better

Remember that ass-tastic yarn?



It's a little better now.



I overdyed it with lots and lots of blue, plus a little black (which didn't really look black at all). I was hoping for the end result to be darker; I was envisioning dark teal and navy variegations, but this I can live with. The yarn has a little more variegation than shows in the photo.



Daniel and I had yet another dyeing experiment this weekend. It's drying in the basement now.

I don't knit enough socks to keep up with all this dyeing, and while I don't think it's nice enough to sell (or worth the bother), I am thinking of doing a little contest for a giveaway. It's all in the spirit of the holiday season, right? Details to come soon!

pretty ugly

I'm going to show y'all some yarn today. I've been knitting lots, but some of it needs to remain secret until Christmas and the rest, frankly, isn't all that interesting. So, yarn it is!

Let's start with the black yarn I bought at Door Creek Orchard the other day:



I don't think the picture shows much, since it's, you know, black, plus the weather has been gray and gloomy the last few days, so I've had a hard time catching a time of day to best use what little natural light we have. You can't really see this in the picture, but the yarn is rustic with bits of vegetable matter and has a pleasant crunch to the touch. It doesn't feel terribly scratchy in the skein, but I think it would still work best in a comfy big cardigan of some sort. I've got a couple patterns in mind, but your suggestions are welcome! It needs to be fairly simple, since fancy stitch patterns won't show up well in this dark color. My very favorite aspect of this yarn, though, is the smell. Yes, I sniff yarn! This yarn smells natural and woolly with a slight hint of apple cider. Maybe it's because the Black Welsh Mountain sheep from whence the wool get fed apples from the trees up the hill from where they safely graze (now that tune is in my head for the rest of the day), or because the yarn is sold in the same building where they press the cider, or maybe it's a little of both.

And now, some yarn I dyed myself! Well, I do have a little helper:



I've been experimenting with dyeing sock yarn with Kool-Aid and Wilton's cake icing gel off and on since last spring. For now I'm sticking with food dyes because of safety with small kids underfoot, but one day I may try using acid dyes like the pros do. Kool-Aid is the easiest because it dissolves so quickly and has so much citric acid in it that you don't need to add vinegar to the dye pot for the colors to set. It's also very cheap; even though you need to use half a dozen packets for 100g of yarn, that's still less than two bucks per dye job (not including the yarn, of course), which is a bargain when it comes to hobbies. Unfortunately, you don't get many color options with Kool-Aid, and once I had pretty much exhausted the red/orange possibilities, I was wanting something different. (Yes, there are a few blue and purple KA colors, but they look terrible on yarn for some reason.) So I tried Wilton's cake icing gel, which comes in many more colors, and the colors are way more intense. You have to add vinegar or citric acid to the dye pot so that the yarn will absorb the color, and that gets a little tricky. I've had mixed results with Wilton's, and I suspect that the pH level of my dye mixture has something to do with it.

The following three yarns came out pretty nice, in my opinion. This first orange skein was done with a bunch of Kool-Aid plus a couple drops of green food coloring to tone it down. It's a nice pumpkin color.



This next green is a completely different color than i was envisioning. I was shooting for a dusty teal color, but I ended up with pine green instead. As long as it's pretty, it's fine with me.



This last one was Daniel's idea. We made a cake last week, and I let him choose colors for the icing. He wanted to mix "Royal Blue" and "Violet." The icing was a beautiful periwinkle - maybe a little strange on a cake, but lovely all the same. I tried the same thing with yarn, but I think I must have used far far too much of each color because it came out intense and bright. Still nice, though.



I saved the ugly for last:



This is the dyeing disaster I mentioned the other day. If you look closely, you can see that about 1/3 of the yarn came out a nice light grayish blue-green. But the rest is ass. That's what you get for using grape KA, folks. Grape KA is never a good idea.



Those of you who suggested I overdye it with black have a good point. It's certainly worth a shot, since the yarn is quite unacceptable as is. Wilton's has a black color, though I've read on some Ravelry forums that you have to be careful about the pH level of your water or the colors break up and you get weird variegations. I'll let you know how it goes.

habitat

I could use a win today, guys. Here are some highlights of my day:

1. Daniel hid behind the couch to draw a rocket ship ON THE LIVING ROOM WALL this morning. Then when I caught him, he tried to tell me he "didn't know where the pencil was going." It's the first time he's been this deliberately naughty (except when he's annoying his little sister) and definitely the first time he's tried to weasel out of something by telling an untruth. I was upset and disappointed. Then I confiscated all his art supplies, which led to a meltdown of epic proportions and we almost missed his preschool class because he couldn't calm down.

2. Actually, what led to him nearly missing school was a secondary meltdown because I got Anya's jacket out of the closet when he wanted to do it.

3. The most interesting place I went to today was the grocery store, where Anya whined for 20 solid minutes until I bought her (and me) a doughnut.

4. Anya threw a tantrum in the corner market this afternoon, where we walked to buy Jell-O because I forgot it this morning at the big grocery store (and by the way, I buy Jell-O exactly once a year: for the cranberry salad for Thanksgiving dinner). They have mini-grocery carts at the corner grocery, and I got the Wrong One out for Anya, so she lay down on the floor next to the paper towels and screamed while I got the Jell-O.

5. But the worst tantrum of the day was when I told Daniel to wash his hands and come to the table for pizza. Which he had requested for dinner. (Aside: I make really awesome pizza with homemade crust and freshly grated cheese and everything. It's a lot of work.)

6. I made some truly fugly yarn today. Daniel likes to help me dye yarn (another post on this is forthcoming), so we gave it a whirl this afternoon during Anya's [tragically short] nap. Lately I've been using Wilton's cake icing dyes rather than Kool-Aid because there are many more color options. We started out with a lovely celery green. But then I had to go and mess it up when I thought there were too many blank spots on the yarn, so I added some more blue, which was okay, but then there were some unseemly blue splotches on the yarn. That's when I really screwed up by trying to fix it with more blue, and the yarn was turning a sort of seasickly green. And the kicker was when I gave it yet another treatment of teal and a packet of grape Kool-Aid just to tone it down a bit and now it just looks like ass. Part of me wants to just call it a failure and throw it out along with the rest of today, but another part of me can't stand to waste good wool no matter how ugly. So for now it's sitting in the dye pot all limp and horrid and waiting for Judgment Day. I'm not even sure I can bring myself to take a picture of it.

This is, of course, the week of Thanksgiving, and I know I have a lot to be thankful for. I am trying to remember that. Being yelled at is part of motherhood; goodness knows I yelled at mine often enough (sorry, mom!). And making crappy stuff is just part of being a creative person. You win some, you lose some.

So let's end this post on a win, shall we? Here's a hat I finished over a month ago. I present to you: Habitat by Jared Flood.



The yarn is a wool/mohair blend of handspun! Not by me, though. I don't spin, and I don't intend to start. I bought this at A Stone's Throw Artisans in my hometown, which just closed a few days ago, another victim of the current economy. The owner's daughter spun this yarn, and it is just gorgeous and shimmery and perfect for the pattern. The mohair content makes the hat slightly itchy when I wear it in milder weather (like today in the mid-40s), but shouldn't be a problem when it gets cold. It's way nicer than Lamb's Pride, which has the same fiber content.



I started this hat while we were on vacation in Door County in August. Then I got to the part with the cables and put it down until I felt like I could concentrate on it, and when I finally picked it up again in October, I had it done in a few days. It's a wonderful pattern, not difficult at all (if you don't find cables difficult, which I don't) and interesting up until the last stitch. Classic Brooklyn Tweed, if you ask me.

wisconsin goodies

On Thursday and Friday, I took the kids for an overnight visit with my friend Stephanie, who is currently staying with her parents at their home in a very rural part of southern Wisconsin. The other day I wrote a post about that visit with plenty of pictures on Madtown Mama; if you want to read about that, click here. Before we even got to Stephanie's place, we stopped in the small town of Blanchardville and met at the River Valley Trading Co. It's a very nice, very eclectic little shop, selling used books, antiques, handmade pottery, jewelry and other usable art, hand knit hats, organic groceries, and local yarn. I met Linda of Hillsprings Farm. Linda is a small, vivacious, chatty lady who obviously loves her sheep, the wool from which was for sale at River Valley. It was lovely wool: natural, crunchy without being scratchy, organically raised and beautifully colored (undyed). I really wanted to buy some, but it was fairly pricey and one skein just wasn't going to do it for me. I have plenty of hats already, and once the holiday knitting is done, I really want to make some more sweaters. Let me say here that local organic yarn is expensive for lots of good reasons, considering the cost of raising the sheep and sending the wool out to be processed and milled...but I just couldn't justify it.

I did not leave empty-handed, however. My first find was a vintage pattern book, a collection of sweater patterns published in Woman's Day magazine in 1973. It cost all of fifteen cents. Historical interest would have been reason enough for me to buy it, but believe it or not, there are actually a couple of nice patterns in there. I'm often on the lookout for patterns off the beaten path, especially vintage ones, so this was a no-brainer.



Secondly, I did buy yarn, just not from Linda's sheep. This is a single skein of fingering weight wool dyed a pleasant pale blue. Can you see the label? It reads, "Spun from the wool of contented sheep pastured in the hills of SW Wisconsin."



This skein has 240 yards, plenty for a Pretty Thing (that's a Rav link).

Apparently, our little jaunt to the boonies earlier this week didn't satisfy my need to experience local agriculture. Also, we ran out of apples yesterday. So this afternoon, the whole family drove out to Door Creek Orchard to load up on the last fruits of the season and enjoy the scenery. It was a gorgeous, mild day, and we spent over an hour wandering around the pond/wetland area nature trails and watching the sheep. They have a small herd of Black Welsh something-or-other, which is actually a rare breed in North America, though more common in England, Scotland and Ireland. We fed grass to the sweet young ram lambs, whose gentle demeanor, dark fleece and beautiful curving horns utterly charmed all of us. (I am really kicking myself that I didn't bring the camera along, by the way.)

The orchard's owners raise sheep mostly for pleasure, as it is nearly impossible to make an actual profit selling them for meat, let alone wool. Still, they have the wool processed into yarn, which is displayed for sale in a modest antique cupboard in the shop. After visiting those rare, beautiful, charming sheep, I walked right back into that shop and bought enough yarn made from the wool on their backs (or, more accurately, their mothers' backs, since these particular animals were spring lambs who have yet to be sheared) to make a sweater. The wool is black, rugged, and a little primitive like the animals it came from.

Remember this yarn, from last month's apple-picking visit? Clearly, I have very little self-control. At least I have enough to wait until I'm done with Christmas knitting to let myself swatch the new stuff.

first birthday sweater

Our niece Claire turns 1 today. Happy Birthday, Claire! I made her a little sweater for the occasion:



You know, it is really hard to find practical knits for little people. In Wisconsin, wool sweaters can be worn 8-9 months out of the year, and I don't always use machine-washable wool for the sweaters I knit for my own kids because I do the laundry, and I don't mind hand-washing their sweaters. But when it comes to knitting for their cousins in the South, there are lots of things to consider. The climate is much warmer, those kids are younger (1 and 2.5) and therefore messier, and if I want those sweaters to actually be worn, I will make them stylish and not too funky and machine-washable. So I have to choose the right pattern and the right yarn. I would rather knit natural fibers than acrylic - even nice acrylic - so I'm always on the search for good superwash or cotton/wool blends for kids' things. Anyway, this is a long, roundabout way of saying I think I got it right this time.

This little sweater - shrug, really - was a very quick knit. I think it took me about three days from start to finish, and it was great fun. It's Stefanie Japel's Whirligig Shrug from IK Weekend. The pattern is very well-written, quite simple to knit, and it never got boring. I think it was the little ruffled edges that sold me.



Pattern: Whirligig Shrug by Stefanie Japel
Yarn: Elle Elite DK (50% washable wool, 50% cotton), about 2.5 skeins in white. For all the factors I considered in choosing the right pattern and yarn for this project, I realize that white is not the most practical color for a baby/toddler...but I don't care. She has dark hair and big dark eyes and I think she'll look lovely in white.
Gauge/needles: 22st=4" on size 6 circs and DPNs
Made for: our niece Claire for her first birthday
Size made: 24 month so she can wear this in the spring. I hope it's not huge!

the new twist

I have had kind of a crappy day. The kids got up too early (5:30), didn't nap, and whatever time they didn't spend fighting with each other, they spent yelling and whining at me. Stuart had a long day at work and came home all tired and unhappy about looming deadlines and homework for his Comp Sci class. It's been the kind of day that sends my self-esteem to rock bottom and leaves me wondering why I chose to not get paid to take care of people half my size who wreck the house and make me feel shitty. Had I not gone on a nice run this morning and then drunk enough caffeine to power a small space shuttle, I might have lost it completely by the time the sitter got here at 3:15 (so I could teach a couple piano students who never practice), but I managed to hold on to a small scrap of sanity, if not dignity.

At one point this afternoon they were so tired and bored I put on their coats and forced them outside, to much objection in the form of screaming and crying practically to the point of hyperventilating, where upon they saw a very interesting pair of city trucks collecting the last of the autumn leaves and completely forgot about Mom The Tyrant. We even followed it around the block, watching as the small truck with a broom attachment swept the dried leaves into the orange scoop on the back of an old garbage truck. For a few minutes, at least, Anya forgot how tired she was and Daniel forgot how much he hated me.

I think I deserved the beer I had at 5:30 this evening. Just saying.

All this has nothing to do with the new Twist, of course, but I needed to vent a little. So, the new Twist Collective is up, and it's a good one. I am so impressed by the level of writing and other content in this magazine. It's a treat to sit down and read the articles. And the patterns! I admit I've bought several since the first issue was released, though I've yet to knit any of them, despite my best intentions. This latest issue had several I simply could not resist:






This last one, especially, has me smitten. I've got a couple yarns in the stash that would be lovely, I'm sure, though I think Berocco Ultra Alpaca in a natural color would be just perfect. I know my gauge with that yarn, and I'm trying to decide if I can justify buying more for this or not. Probably not...but I am in the thick of holiday gift-knitting at the moment, so I have time to decide.

let the christmas knitting begin

I have no idea how many Christmas presents I'm going to knit this year. That's right. I don't have a plan. Oh, I have lots of ideas and possibilities jangling around in my brain...just no plan. The truth is, I don't like when the holidays become unnecessarily stressful. Some stress can't be avoided, like when your kids are involved in a dozen different concerts or plays or parties, trying to coordinate family get-togethers when everyone lives hundreds of miles from everyone else, driving through Iowa the long way (diagonally NE to SW) during an ice storm...so why pile on more things to worry about if you don't have to? Like giving everyone something you knit yourself?

On the other hand, I really enjoy knitting for other people, and sometimes I just can't help myself. So I have decided that this year I'll knit what I like for whom I like, and just hope no one else gets their feelings hurt. Everyone I care about is bound to get something hand knit from me eventually anyway, just not all at the same time.

With that said, I present to you my first Christmas knits, a pair of fair isle stockings:



A big reason I made these stockings was to practice two-handed colorwork. By the end of the blue stocking, I think I was finally getting the hang of it. Here's a close-up:



Blocking helped smooth out some of the puckering and uneven tension. I soaked each stocking for about a half hour in warm water and wool wash. I believe a second bath would probably help even more, but at this point I don't plan to do it.

Remember my woes with the short-row heel? This is how it turned out:



I tried Revknits' trick of not picking up the wraps when I did the heel on the blue stocking and you know what? It came out looking exactly the same. I decided to forgo the stripes because I wanted consistency between the two stockings. Plus someone said in comments that the colorwork pattern was busy enough without a striped heel, and I agree.



These are technically not quite complete because I still have to do an i-cord loop so they can be hung by the proverbial chimney, but I'm calling 'em done anyway.



Pattern: Henry's Stocking from the August-October 2009 issue of Cast On.
Yarn: Cascade 220, 1 skein each of Christmas Red, Forest (dk green), Bleach for the first stocking, and a dark and medium heather blue plus the Bleach white again for the second stocking. I have quite a bit of yarn left over, even the white, which I used for both. One of these days I'll have enough leftover Cascade for a stripey charity blanket.
Made for: Not telling!
Mods: The pattern called for DK weight yarn, and I used worsted weight with size 7 needles to make a more robust stocking. I also left out the stripes in the heel and toe to make everything look a little neater.
Comments: I definitely improved my two-handed colorwork technique, but I have to admit I didn't much like using DPNs. I have a couple other fair isle projects in mind - sweaters for the kids - which I will get to eventually (hopefully sometime this winter), and I think using a circular needle will be much less awkward.

monday randomness

1. The kids are still adjusting to several time changes from last week. We drove to Kentucky to visit my parents, so we crossed a time zone. Then on Nov. 1, my mom's birthday (!), we changed the clocks to end Daylight Savings. Two days later we drove back to the central time zone and came back home. Anya has been getting up between 4:30 and 5:00 every morning. Yesteday she got up at 4:30, didn't nap, and went to bed at 5:00 in the evening. Daniel, who doesn't really nap anymore, gets up early, too (though not as abominably early as his little sister) and goes to bed any time between 6:00 and 8:30. It's completely unpredictable. It also makes dinner time a little tricky.

2. I made myself a hat, which I actually finished up a few weeks ago, but it's been snuggling up with my new mittens in the pile o' winter accessories because it's been so freakishly warm here. (Daniel wore shorts on Saturday. I hung clothes out on the line on Sunday. I did not think this was possible in November.) I'll give the hat a proper FO post soon, but here's a little preview:



3. The warm weather feels really strange, given that the trees dumped their leaves a while ago and how early the sun sets.

4. At least the warm weather makes running more pleasant. I ran for a whole hour Sunday morning and it felt awesome (though I'm paying for it a little bit now - sore calves.)

5. I started another Christmas stocking, this one in denim blues:



I think I'm getting better at knitting colorwork with two hands. At least, my tension seems more consistent than the first stocking (though blocking did help quite a lot.) The stockings will get a proper post of their own when this second one is done.

mitered mittens

The mitered mittens are finished!


They are, alas, still not perfect. The thumbs fit better, but they still pull a bit in the middle of the palm. I briefly considered knitting them all over again and doing a thumb gore up the side instead of the trick with waste yarn. But these are for me, I wanted them done, and I suspect the fact that they are fitted means any thumb would pull a little bit. That's okay with me. I want the mittens to fit snugly enough so they don't slide around when I'm trying to do things like drive a car or pick up a kid, and these fit the bill.



Have I mentioned that I love this yarn? I used just under one skein of Mountain Colors Mountain Goat (45% wool, 55% mohair). Every stitch was a pleasure. Come to think of it, the other time I used yarn by Mountain Colors, I made a hat and mitered mittens for Daniel (that was out of Twizzle, a merino/silk blend). Yarn like this is expensive, but worth it every once in a while, and the hand-painted variegation lends itself beautifully to this mitten pattern.




Pattern: Mitered Mittens from A Knitters Almanac by Elizabeth Zimmerman
Yarn: Mountain Colors Mountain Goat, 1 skein
Size: 7.5" circumference, and I made them fairly long, too, about halfway up my forearm
Gauge: 5spi on size 6 needles.

I have several other small projects finished up and waiting to be blogged. Part of the problem is the lack of daylight available for taking good pictures. We have a busy weekend coming up, but I may be able to squeeze in a couple of photo sessions for those things.

let's try this again

I'm finishing up a week in Kentucky, where the kids and I are visiting my parents. I needed a break from Madison, and Halloween weekend seemed a good time to do it. (If you've ever been in Madison for Halloween, you'll understand why. I'm TOTALLY over the party on State Street. I was over it before the riots became an annual tradition. Now the riots are over, but the police are everywhere and you know what? It's not worth it. Thousands of slutty drunk undergrads...not my thing. But I digress...)

It's been a good visit here, what with warmer weather and making animal costumes and visiting local attractions and such. I went to A Stone's Throw, the LYS going out of business at the end of the month, and I also visited Magpie Yarn in Lexington. Purchases were made, but the pictures I took today were too dark, so I'll share more about that later.

Meanwhile, I've been working on a little project for myself:



These are Elizabeth Zimmerman's mitered mittens from A Knitters Almanac. Such a lovely pattern! So simple yet elegant and the mitered feature makes these mittens very well-fitting.

Unfortunately, EZ was not so specific about the placement of the thumb. I use waste yarn rather than cutting for an afterthought because cutting makes me nervous, and my first attempt wasn't quite right:



See how it pulls on the palm? I think I should have moved the waste yarn and thus the hole about one stitch towards the center, and made the hole about one stitch bigger. It felt fine on my hand, but this yarn is so wonderful (Mountain Colors Mountain Goat) I want the mittens to be perfect. So I ripped. They're a fast knit anyway. It's already after 9, and the kids aren't asleep yet (even with the time change gaaaaaaah), but if they go to bed soon I might finish at least one mitten tonight.