Knitting, with Dogs

Completed Socks

The Aloe Socks are done!

Can I tell you how much I LOVE these colors????  And the yarn is good and easy to work with.  And I'm proud of how well I'm doing with the identical socks.  I'm happy with how these came out!

In other knitting news:

I'm still frantically swatching for the Knitting Olympics (memo to self:  put the damn button up on the side bar!).  Here's my ginormous multi-purpose swatch:

I think I've solved the basic issues I had with the pattern, but I still have to do the calculations about how much to cast on and how many increases to make, etc.  I'm planning to try this thing on as I go, so if I get started going properly, there's a good chance I'll be ok.  The things I need to worry about is getting patterns centered and stuff like that.  I also found out I'll get to test-knit another sock pattern.  Unfortunately, that's going to start about the same time as the Knitting Olympics.  EEK!  Ah well.  All I can do is what I can do.  It'll work out one way or another.

Oh, and here's something I saw last week:

The first daffodil of spring. In February.

Learning all over again

Since it looks like I'll have a little more time at home at least in the short term, I've set myself the goal of re-learning how to spin fat yarn.  It seems to be pretty easy to gradually learn to get finer and finer when you're learning to spin.  After seeing Mouse's lovely fat, soft yarn, I realized I wasn't sure I could do that. 

Ah, a challenge to my spinning-fu!  The Spinster doesn't shy away from a challenge!

And it's harder than you'd think.  Spinning a fat, soft fluffy yarn is work, I tell ya.  Work!

First I sat down to spin the packing material that Caroline used when she sent the spindle and wpi gauge.  Folks, you should all wish that your stuff came packed in stuff like this.  Caroline called it mystery roving -- a little bit of this, a little bit of that.  And it looks like this spun up:

So far, so good, but it's not very fat.  So I tried again with some variegated roving that came from Margaret's shop.  I spun it as fat as I could and just plied it back on itself.  This is what I got:

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Better, but still not what I want.  It does feel nice, though -- fairly soft and lofty.  I got about 120 yards of 2-ply out of a little less than 4 oz. 

I just think that plying muddies up the colors.  My goal is to spin a thick, soft single yarn that's still light and lofty and with enough twist to hold it together, but not so much twist that it biases when you knit with it.

Here's my next fiber victim.

Fun, huh?  Stay tuned for results!

My dog eats my socks

so I have to make more.  Behold my first pair of identical socks:

Close enough for me!  Success in one endeavor makes you eager to do more:

This is that new Austermann sock yarn with aloe and jojoba oil.  The colors are subtle, but I lurrrvveee them.  That's the short-row garter stitch heel from Lucy Neatby's book Cool Socks, Warm Feet.  Easiest. Heel. EVAR.  But it might be a little bit shallow for someone with a larger foot than mine.

Easy socks are pretty fun.  And easy.

The Walnut Hull Dyeing Experiment, Part 2

The Process:

I let the yarn simmer in the dyebath for about 2.5 hours.  I had been thinking about using my other skeins with some alum as a mordant, since my reference sources had mentioned that alum (a fairly non-toxic mordant) could bring a slightly different hue to the walnut-hull dyed yarns.  But I realized I didn't really have another pot I could dedicate to dyeing.  (The pots you use for dyeing should NOT also be used for food, unless you're just doing Kool Aid dyes or Easter Egg dyes or any other things designed to be eaten by humans.)  At some point I'll go out to a Goodwill or something and find another old enamel or stainless pot that I can dedicate to dyeing.  But that time has not yet come, alas.

Anyway:  I took the first skeins out of the dyepot and washed them in the sink.  It took a good bit of washing and pressing water through the skeins repeatedly to get the water to run clear.  And I didn't get any pictures of the process, partly because my hands were in hot water.  Good for aching joints, not so much for cameras.  And while I was washing the first couple of skeins, I threw in the other 2 handspun skeins plus the skein of laceweight yarn that Lou had asked me to dye.  I gotta tell ya, I'm pretty confident in my mad skein-tying skillz, but I was dead worried about that laceweight.  It was a skein of snow-white Ornaghi Filati Merino Oro.  I think I tied it in eight places, and that was on a small skein.  And I prayed.

The first skeins out of the dyepot looked like this after they dried:

From left to right:  the 3-ply, the singles and the superwash commercial baby yarn.  Three different yarns, 3 different shades.  Cool, no?

Here's a close-up:

What's really interesting is how much darker the fine-weight baby yarn was compared to the thicker handspun.  It was about twice as dark as the 3-ply.  Right now I'm kicking myself because I didn't put a very fine handspun into the pot to see if it's just the fine yarns that get so dark, or if it's something in the processing of the yarn that makes the commercial yarns take up the dye so readily.  However, my 3-ply was spun from commercially processed roving, so it's probably the fineness of the yarn that's the difference. 

The second batch of skeins was (predictably) lighter:

And voilà, there on the far right is the laceweight.  It also took up the dye more than the handspun.  Again, a fine yarn.  And I only had one little break in the laceweight,  and it was close to the end of the skein.  w00t!  Here's a detail view of the second batch skeins:

Here's the singles from the first pass through the dyepot next to the one from the second pass:

Cool, huh?  I don't even like browns very much, but I kinda like these, especially the rich brown of the laceweight.

This is fun stuff.  And I've still got pounds of walnut hulls that I can experiment with.

I'll entertain questions from the floor if there are any.  :)

The Walnut Hull Dyeing Experiment

The Dyestuff:

Ok.  So Lou gave me a HUGE box of dried walnut hulls.  This is A Good Thing.  I have actually dyed with walnut hulls before, mumbletymumble years ago.  So I pulled out my big plastic bucket and my big old enamel canning pot (bought as a dyepot years ago) and got to work.

Now I am not the most methodical person in the world.  But I did make an effort this time to keep track of what I did.  So on January 20, I took 2.5 lbs of walnut hulls and put them in my big plastic bucket.  They looked like this:

I added 4 gallons of hot water to the hulls (enough to pretty much cover them if they hadn't persisted in floating to the top), covered the bucket and let them sit.  They sat and soaked for about 2 days.  On Monday January 23,  I moved the bucket into the sink so I could work with the stuff.  (Memo to self:   4 gallons of water with 2.5 lbs of walnut hulls is actually kinda heavy.  I had a few nervous moments until I realized that I could actually lift the whole kit and caboodle.

Soaked walnut hulls look like this. Notice how dark the liquid is?  I confess I had a few doubts about the dried hulls, since the walnuts I'd used before were the green ones still in the hulls .  But there's obviously still a LOT of dye in the old dried- out husks too.

I scooped out all the hulls and strained the liquid through a dish towel. 

The yarn:

I went stash diving to find some yarn suitable for dyeing.  What I found was some handspun.  I pulled a couple of skeins of 3-ply I did a couple of years ago and a couple of skeins of a single that I'd spun Og knows when:

The single is on the left, the 3-ply on the right.  The 3- ply was from some Cormo roving I got on eBay, the single is from who knows where.  You can see that they have natural differences in color from the get-go.  The two skeins and a little bit of commercial superwash baby yarn weighed a little less than 8 ounces.

It was time to pull out the Big Enamel Pot.

I put the dye liquor in the pot and started heating it up.  Walnut hulls produce a substantive dye, i.e., one that doesn't require a mordant.  (Mordant: something that helps to fix dyes to fiber or material.  When you use vinegar with Kool Aid dyeing, you're using a mordant.  Natural dyes often require fairly toxic chemicals to get decent color.  Happily for me, walnut hulls do not.)  So after soaking the yarn for 45 minutes or so, I put it into the simmering dyepot.  After a few minutes it looked like this:

I know I don't have to tell anyone contemplating doing anything like this that it's absolutely ESSENTIAL to tie your skeins in multiple places with a figure-8 knot, right?  If anybody needs to know how to do this, let me know, and I'll post a tutorial.  It's dead easy, but if you don't do it, you WILL have the most ungodly tangled mess you can imagine.  Ask me how I know this.

Tomorrow:  The Results

A Poem for St. Brigid's day

I just saw this idea on Grace's Poppies -- poetry for St. Brigid's* (aka Groundhog) Day.  I'll play, with a winter poem I saw and liked a while back.  Even though it's not very wintry here in Georgia.  It's even kinda fiber related.

First Sight

Philip Larkin

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth's immeasureable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

Earth's immeasurable surprise.... Yup, that's what it's all about, folks.

*Though honestly, a couple of the sources I looked at gave her feast day as Feb. 1 instead of Feb. 2.  Even so, I can go with the spirit of the thing, especially since I've practically missed the 2nd anyway.