Hi There Hammy

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?

I finished a cardigan I’ve been working on (for what seems like a small eternity)! Oh it feels so good to call something “done”. But it’s not done, not really. I might still get an urge to embroidery more bits of this and that… and I might put some buttons on, just for show. But for now, I’m satisfied. The pattern is for a Featherweight Cardigan by knitbot. It was a pretty great pattern, you knit the cardigan from the top downwards, which is unusual. I used the same yarn I made my last pair of fingerless mittens out of (Knitpicks’ Palette). I’d never embroidered anything on something I’d knit before and it was surprisingly easy. I think it helped that the stitches are so small and even. Perfect!

A few days ago, I posted the results of some hard work involving soap, wool and a spinning wheel. Now it’s time to look at the same wool once it’s met some knitting needles! I took the yarn I spun and knit Joe one half a pair of socks. One sock took an entire spool of yarn… that’s a really big foot. They are most definitely the largest socks I’ve ever knit… and a big contrast to the tiny baby shoes I’ve been knitting.

Socks for size 13 foots…

I hand carded and spun the wool so I would have sections of dark, medium and light colored wool. Joe took wool from the same fleece and ran it through a drum carder which blended all of the different fibers together. This made an evenly medium grey batch of wool roving without the variation that I like so much. It was a much faster process though…

Now it’s time to get down with that second sock!

I found an old ball of bulky yarn that I’d spun months ago when I got my first batch of wool from Bonnieview. I decided to try dying it with a packet each of the blue and purple kool-aid. Turns out that the purple overwhelmed the blue but the end result is a fairly nice light purple yarn with flecks of cyan here and there. I like it much better than the crazy “Caution Orange” I made a last week, to say the least.

I knit another pair of baby shoes using the Babystovler pattern from Handmade by Calista. The process of working my way through the leftover bits of yarn and through the yarn I don’t like is fairly addicting and baby things are small enough that I can bust through a walnut-sized ball of yarn and wind up with a pair of useful and sweet little shoes! That is my definition of satisfaction.

Joe and I slopped our way down to the farm to empty our compost bin and we stopped by to see the new piglets! The second pig just had her litter of piggies yesterday, and you can see the other sow in the background with her litter. In amongst the new piggies, there’s a wee black one with white socks on his feet. They are so tiny and wriggly that it was hard to get a good picture. The sow never pulled her head out of the hay burrow she had made, but her grunting got louder when she heard us come in. Oh mama-piggy, your babies are so tiny and sweet! Still, I know what they’ll look like in a couple of months: big piggies.

I read a tutorial on dying yarn with a crockpot and kool-aid and thought “Well, why not?” So I skipped down to the village store, bought a packet of each flavor and spun up two spindles worth of yarn. I soaked the yarn as soon as I was done spinning it and then followed the directions in the tutorial. About an hour later I had a ton of yarn pretty bright orange and salmon yarn that smelled like hot juice. I wanted to make a yarn that went from yellow, to orange, to red then to blue and back through the colors again. Turns out the kool-aid in the blue pouch is NOT blue. No, it’s also red. The same red as the stuff in the red pouch. SNAP. I was hoping to work some purples and greens in with that blue pouch and instead I have something crossed between sherbert and construction site.

But, now it’s been two days and I’m getting over the initial peevishness. The colors are starting to grow on me, to the point where I’m even starting to think of some projects I can work it in to. Next time, it’s blue all the way baby. If I can find a wrapper that doesn’t lie, lie, LIE.

Oh, and it was a great tutorial, so if you’re interested in spending the minimum amount of time and money dying something, this is definitely the way to go.

Not this Christmas but the one before that my Grandmother Joyce gave me about five balls of self-striping yarn and I’ve moved it through a few houses since then without using is. Until now, that is. I rediscovered it two days ago and I had this instant flash of genius: an 80′s sweater for the sweet Willow. And oh man, it turned out perfectly! I just did about five inches of ribbing for her tum tum then just knit back and forth until it was about the right length, went back to knitting four more inches of ribbing and I was done. VOILA! A perfect Winky sweater.

Unfortunately she’s still itchy whenever we put clothing on her and this sweater is no exception. She looks sporty anyway.

Sigh… I still have four balls of yarn. Maybe Monty needs a matching cape?

I can’t believe I sold that last pair of mittens within 24 hours of posting them (Thank you!). These were the mittens I was talking about when I posted the last pair…

They’re knit from the same yarn, just a different set of colors and I made up a different pattern. Unfortunately this kind of pattern is much more time consuming than the last pair so they won’t be going up on etsy (I didn’t keep track of how long it took me to knit the last pair, but these took me about ten hours to wip up… that’s like the entire Lord of the Rings box set… with commentary). These are for Hannah hands and OH how I love them! I’m starting another pair with the same yarn from the other pair but a different pattern. Those WILL go up on etsy when I’m through. Keep your eyes peeled for a few more pairs in THIS yarn later…. hopefully with a more economically feasible pattern.

I’ve made myself some sockies from a book I got over Christmas from a wool/silk blend  yarn I got over the break too. They turned out so warm and cushy that I think I’ll order a box full of yarn and try it again!

With a name like “Cosmos” how can a yarn NOT be as awesome!? I’m glad I got some… plus I managed to knit these for about $4 in materials (labor sooo doesn’t count, kay?).