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:

Boredom Sets In with the old WIPs

I have been just having a heck of a time getting excited about what is on the needles. Maybe it is my New Year's Resolution of "Thou must finish one of your WIPs before Thou starts a new Project." I was trying to do this with Spinning fiber and Knitting objects, but apparently that is just too darn hard for this gal.

I did get Colette plied up (276 yards in this skein) and here she sits on the jumbo bobbin and with Georgia and Painted Desert:


So that is looking good for the Mill Pond jacket I want to make by Ron Schweitzer. Remember that I need five colors and it looks like these are going to be three of them, however, I am not 100% sure about the Painted Desert staying in the mix since the last skein I set the twist on still bled, and I don't want all my hard fair isle work to go to waste. . . I will try one more time to set the color and if that doesn't work, I will have to try Plan B. Plan B includes more pinks being spun up from another source!

So since I reasoned that I did finish the two bobbins of Colette, (let's not mention that the basket still holds a lot of her fiber, tho) and I got two new bobbins in the mail this week, I started this fiber called Blackberry by Loop:
I think I have dyed and gone to heaven! This is some amazing stuff, made out of alpaca and bamboo and the smallest bit of glitz! I am aiming for mittens for some recipient for next year's Christmas gift. The stats are that I am getting approximately 28 wpi and all in all I think I'm in love! I personally think she is a bit pricey, ($15 for 3 oz) but the ease of spinning this has made up for it in spades! Caryn took this picture with her new camera, but I have decided that getting a good shot of wpi is just about impossible!

And here is the bobbin getting started, I think I got interrupted about a bazillion times, so this was it yesterday. I did use the method that Vicki showed us way back in April 2007 to start the leader on this new bobbin. It works really well and I highly recommend it!

Hope you all are not experiencing the avoidance problems I am with your knitting and you all have a great week!

A disjointed tale follows, be warned!

It got me! The creepin' crud that was going around the office just before we left for our Holidays got me. Unfortunately, I wasn't worth the words on this page last week. But all my work was due to the Corporate Office, so, I went to work. Finally took half a day on Friday, and yeah I went home and slept. . . and slept.

But ya know. . . .

Caryn's birthday was yesterday!!! She turned the big 18! OH WOW! No more kiddos at this house and that's the truth. So, here's the Birthday girl and her doggy:

Jake is everybody's dog, he's not picky, and we all love him to pieces. Bailey on the other hand is partial to Caryn and Chris. So, there you go.

We went to the Cheesecake Factory for lunch, since we can never seem to time it right to get there for dinner without a 2 hour wait. We brought the family, and her best friend, Whittney. She got a fabulous camera (Sony W-55) for her present, and more ice cream cake for dinner - Lord, we were so full! I think sometimes she still feels like it should be more of a party, but how do you do that? Well, in the end, I think she had a good birthday.

Bryan goes back to UK today, and it's been told that Caryn has decided she wants to go to UK next year. So, Mama will need to work for at least a year and a half I think to keep them both there for the next year and a half! Who wants to retire anyway? Naw- I really don't want to retire, I just want to do something a little more fun than spend 9-10 hours a day looking at numbers for people that don't understand numbers! Maybe a fiber shop? With yarn? Well, you know I did get my back room cleaned up which starts all these thoughts -

Ok, enough dreaming! You know, when I'm sick, I spin. . . here is one 4oz bump of Goblin Eyes:
And here is another:

These came out so very differently, that I think I have no choice but to ply from the ball - arrgh! So, you should see that next week. . .

Mama is still feeling funky, so Nitro says Bye till next week! (Oh what a gorgeous cat!)

It's all in the numbers. . .

This week the magic number was 24:











I understand that may not mean a lot to you right now, but let me clarify for you! See, as we have established in some of my previous posts, I really like knitting the challenge, like doilies and fair isle and arans! So, it feels like I have knit a mile on Caryn's Charm Wrap, when in actuality I have only knit 24 inches. . . that's, 1,182 feet, not even a quarter mile, but it's 1,182 feet of yarn, or 24 inches of almost exclusive stockinette!!

Lord! Help me! She wants this wrap to go just a little bit past her arse, so, it has felt like I have been knitting a long time just to reach her armpits! lol! I have two fronts and two arms to go! Well, who am I to complain? I normally only knit for myself as no one in my family wants a hand knit as they are all too warm blooded, so I will stop now. It has been rainy and gloomy here lately ( I am not complaining, just stating facts). So the pictures are hard to get the right colors, and here is Nitrous helping me measure, just to be sure I do it right. . .

Um, well, maybe he just wants to eat the tape measure! I literally had to beat him away from the board to measure this back, and I don't usually pin out to measure, however, since this is for someone other than myself, I want it to be right, so I am taking all precautions!

Ok, on to other items: I took Friday off with all kinds of plans to spin and knit all weekend, well, we all know what happens to plans, but I did try to spin up this roving I bought from a vendor on Etsy:

But what, what, what? Is this?

Well, it is full of that - you can put your own choice of words in here. So, it makes for slow spinning and a lot of this:

I am working to get enough yarn to make Knucks from Knitty. Here is the bobbin almost finished, I hope to complete the spinning today, and ply next weekend after it rests for a while.

The sun has finally come out and these are pretty close on the correct color - so I hope to so you some yarn next weekend!

My Cup Runneth Over . . .

It is so cool to have friends that will drop everything on a Saturday afternoon, just to come over and visit. I had some sock yarn that I offered to trade/or give to Ashley, a friend from my knitting group. Somehow, RoLynn, (Ashley's Mom) met Peggy on the internet, who is another friend of mine, and she knew about our group of knitters from meeting me on the internet and now we are all great friends. Isn't that cool? I mean what did we all do before this technology was available, anyway?

Anyway, I digress. . . as usual, I know. So, Ashley and RoLynn came to visit yesterday and it was really so fun to sit around and talk knitting and spinning with other people that "get it" and well, it was just cool. So, RoLynn traded me some wool for some sock yarn, Lookey what she gave me:

Silk and Cotton:
And straight Silk:

And Mohair:
So tell me, how does a person who has only known you for approximately two or three months get every color you love in one fell swoop?! I love them all, but I am a bit worried about the silk and the silk and cotton, as those are fibers I have not spun before! Well, they will just have to come back over to help teach me! :)

The Helmlock is almost a finished object:

The rows are definitely long now, and I only have so much free time don'tcha know! I hope to finish this week- I am getting kind of anxious to see it blocked out - plus I am trying to finish that sock and my Kai Cardigan is now being worked on again since I figured out the V-Neck shaping on it and I am on my way - I hope to post about that soon. How many of you guys really know the procedure of creating your neckline in the round? Yeah, there isn't much published on it is there? So, maybe my findings will help.

Chris has continued to finish up the barn now that it is not 100 degrees plus outside, he was playing with Bailey and Caryn got this really good shot of him at lunch yesterday:


I was so proud of my daughter, Caryn this past week. She joined the National Honor Society at school, this year. (I think she finally understands that it helps with scholarships and such when applying to colleges.) The team took a trip to Bowling Green on Thursday for team debates and exams competing with the other schools in our district. Well, she got second place with her testing for spelling. We thought it was pretty cool!

Three Skeins of Georgia -

So, I have been spinning. . . bet you didn't know. . . I got a shipment from Wooly Wonka Fiber's as I am in Anne's Exotic Fiber Club. This shipment was for 4 oz. of the most white Cormo roving I have ever seen!! Since my wheel was in a prime spot for moving out bobbins, I started spinning some of it up:

I know, that's not a bobbin, but look at how white that roving is!! Ok, I have to admit, it's not my favorite to spin. It is very soft, yes, and it is very well prepared, but I still end up with itty bitty nups that do pick out, but drive me nutty. I don't think that soft fine wools can be prepared without these bugger's, which is why I sold a whole prepared fleece of Cormo from OVF. I just couldn't stand the nupps, and it feels like I have to practically watch every second or the fiber pulls away from me! I don't remember either of these problems with some hand dyed merino I started with on Tina, so maybe this is indicative of Cormo. I don't know, but here is my spinning so far:


So, the reason I was ready to start this is I had another full bobbin of Georgia ready to ply with it's mate on the Lazy Kate. So, this afternoon, I plied, and plied, and plied:

It's major hot here in KY which is the reason for the half gallon drink sitting next to me! But anyway, I took a shot of my lazy kate after plying the two bobbins and, Ashley, just look how close I came to being perfect! Well, I don't usually get this close, this is pretty dad-gum close, I have to say myself!

So, this resulted in 291 wraps on a 1.5 yard skein winder:

Which equates to 432 yards approximately:

And this is all the roving I have left to do of Georga:

Which I am now trying to decide to either spin the whole thing on a bobbin and center ball ply or try to even it out on two bobbins and ply 'em up like I did today. . . my luck is not so great with the center pull ball, but I hate to waste any of these singles either! Decisions, decisions!

Fibery Pursuits - in Kentucky and Tennesse!

Yesterday, Peggy and her granddaughter Emma Belle picked Caryn and myself up to go to Tennessee on a bunny hunt!

It was quite and adventure, as the woman who was selling the French Angora Rabbits was completely clueless when it came to giving directions! On top of that, dear Peggy doesn't have a map in the car. . . ok, well, not my usual way of doing things and hopefully, I didn't spoil Peggy's day, but I honestly hate to not know where I am going! All's well that ends well, though and Peggy got 2 of the little critter's and I am thinking about the offspring of those two. . . Go see the cuties on her blog!! Oh, I want one!

Ok in other persuits, when you take two of these:




And ply them together:




You could get one of these (with leftover's on one bobbin):



This is 4.5 ounces of a Romney Sheep named Georgia (from Skyline Farms) that spun into 305 yards of two ply yarn at 14 wpi.



I have been using the Yarn Scale that is supplied in The Essentials of Yarn Design by Mabel Ross to try and stay consistent with this yarn. I think that so far it is working! This is the darkest of my Romney and I plan to have three darks and two lights for a fairisle design by Ron Schwitzer.