an ent knits

stripey two-ply

I finished the spinning of that yellow/green/blue wool blend that I dyed a couple of weeks ago.  (Second from left in the first picture here.)

I predrafted the second (longitudinally split) half all at once, the way I did for the first half, spun it, and then plied the two together.  I wound up misjudging somewhere, as one bobbin had enough excess yardage that I wound it off and spliced it to the end of the other, but I'm pretty happy with this as an experiment.

 

This is about 110 yards. 

Quick knitting update: everything that's genuinely active/in progress (the wool-mohair toe-hat, the garter-stitch scarf of purpley handspun, the peacock feather shawl) has grown a bit.  Pictures soon.

eye candy friday: dye-day edition

I have a huge pile of freshly dyed wool!  I think I know what I'm going to be doing this weekend...lots of spinning.  And probably even more gazing at my wool with a smile on my face.

I showed the first batch of roving on Sunday; here's the rest:

The three bits on the left were microwave-dyed; the fourth was kettle-dyed blue; the two on the right started out as grey-brown wool blend. 

I think this shows the blueishness of the kettle-dyed stuff a bit better.  Anyway, it's a lovely greyish blue.

Now, the yarn.  I bought two half-pound skeins of Henry's Attic kid mohair specifically for dye-day.  One of them is now yellow and orange and brownish-orangey:

This may just turn into an Icarus shawl as soon as it gets sufficiently cool and dry to deal with mohair.

The other skein was supposed to be chocolate brown with bits of yellow. 

That's basically what it is (the yellow bits are hiding from the camera), but the brown came out a little purplier than I wanted, so I'm going to let it sit for a while and think about what to do with it.

And...I overdyed the stuff I posted about last week:

Much better.

dye-day: sneak peek

I spent Saturday with a bunch of the PhillyFiberists, dyeing lots of wool.

This is the one batch of my dyeing that I brought home (they were all still at least damp when I left)--5oz of BFL, which may turn into socks.   (More pictures on Friday, when I'll have the rest of it.)

Dyeing is awesome. 

comfort spinning

As I said last week, I've been doing some comfort spinning to try to deal with some of the unpleasantness of life.  Here's the wool I dyed with onion skins, all spun up:

Some of it is wound into a ball because I didn't secure the skein very well before finishing.  I'd like to think I've learned my lesson...but we'll see.  It's not especially even, but I don't really care.  It was fun to spin, and it'll still be great for the project I have in mind.

And here's a fellow spinner whom I found in my kitchen the other day. 

On a semi-related note, I think a bunch of people I know will appreciate this felted insect pattern booklet.  I found it through Ravelry.  (Such a dangerous time-suck, but such fun!)

blended fiber

Pretty much none of the fiber I showed you last week still looks like it did in those pictures.  I spent a couple of evenings over the course of the week playing with the drumcarder that Sarah left at my house on Sunday, and now I have these:

Somewhat varied blends of the onion-dyed fiber.  There's a bit more than will fit in an 8x6x16 plastic bag.  (The three bits that are at least partly in this picture are more-or-less representative samples.)

One green batt, resting on the carder.  This stuff fits more comfortably in that size bag. 

I had hoped to start spinning the freshly-blended wool this weekend, but my hands have been sticky with aloe gel for most of the time I've been home last night and today.  I went hiking yesterday with some of my labmates, and it was great, but my shoulders are now bright pink.  *sigh*  Back to slathering myself with aloe...

dye day, part 2

As I said yesterday, there's lots more freshly-dyed wool in my apartment than would fit in my last post.  Here's Mel with some of it:

Mel, wool blend, corriedale, white cormo, grey cormo.  Everything but the cat was dyed with red onion skins.

Yarn dyed with red onion skins.

From farther away.

We didn't just do onion-skin dyeing, though:

Wool blend, corriedale, overdyed leftovers of pine corriedale, habu A-93, light grey elann wool.

This, for the record, is what the non-white base wools look like, undyed:

Grey cormo, grey-brown corriedale.

Despite the interestingness of trying to dry all of this wool while retaining access to my bathroom, this was a lot of fun.  I have two reasons for not dyeing too much more, though--I'm running out of dyeables, and it's not like I've been using up the predyed stuff.  (New plan for future purchases: natural colors of wool.)

dye day, part 1

Sarah came over on Sunday, armed with her box of dyestuffs (and a lot of wool).  We spent a couple of hours dyeing, with what I think are pretty nice results.  They took quite a while to cool, though--ranging from overnight to ~24h--here are pics of the first batch to cool and dry.

The color is somewhat more accurate in the first picture.  All of these started out as natural shades of wool (some greyish brown, but mostly white), and they're dyed with a mixture of red and yellow onion skins. 

[The roving in the front is mine, as are the teensy skeins of yarn; the singles and the fleece are Sarah's.]

quick peek

(All of this yarn is stuff that I finished over the weekend.  Of course, some of it was started quite a while ago.)

Clockwise, from the top:

• alpaca/wool plied with peony Boogie merino
• purple/brown/blue mixed wools that I carded a couple of weeks ago
• cormo plus a smidgen of blue Boogie merino
• cormo that I dyed with food coloring
• mixed fluff sent by Jen of garriber.org

three pictures

This was the view out my front window this morning.  Snow!  Enough to stick!  The best part was that there was just barely enough to crunch under my sneakers, but not enough to make it tricky to walk to work.

I played around with kool-aid dyeing again last week.  This is about 3oz of Amy Boogie's wool blend, with several packets of various flavors of kool-aid.  Lesson for next time: grape is really powerful. 

I've also been knitting away on the second fire sock.  Most of the ribbing was knit during the Värttinä (Finnish folk-rock) concert I saw last Thursday--they were excellent, and I'd highly recommend seeing them if you get the chance. 

And that's it for me for today.  Work is really busy, and I haven't had the energy for a lot of fiber stuff, but there'll be fiber night this week, at least. 

red, indeed

Well, I got some more kool-aid (and a very strange look from the cashier when I arrived at the cash register with eleven packets of drink mix and nothing else). Three and a half packets of cherry, one packet each of tropical punch and lemonade, and half a packet of ice blue raspberry lemonade later, I had this:

I've included a netflix envelope for color-balance confirmation and one of my favorite red t-shirts as a comparison for wearability. The yarn is now very, very red (a little more red and less orange than it looks on my laptop), but I like it. I think it'll be fun.

And, unsurprisingly, I did some spinning this week, too:

about 150 yards of DKish yarn

This is more of my first wheel-spun singles plied with singles I spun from three colors of roving that came in multipacks with the black roving I bought to ply with the alien singles. I had fun switching between colors; I really like the bits with overlapping colors.

I feel silly, though, 'cause it's yet another yarn that isn't a color combination that I'm ever going to wear. Maybe I'm being overprotective of the rovings that I started spinning on my spindles and which I really like...I sort of don't want to start spinning them on the wheel because they'll probably come out differently. Which basically leaves me with the rovings I didn't like as much. Well, the merino-silk wasn't going to be a shawl project anyway, so maybe I'll try that on the wheel...