you would expect it to.


This came out much greyer than I imagined it would, but that's okay. It's not a large piece and I used a TON of colour (both Kool Aid and food colouring) in blue with a touch of red added so it wasn't so bright. I think I'm going to use it as a contrast for my first project.

Which was to be, I decided with yarn in hand, to start those sock-slippers that I've been promising Mr. Pie. My problem in the past is I've always hated doing the whole double pointed needles thing. This time I went in search of a Two Circulars pattern for socks and found Silver's Toe-Up on Circulars Tutorial.


I can not tell you guys how stoked I am about this. I am SO excited I found a way I actually LIKE to knit socks! I only have two circulars in the right size and length in about two sizes, so I'm really really hoping that Santa is going to bring me a set of Knit Picks Interchangables for Christmas! ;)

I only have a few Christmas items left to finish, but mostly small stuff. Package toppers and some smaller gifts. I love it! I just have Mr. Pie to worry about now!

Even More Christmas

These Christmas gifts really are flying off my needles, which is probably good since I'm starting classes in TWO DAYS!!! AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

Yes. :ahem: Back to knitting. This is my brother's gift, or at least part of it:

Rugged Camper Cookset

He's a tough one to shop for, but he has recently moved out and got a place all of his own. I think I'll send along this oven mitt-like thingy along with a (yet to be started) double-knitted trivet in the same colours. I just need a small piece of leather for a handle, and this will be complete. I'll think of some other little kitchen goodies to send with it.

And I told you I had some more pink in the crock pot last night, right? Well, when I pulled it out I decided I wanted something with a little more zest for Lila's Brain Monster , so I added 7 or 8 drops of red food colouring and put the yarn back in the crock pot for about an hour. Here's what I have so far:

I'm really a huge fan of the variation that I got in this ball! I think this is going to be SO FREAKING CUTE!! Now... I need to find some big googly eyes...

Contributions

I've learned not to cast on one project directly after finishing another. My brain is normally a little shot and I'm still on a cool high from finishing. hehe So yesterday, after completing the Kimono, I decided to get right on some dying that I promised my Mom. She's crocheting a baby blanket for my baby niece and I wanted to get some of my hand dyed yarn in there! :)

Since the rest of the blanket is in solid colour stripes (and I didn't think a multi-colour yarn would look right) I immediately thought of the crock pot, a method I hadn't tried yet.

Yarn Soup

I used a single packet of grape for one ball, and then a single packet of an off brand strawberry lemonade for the other. After soaking the yarn I just plopped it in to room temperature water along with the entire packet. The thing I liked about the crock pot method was that after turning it on, I could walk away for hours and not have to worry about accidentally felting or anything. I pulled it out after a bunch of time (when I remembered that it was still going in the kitchen... lol) and hung it to dry outside.

In the end, I got a pretty semi-solid colour:

There's some light and dark in these that aren't very apparent in the photo. I think they'll both look great in with the yellows and greens in the blanket. Now let's just hope that Mum's allergy to wool doesn't extend to crocheting with it. ;)

I have another ball of pink going now that will end up as a Brain Monster for Chris's niece, Lila.

I've Been a Busy Girl!

OH my gosh you guys! Today was the last day of my long weekend and I got to spend the whole day at home playing with yarn! First of all, let me back up to last night.

I didn't mention my new ball winder in yesterday's post because I thought it deserved a post all by itself. I can not tell you guys how cool this thing is and how easy it is making my life! Here's the picture of the version that I bought from Knit Picks. This was about half the price of any of the others I found, but I knew I'd have to pay shipping. I thought I may as well buy yarn too and get up to $50 so the shipping is free 'cause it's kinda like you're getting free yarn then. hehe


It's sitting mounted in it's permanent location on the side of my desk. And boy has it been broken in! hehe I started last night with the large skein of yarn I had dyed successfully a few days ago. This was probably a mistake because the skein itself was pretty messy and very tangley. Mr. Pie ended up getting a shot of me creating my first "cake" :


That took a long time and was very tedious. lol Going around and around in a circle on my desk chair, foot on the yarn so it didn't pull up and get tangled worse. BUT it was worth it, because it turned in to THIS:

Num num num.

After that success, there was no holding me back! I started turning anything in sight in to a ball. Then I got out one of the two identical red turtleneck sweaters that I bought and went to town. It was so thrilling to watch the yarn from the sweater flying out and in to a ball! I have no idea how many yards I have from that sweater, but it's a LOT. AND I have a second sweater the exact same colour still yet to frog! I was on a roll, is what I'm sayin'. Not to be stopped, Mr. Pie and I put on a pot of chai tea and I started taking apart that cream coloured angora/nylon blend sweater that I bought for 50 cents from the neighbor's garage sale. By around midnight, this is what the stack beside my desk looked like:

After reading up on the subject a little, I learned that nylon behaves very similarly to protein fiber and therefore can be dyed with regular food colouring and kool aid, like my other yarn. An idea was hatched. I finished taking apart the angora blend sweater in to pieces but waited on frogging it, deciding to try my hand at some garment dying. This is where you dye a finished piece of fabric and then frog it afterward. I was looking for a way to get a really cool light to dark gradient through an entire skein of yarn and not as a pattern repeat in stripes. Does that make sense?

With that idea in mind, my day ended up here, with all parts and pieces of the recycled sweater dyed and hanging to dry:

I took this liberty to experiment a whole lot with different dyeing methods and also with both food colouring and Kool Aid combined. As much for myself and my own records as for your benefit, I'll tell you what I did and how I did it. hehe


This was the first of the gradient garment dyes! I haven't skeined up any of the others but I wanted you to see the colour differences. When it's in a ball, it just looks like this:


You can see that it's the darker green in the middle and then it goes to lighter green on the outside, but you can't really see the different shades side by side.

Okay, so for this one that I started out (after letting it soak, of course) with the whole sleeve of the sweater in my pot on the stove along with one pack of lemon-lime kool aid. I let that get up to temperature (just before boiling, no bubbles) and let it sit for a few minutes, then I pulled the whole thing out and put it on a plate. The water was almost clear. I added a few drops of green food colouring, then put most of the sleeve back in, leaving out the tip. I repeated this process, lifting out the sleeve, adding more green, and then putting in a little less of the sleeve than was in before. I got the darkest green by adding just a touch of grape kool aid along with more green dye for the last step.



I really like these colours together, don't you? The brown reminds me of a great worn in leather, and the blue-green really reminds me of turquoise. Anyway. lol The brown I garment dyed with straight food colouring exactly like how I explained above. I followed the recipe for the brown colour on the package: 5 drops green, 3 drops red, 6 drops yellow. The turquoise colour I did just an all over dye by putting a tad more blue than green and submerging the whole thing and just leaving it alone. I'm thinking I might want to try some "fake isle" technique with these.


With this one I tried something totally different. This piece of the sweater was the cowl neck part and it was very long and knit in the round. I put half the fabric in a drinking glass (about 8 oz) with one pack of grape off brand kool aid, and the other side in a glass with a pack of dark cherry kool aid. I had to dip the center part in a bit of both so it was wet and coloured, then I put it in the microwave for two minutes. I waited for it to cool almost completely (that took quite a while) and then I rewetted the center section and went for another two minutes. The results are very pretty, I think. In person I don't think it's nearly as purple as the photo came out and much more reddish. I don't know what I'll use this for but I like it.

Now I just have to see if there's room in my stash for all this yarn! SQUEE! :D

Dying Success!

Finally! I managed to get a decent skein of yarn from dying! This time, I took a different approach instead of full immersion. This was my before shot. It's a light blue 85% wool, 15% polyester that I received from my first ever swap! Pretty, but I thought it could be cooler.


So I dunked it in water, and got to work:


While that was soaking, I prepared the dining room table by covering it with newspaper and then laying the saran wrap in a big rectangle to put the very long yarn on top of. I knew I wanted to try to do a hand painted/ self-striping kind of thing. While the water was doing its thing, I mixed up my dyes. Originally I thought I would try for a tonal look with a darker blue and a purple, but once I looked through my koolaid stash I realized that I didn't have grape, but I had a ton of cherry and dark cherry. A plan formed: light blue, dark dark blue, and hopefully purplish with a light red dye and the blue yarn mixing. This plan was foiled when I opened up what I thought was blue dye (because of the package colour) and realized that it was actually red dye. lol

Not to be dissuaded, I changed the plan again! Going back to the stash I grabbed some green and a new idea was hatched: dark red, lt. red, purplish, and green. I mixed 1/2 pack of cherry kool aid with 8 ounces of water, then the other half of that with a bit of dark cherry and 8 oz, and then the green with 8oz, with the plan to leave the other fourth of the skein in it's natural light blue. Here it is in progress:


After the yarn was painted, I wrapped it up tight in the saran wrap and made it in to a kind of cinnamon bun looking thingy and it did a couple of short two minute stints in the microwave. (I would show you the microwave picture, but I didn't notice until I saw the picture on the computer screen how badly our microwave needs to be wiped down!)

And then... outside to dry:


After only a few hours of hanging, I twirled it up in to this:




Taa-Daa! It turned out mostly red, with some lighter and some darker, the green sorta mixed with the red in places to get me a more tonal red/green colour. There is definitely some purple that peeks out and even some pink in places. I love how it contrasts against the startkness of the light blue. It might be destined to be a hat for someone... moi perhaps? We'll see!

Dye Job #2

This is a warning for all yarnies who are faint of heart, the following photo is very disturbing.


This is a photo of a tragic accident involving a full 50 yard skein of my beloved recycled angora blend yarn, painstakingly frogged by this author with her own two hands. On the evening of Wednesday, July 15th, approximately 8:30 pm when all other skeins were being extracted from their bath in the washing machine, this poor skein was left behind. Then later in the evening when this author inserted other clothing in to the washing machine to be cleaned, it was agitated to and fro with said towels and jeans.

RIP this yarn! *sniff* Knowing that this skein wouldn't want it's short existence to be completely in vain, I decided to use it's remains for the scientific kool aid experimentation.

This was the result:


Not bad, right? This time I used strawberry with a bit of grape mixed in and I mixed the kool aid in a glass ahead of time. I didn't *quite* cover the yarn so that there would be a few different levels of colour. I think if I really could knit with this, it would be pretty. lol

At the end of frogging that sweater I had about 15 yards left that I decided to experiment with at the same time using a lemonade kool aid. The results didn't work out quite as well.


I think this was about 1 1/2 packs of the lemonade and you can kinda tell it's yellowy-er, but it didn't turn the already tan parts green as I had hoped.

So this experiment wasn't quite as bad as my first, and hopefully my next won't be quite as bad as this. I'm thinking of buying a few of those 100% wool balls that I posted below, but I don't even want to waste the money on that if I'm just going to mess it up! Still, not a complete disaster is an improvement. I'm optimistic about the future yet again.

Attempt #1: Epic Failure

I suppose it was bound to happen eventually, right? I've been trying so many new crafts lately and, mostly successful with these endeavors, so I was totally due to fall flat on my face at something.

So I tried the KoolAid dyeing this morning, with much trepidation, on my newly frogged (recycled) yarn angora/wool/nylon blend from this sweater:


If you can tell it's terribly fuzzy but it's oh so soft! It's also got a tan strand and a white strand that runs all the way through the yarn, which I was hoping would make for an interesting colour variation. So here's what I started with:


So I did my reserach on Ravelry with the help of some very knowledgeable women, then got to work. At first I poured both packets of Orange koolaid in to the bowl, decided that was way too much, dumped out 2/3 of the bowl and added more water, THEN dunked in the yarn. This was my first result:



Soooo... I was thinking that the Nylon probably wouldn't absorb as much of it, right? And well maybe by only doing 4 rounds of 2 minutes in the microwave it won't soak in quite so much. Ummm... not so much. Traffic Cone Orange wasn't my goal. So I decided I would try to put the red over the top to make it more... oh I dunno... reddy-orange like a fall colour. Here's my second result:


Better, right? But still NEON. I guess I"ll have to find some green dye if I want to muddy it up some? Or you know... just knit it as my swatch piece for gauge and be DONE with it. LOL Oh, and I totally didn't use gloves either! Hehehe! I'm typing this post with some very red finger tips!


So now I'm at an impasse. Do I use more of this soft cuddly yarn to keep experimenting with? Or do I just knit it up in it's boring white/tan colour way? I'm thinking it's bulky enough and that I'll have enough of it (about 600 yards?) that I can knit something pretty nice.

I would really appreciate any feed back from the more experienced dyers! What the heck did I do wrong and how do I do it right next time? LOL