Hi There Hammy

Unbelievably rad…

Seventeen Evergreen – Polarity Song from Lucky Number Music on Vimeo.

The newest skeins, hot off the wheel!

You can also see my first forays into “bulky” spinning. I’ve been able to spin super thin yarn and ply it together to make something along the lines of “fingering weight” yarn which is great for light weight things (see the grey and greeny-yellow skeins) but if I want to knit something with a little more oomph to it, I need to learn how to spin a heavier yarn. Take a gander at the blue skein to see how I’m doing! There is much progress to be made but I’m pretty satisfied with what I’ve figured out so far…

I believe that this might make me a groupie….

Sir Linus accompanied me to work yesterday and spent the day hanging out, mugging for the ladies and being generally the cutest bunny to ever hop around the office. He also starred in his very own video… but, more on that another time. I can’t wait to see it, and I’m sure you can’t either!

A little bit of sunshine from my desk to you!

Jody has been a busy duck dyeing yarn in the fiber arts room on campus. She used a variety of natural dyes to get these wonderful colors: logwood, indigo, cochineal, onion skins, walnut, weld… and a whole passel of other dyestuffs I can’t remember at the moment. I hope MY summer will be filled with such things too!

I’ve been hitting up the Kool-Aid again…

I recently inherited a crock pot (thank you!) and I’ve taken it on a maiden voyage. Not with the usual beans, soups and hunks of meaty bits, mind you. I’ll be cooking beans and soups in it this winter but I have more pressing needs in the mean time involving bland white wool and wee packages of instant happy. Kool-Aid! There is a wonderful tutorial about dying with Kool-Aid here, so I won’t go into the whole process, just bits here and there.

Read on if you want the color key to the skeins above:

The mouth-puckeringly red red at the back of the photo was covered with Black Cherry and a little tiny bit of the Orange. Just a smidge.

The peachy color was from and exhaust bath (someone had already used the water to dye something mouth-puckeringly orange + a little red and had some colored water left over) with a little bit of Lemonade and Pink Lemonade sprinkled over it.

The red stripped skein was dyed with Black Cherry with 1/2 submerged in a very dye-intense water bath, then 1/4 in a mildly dye-infused bath and then the last bit submerged in a very watery dye bath. Nice, no?

The green and yellow were from straight-up Lemonade and Lemon Lime.

The purpley-blue is from the Grape “flavored” Kool-Aid. 1/2 the skein was submerged with Grape sprinkled heavily over it and the other 1/2 was dipped in the exhaust bath afterward. Turns out the pinks and blues in the purple coloring like to separate, leaving a neat speckled coloration.

Happy Winter Everyone!

We’ve finally had enough light at the end of the day for me to pop outside and take some pictures of all the yarn I’ve been dying! From the bottom to the top: Gross, half washed llama dyed with Coreopsis flowers from the dye garden here at Sterling, white wool dyed using goldenrod flowers, white wool dyed with goldenrod leaves and white wool dyed with goldenrod leaves then over-dyed with indigo to make a nice grassy green! All of these were mordanted with alum. Ta Dah! I’m working on spinning enough white to make a sweater and then I’ll use the top two skeins for some sort of pattern.

The story of Joe’s socks has come to an end (at least when it comes to the making-of-the-socks part). Here they are, together at last and on to the next adventure: being worn and keeping feet warm. Now you can see the whole process from start (the shearing of the sheep) to middle (the processing of the wool) to end (the knitting of the socks). The second sock wound up with some pretty sweet stripe action happening because there were some huge patches of white on that half of the fleece. It was so much fun knitting along just to see what color would come up next! Now… what’s next?