Tuesday Spinning Report

It has been awhile since I did any serious spinning.  I finally powered through and finished my 8 ounces of Wensleydale.  I bought this back when Woodland Woolworks was going out of business, and I dyed it with Wilton's cake decorating gel "Delphinium" during one of the rest days of last year's Tour de Fleece.  I started spinning it sometime this year, I forget exactly when, but it was really hit-or-miss for a couple of months whether I'd even get any spinning in at all.  Now I'm gearing up for the 2012 Tour de Fleece, which starts June 30.  I've got a fairly massive amount of spinning to do, and then will come the Ravelympics, when I'll try to knit it all up.  But I needed to clear up the bobbins on my wheel first.

So I plied it all up.  Amazing how fast plying goes in comparison to spinning!  This is (my estimation) 816 yards of heavy laceweight or light fingering.  Wensleydale is a long-fibered wool, and it's very lustrous.  I used similar dyes to color the BFL that eventually became my Oslo Walk shawl, but it never posed for photos quite so well.  You can see how the color ranges from true blue to purple. This yarn will probably eventually become another shawl-that-I-never-wear. 

Quarta wanted to help with a silly pose.  Wasn't that thoughtful?

WIP Wednesday: Brought to you by the W.C.T.U.

Here's a little finished project - Quarta's first latch hook kit.  I made it into a pillow this week.  It had been cluttering up my sewing area so it was good to get it done.  It's by no means beautifully finished, but it's finished.  Yay!

Farmer's Wife Quilt block #98 - Waterwheel. 

Block #99 - W.C.T.U.  This one makes me tear up a little.  My late grandmother and her family were active in the W.C.T.U. in rural Ohio, and I have only fond associations with her despite the fact that I know some who like to poke fun at the temperance movement.  I did some research and the Women's Christian Temperance Union was associated with a white ribbon opposing violence against women, and quilts associated with them were frequently blue and white.  The white ribbon was a traditional bow, not the more modern "awareness" loop, and this block composed this way looks a little like the bow on the W.C.T.U. logo.  I think the white and solid blue are both scraps from my grandma, and the flower print looks like something she would have loved.

Block #100 (woo hoo!) - Weathervane.  I needed more golds and purples and I like the way these look together, with the gray looking like the iron of the weathervane.  I noticed I constructed this block a little differently than the book, but I'm also referring to Maggie Malone's 1001 Patchwork Designs book.  It just seemed sensible to do it this way.  I used fast-45's for the corners around the house-shaped patches, so there was no template cutting.

Startitis has struck.  I need to start on my UFO for March (a bag which actually hasn't been started yet), and I just finished my 3rd shawl for 2012 so of course I needed to figure out what to start next in knitting.  I tentatively chose Maluka and some yellow sock yarn from my stash.  And I decided to dye some ugly tan cashmere laceweight I had in my stash of reclaimed sweater yarn, with the idea that it could be used for one of the 2 "large" (= 500 meters or more shawls) required for the 12-in-12 challenge .

I kettle-dyed it with almost an entire jar of Wilton's black, burgundy, about half a jar of red red and a dab of rose.  I was going for that almost impossible to capture black-cherry red that so many of my friends are knitting now.

This is well over 1000 yards of 100% cashmere laceweight.  It was cold this morning and a few crunchy ice crystals had formed on the bottom of the hanks, but it's warmed up now.   The smaller skein on the right is the one with lots of knots that I threw in at the end to sop up extra dye, and I almost like it more than the main ones.  I may lose some yardage because of slight felting, but it's really easy to spit-splice ends of this yarn together.  And I have a hard time imagining ever knitting more than 1000 yards of a shawl.

This photo is not accurate for the darkness, but it shows a little of the variation of color.  I'm going to have fun picking out a large shawl to attempt with my very own custom-dyed luxury yarn that I got at the thrift store for under $2.  And you should have seen my students' faces when I explained my hands were red because "I was dyeing yesterday."

I did some spinning yesterday evening and made some progress on the Wensleydale laceweight I dyed last summer.  The trouble with spinning laceweight is that it takes forever to fill a bobbin.  I spun about an hour altogether and maybe did a quarter bobbin. 
I should really create a list of WIPs - that way I can be more accountable week to week.

• Aunt Maggie's Quilt - binding 25% done
• Farmer's Wife Quilt - made 3 blocks this week, 11 to go
• March UFO knitting bag - not started but I'm thinking about it
• knitting Oslo Walk shawl (3 of 12) - finished, awaiting blocking
• knitting argyle-fest - no progress
• knitting cotton bath rug - about 1/3 done with center
• knitting On Your Toes sweater - downgraded to UFO, no progress for months, oops
• knitting Maluka - just cast on, no pics yet
• spinning blue Wensleydale - about 25% done

goals for next WIP Wednesday:

• finish Aunt Maggie's binding
• start boxer shorts
• cut out pattern for March bag

I have to give myself homework, and it helps to have a list.  I am my mother's daughter.

Check out the other WIPs at Freshly Pieced.

A study in orange

Today was a rest day on the Tour de Fleece, and I did some dyeing.

Long story short, I offered to knit my sister a sweater and she wants one just like this one that I did in 2009 when I was turning out one a month.  So I set out to replicate the dyeing process today.  I started using Wilton's cake decorating color gels to dye back when my kids were little, and I've kept up with it because it's easy to find and nontoxic, although I'm sure the "real" dyes are much more colorfast.  There are many tutorials on using Wilton's or other food colorings to dye wool: here's just one.

I dye in an old pressure canning kettle (I don't trust the pressure gauge, so I use it only for dyeing).  It makes the house smell like vinegar and hot, wet wool -- which is a smell that has grown on me, but my kids hate it.  The wool that is now orange is superwash, which means it can be washed in the machine without felting it.  And there are 2.5 pounds of it, which is a lot.  I dyed it in 5 8 oz. batches, using primarily copper, brown, and orange.  But of course I like to add blobs of other colors here and there, to make it interesting.  From the top down, my "recipes" (not scientific here) were

1. about 2/3 of a jar of brown, plus blobs of orange and small blobs of teal, in a cold dyebath that heated up gradually.  This left areas of less color where the dye didn't penetrate.
2. about 2/3 of a jar of copper, plus blobs of brown, stirred into the already hot dyepot before I added the fiber.  More even coverage.
3. orange, plus copper and brown, also stirred into the hot dyepot.
4. started fresh with a cold dyepot, mixed in nearly a whole jar of copper, then blobs of brown, royal blue, and red.
5. brown, red, and a few other blobs.

This will take quite a while to spin up.  So far in the TDF I've been spinning like mad but I don't think I've spun a full pound yet.  Sweaters take a lot of wool.  I'll be spinning this in the fall when I have orange cravings.

Of course, I didn't want to waste all the effort of getting the dyepot out and so I dyed some Blue-faced Leicester from last year's Black Sheep Gathering trip (4 oz.).  In royal blue.

And then some Wensleydale from Woodland Woolworks, 8 oz. in delphinium blue.

BFL on the right, Wensleydale on the left (plus a tiny bit of generic wool to sop up the leftover dye).

 I didn't wear gloves.  It'll be better after a few days.  It was a fun Monday, but I didn't get much laundry done.

Mixed Berries...

... is my tentative name for these skeins of homespun fingering/sport weight yarn from some Polwarth roving I bought last summer at Black Sheep Gathering.  According to my rough estimates, it's about 440 yards, enough for a shawl.  It's not superwash, so it's not practical for socks (at least not in my house, where you can't count on anything being handwashed unless you intercept it yourself first every time.)  But it will make a nice shawl, and I've been queuing quite a few shawls on Ravelry.  I don't wear them much because they make me look like a dork, but that's beside the point.

I dyed the roving using food colorings.  Wilton's cake decorating gels are great, and I also have a few of the liquid kind you find at the grocery store.  I have an old canner kettle that I use for dyeing.  You pre-soak the wool for 30 minutes, add it to the kettle (already filled with water and a few glugs of vinegar) and slowly heat it to a simmer, adding your dabs and drops of food dye at will.  Nothing terribly scientific about it.  When the color disappears from the water and seems to be absorbed into the yarn, you take it off the heat and try to be patient while it cools.  You should soak it in water the same temperature as the cooled dyebath to make sure any excess dye gets removed.  Still, while I was spinning it, my thumb and fingers got pink.

The top photo is the truest color, but the strong natural light washes it out a bit.  The lower photo is too blue, but shows the tonal variation a little better.