Stripey Sweater

I’m currently designing this sweater… (well, I guess it’s only a sleeve and a half so far.. hardly qualifies as a sweater)… which is going to be pretty stripey all over.  It’s knit from recycled and hand-dyed merino yarn, and it’s at a pretty fine gauge, knit on US#3 (3mm) needles.  As the same needles are being used for gloves that I’m currently knitting, I have had to wait before getting back to the sweater.  Of course, I’m impatient, because who doesn’t love stockinette in the round with only stripes to distract one from cheesy TV?!  And I think the end product will be very wearable – that is if I ever finish it!!

 

New Colours

For Christmas my aunt gave me some gift money to enhance my craft supply stash, and I used it to buy more colours of Jacquard Acid Dye, which I use to dye yarn.  These are dye tests on recycled yarn of various sorts; white alpaca, tan merino, light brown merino, and light blue cashmere.  From left to right in the picture, these fibres were overdyed with my 4 new dye colours: aztec gold, brown, magenta, and turquoise.  They form quite an amazing rainbow, as each yarn took the dye differently, and the way the dye colour interacted with the yarn’s original colour created many different effects.  I love colour!

 

Craft Corner… so my cr#f$ don’t take up the entire apartment!

So the apartment now has colour, and I have the most amazing space I’ve ever had in which to adore fibre of all kinds: my craft corner!! OK, it’s more like an alcove, … and lets face it, it basically takes up the entire dining room… but I am overjoyed, to say the least.

So I’ve also been making some stellar progress on the Lady Sweater – I’m done the body, and part-way done one of the arms. I’m VERY excited, as I intend to ACTUALLY FINISH this sweater, and that will make it my first! Hopefully my aran cardigan will follow soon after…

I’ve also been unravelling more thrift-store sweaters, and dyeing roving, and doing a bit of spinning.

The blues/greys roving is polwarth sliver that I got from birkeland bros. here in Vancouver, and hand-dyed using the hot pour method (stovetop). It felted very slightly (not as bad as I have done before, but still not great), so I think I’m going to go back to the oven-dyeing method, which I think is a little safer.

Here are a couple of yarn shots of some spinning tests I’ve done with this roving:

 

Fishtail Mittens – WIP

This is a design I’ve been working on, and has yet to be entirely perfected.

Further pictures and pattern to follow soon enough. The mittens are knit in a recycled merino that is very springy and lovely. I dyed it last year, when I was just first experimenting with dying, using food colouring. The colour is somewhat more faded and muted than my generally intense and saturated preferences, but I do like it.

The mittens are knitted very densely, so they will be quite warm, without being bulky. I think they will be very practical, and I’m very excited to perfect and complete them! Of course I was inspired by the mitten craze and the current Vogue Knitting, which features a bunch of mittens with cable designs.

At the same time, I’m progressing on my February Lady Sweater:

I’ve gotten to the stage where I’m bored of it, despite loving the colour, and the lace pattern. So now I just have to suck it up and continue, despite boredom. Of course that’s why I started designing the mittens!!

And as the weather has started to turn crisp and cool in Vancouver, I’ve also picked my aran sweater back up… but then the Lady Sweater kind of eclipsed the progress I was making… I guess I’m not so much about finishing things, if you hadn’t noticed already from looking at this blog!!

 

Recycled and Respun

I’ve recently realized that I hadn’t gotten around to trying plying recycled yarns to create newly spun yarns. So I got out the spindle; and had a go.

I haven’t knit with this yet, so I’m not sure yet what the result will truly be, but it looks pretty successful and beautiful to me! Perhaps I over-plied it a little.

Next I will try a 4-ply cabled yarn, so that the twist that I add into the first ply will be balanced by the second plying.

I’ve also blocked the first part of my pillow cover project; a yellow lace medallion in bulky angora/wool recycled yarn.

In the kitchen, I cooked up some deep purple sock yarn… OK, I’ll admit it, this was not the colour I initially shot for… But when the teal which I’d lovingly coveted turned to dark green after I added the vinegar and the yellow dye really STRUCK, then I had to dump in other random bits of dye I had hanging around, and voila! purple. Not bad though!

I’ve also been to the thrift stores, and had some success;

• Mohair/nylon sweater, which I over dyed to wear.
• 100% lambswool LS sweater
• 70% angora 30% nylon MEGA sweater in flourescent orange (AMAZING!!)
• felted wool cable sweater, which I’ll make into a felted bag
• 70% silk 30% nylon short sleeve sweater – very slinky yarn, which takes dye well
• and last but not least, a 100% cashmere long-sleeve women’s sweater, in a purple I actually like!! This might have to be a vest? Or a hat+gloves set? Mmmmm something with cables? Maybe doubled up and bulky… Very exciting, that’s for sure!

70% silk / 30% nylon recycled yarn

 

Handspun tangerine and eggplant

Two new yarns; or little tiny tastes of yarn, anyways:

• Polwarth – roving dyed, then spun – 12 wpi
• Alpaca/Wool – spun then dyed – 16 wpi

And I’m working forward on the hand-spun toque too!!

 

Blustery Day handspun scarf

This is a little scarf that I’m working on with the yarn I hand spun from hand-dyed polwarth roving [see dyeing in previous post here].

It is a very satisfying little project, perfect for the bus and skytrain, and yes, nerdiness abounds, I’ve even begun to knit while walking, I’m embarrassed to admit. It’s just such a great way to relax after a hard day of work!

It’s only 18 stitches wide, knit on US#7 (4.5mm) needles, and the pattern is one that uses multiple wraps to create elongated stitches; it’s a really easy way to make an open, lacy fabric. I really love it as a way to show off this yarn, because the color shifts turn into fairly wide stripes, and the thick/thin inconsistency of the yarn looks nice. I’m not sure if I should block it after it’s done or not…

I started out knitting simple uniform rows 8 row repeat: <K 3 rows, then 1 row wrapping each stitch twice, then K3 more rows, then 1 row wrapping each stitch 3 times>

Then I got bored of that, so I switched to a pattern which creates ‘open’ rows that are shaped like eyes and hourglasses:

R 1-3: K all sts

R 4: K2, (Knit, wrapping twice) 2 times, (Knit, wrapping 3 times) 3 times, (Knit, wrapping 4 times) 4 times, (Knit, wrapping 3 times) 3 times, (Knit, wrapping twice) 2 times, K2 <18 sts total>

R 4-7: K all sts

R8: (Knit, wrapping 4 times) 2 times, (Knit, wrapping 3 times) 2 times, (Knit, wrapping twice) 3 times, K4, (Knit, wrapping twice) 3 times, (Knit, wrapping 3 times) 2 times, (Knit, wrapping 4 times) 2 times

REPEAT THESE 8 ROWS

I’m very pleased with the result – I’m 2/3rds of the way through my 170 yards of yarn, and it will be very

lovely when it’s done!

 

The Works

So after a relatively short time spent job hunting, I’ve just started a new job, and I’m in my second week. It is exhausting to get back to the 9 to 5 after 2+ years of grad school and slacking!! I’ll get used to it soon enough, but it’s a shock to the system to be getting up at 6:45, and returning home exhausted with very little energy left for anything else!! That said, some days are easier than others, and I’m enjoying the work!

I still don’t have a functional digital camera, which is a bummer for the blogging – I don’t want to blog without pictures. However, I have one new project image – this scan of the Lace Ribbon Scarf (a free pattern from Knitty) I started as a knitting group project, because I wanted to have something relatively brainless and portable to take with me.

I’m really liking the pattern, and the finished result. I’m excited to see how it will look and feel after blocking, too. I’m using 2 lace weight yarns, one is an angora/nylon blend that I recycled and hand-dyed, and the other is Knit Picks bare merino lace that I hand-dyed. For the first half of the scarf, I held the 2 different yarns together, and then for the second half, after I ran out of the merino, I’m just knitting with 2 strands of the angora. More pics once I get a new camera!!

See also the yarns: the angora, and the merino lace, on Flickr.

 

The hunt for the elusive Teal : part II

As I stated before, my thirst for Teal (or maybe turquoise, I’m not sure of the truly correct descriptor) has not been sated. The dye tests continue, this time a little more scientifically than the last [link]. The fiber I’ve used this time is Knitpicks ‘bare’ superwash merino DK, and I am dying it to knit a sweater, which I have designed. It’s going to be called ‘Biased’, but I want it to be a surprise, so I’m not going to debut it here until it’s 100% done.

My process is as follows:

1. Make solutions of the jacquard acid dye colors that I use (8 oz of water, 1 tsp of dye powder).
   Make several mini-skeins of the yarn to be dyed, and soak these in lukewarm water for 30 minutes or more.
2. Fill mason jars 2/3 full of water, and then prepare the test dye baths by adding 1 tbsp of vinegar, and then adding dye solution using an eyedropper, and recording the amount of each dye colour added. I find the most important thing to note is the proportion of one dye to another, as this is one thing you can duplicate in your full-scale dyeing later.
3. Drop the mini-skeins into the test dye-baths, cover the mason jars with plastic wrap, and put them in the microwave for 2 minutes or so, till they get really hot. Let cool for a few minutes, then repeat. When the dye baths are exhausted, or the test skein has reached the desired color, pull the skeins out of the jars, rinse, and let dry.
4. When dry, knit up the yarns into a test swatch – I think this is important because the color always looks much different to me once it is knitted up; plus this allows you to test the yarn out, and determine gauge, if you haven’t already.

Once you have decided on the color you like best out of the lot, you can go ahead and dye the entire lot by making a much larger dye-bath with the same proportion of dyes. Likely it will come out slightly differently than the mini-swatch, as it will be dyed on the stovetop, instead of the microwave, and in a larger skein, which I find often results in a less uniform colour. Also, unless you precisely calculated the weight of mini-skein, and extrapolated the dye amounts for your larger dye lot to correspond, the colour you achieve may be lighter or deeper, but I’ve found that I can just pull the skein out of the pot when I feel it’s reached the right shade.

 

Pink Rainbow

This is a sweater’s worth of recycled angora blend yarn, which I dyed into a ‘rainbow’ of red shades, from light pink to a deep burgundy. I actually dyed and photographed this project in my last few days living in Whistler, before moving into my new apartment in Vancouver, but it’s taken me awhile to get it up on the blog.

To get these coordinated shades, I tossed the entire lot into the pot, and then pulled out the skeins one by one once I felt like they’d reached the right depth of color. As I went, I had to toss a bit more dye into the pot as well, so that I could reach the deeper colors, which required the addition of some blue. I’m pretty excited with the results.

I’ve had a few thoughts about how to work with this yarns:

• working single-row stripes which transition gradually and somewhat randomly from light through dark
• working multi-color slip-stitch patterns (Barbara Walker’s treasuries have MANY examples of this)
• working more than one strand of each yarn together, and shifting the strands to create a subtle ‘ombre’ effect – perhaps in an interesting texture pattern?

The thing about the yarn is that it is quite small gauge (fingering?) and it doesn’t have very much stretch at all, which makes it a bit tiring to work with, so while I was VERY excited while dying it, I’m not sure how much I’ll like knitting it up. Maybe I’ll hold two strands together to get worsted/heavy worsted and then make some pillow covers, or something else that is fast and satisfying… lace medallion pillows perhaps? Check back later to see swatches!