The Spin goes on, Yada, Yada Yeah

Well, as predicted this was a week from Hades, but I have survived with help from my good friend, and co-worker, Karen. Thanks so much for all your help, girl friend! Three hours in on Saturday finished up the torture and now I hope it is clear sailing for a month. We got a good audit report in the end, so I guess that is all that really matters in the end.

So, in case your wondering about my over dying experience on Monday here is the result, although, I did change my mind at the last second and used turquoise instead of black to darken up that purple skein in the post below, (please scroll down just a bit!) and this is the result:

It's not real striking looking at it by itself, actually, but when I put it with the Goblin, it really looks like I know what I'm doing! lol So, what do you all think?



I am now leaning towards the mitered afghan from the Mason Dixon Knitting fame to work up this yarn. I plan to roll the yarn this afternoon and start on it tonight, probably. I am trying something different with the pictures, although I am not looking entirely successful, but I guess I'll let it go.














One more thing going in the wings right now (well, other than the Kai, which I did get my yarn for, thank you Karen, from Two Swans Yarns!) is the gloves:

One pinky done twice as the first one was kinda tight, even for my bitty pinky, so I ripped it out and started again. Then Monday rolled around and you know the rest from there.

Chris and Caryn go off to UK to sign her up for classes next semester, and to pick up Bryan, he will start his Spring Break on Friday. Next year, they will have a car and can come and go as they please, which will please us to no end. Getting them both up there at the same time will be a problem tho! Well, off to the shower for me, I hope you all have a great week!

Please don't be shy about comments, I really love to hear from people, so I know this is actually worth the effort! :)

Forays With the Dye Pot

So, do you all remember my dilemma with the bobbins of Goblin Eyes?

Do I want to ply the two bobbins together? Do I want to Navajo ply? Do I want to ply from a ball? So what do I decide to do? I always hem and haw, do I want to spin the fiber then dye or dye and spin the fiber?? See all this procrastinating going on? And the bobbins are still not plyed! lol,

All rightly then, I decided to dye up some roving dying yesterday! I think, that a really deep purple would look fabulous with Goblin and, well, I have lots of Romney roving (I love Melissa from Skylines Farms) so I will dye up roving! This roving from a ewe named Peggy Sue in the following experiment.

One messy kitchen counter! Note the note pad so I can recreate this again, although I'm not sure this is exactly what I was going for! Here is one dyepot with 8 oz of roving, at this point I am thrilled and thinking I got exactly what I had planned, well, not quite eggplant color, but a really deep purple anyway!

All right, so lets lift it out of the dyepot, after 30 minutes of simmering:

Well, %$#@^&*! What, what, what is this?? Fuchia and blue-purple?? Apparantly the dyes need to be pureed together or the dye paste needed further mixing or something I don't know what! This is quite a bummer I must say!

Here it is drying on the clothes rack:

I am planning to put it through the carder this morning before spinning to try to homogenize the colors a bit. It wasn't a total failure, I think it will go well with the Goblin Eyes, look here:

Dyeing Can be Quite Trying!

Hey guys!! Well, here it is a week later and can you believe that we finally got a couple of rain showers here! Wow, who knew that the weather was such an event in Franklin, KY? The temperatures have come down (yeah, to the 80's and 90's) and we are enjoying huge reductions in humidity so all is well again. We are still in drought conditions, but we have a little hope now!

Caryn has made her choice in the naming of this dyed wool and yarn. She chose Peggy's entry of Painted Desert. So, Peggy, the next time you come to knitting night at B&N I will have the yarn waiting for you! On this same vein, I have to show you all what a cool thing my sister in law, Carol sent to me:I was so darned impressed with this that I am going to send Carol the other skein of the Denim sock yarn! As you all know, I am a bit impaired when it comes to my photos and this combination just knocked my socks off!

Ok, so I got a lot of Painted Desert spun up and then I started to ply:

I think I am partial to these colors - what do you think? lol! Here is some on the Jumbo Bobbin:
After completion, I wound it up on the yarn skeiner, and this showed me that I got 346.5 yards out of this run,
but it also showed me that I had extra dye in the skein - Damn it!
I sort of tension the yarn coming off the bobbin as it goes onto the skeiner, which is how the extra came off like this. But, this skein is the most perfectly balanced skein I have ever made (doesn't that just figure).


so, I was in quite a quandary, what do I do now? Well, I don't want to go to all the work and have it run in a sweater, so I am washing the wool again. . . and again until it doesn't run any longer. Here is the skein pre-washed and a bit fuzzy with Georgia:

If I get to it, I will try to put up the skein after the wash later! What a drag! I have ordered some citric acid powder and some retayne to try to avoid this issue in the future. I just hope enough of the dye will remain to make this a fight worth fighting!