December 2005 Archives

I wasn't sure if I'd visit Rubi + Lana in Gordon.  I'd not been to the shop before, but I'd heard a lot about it from others on the Justdoitknits list.  Being so close to Christmas, I thought getting to Gordon and parking was going to be a hassle.  But I'm glad I went.  Parking was no problem at all, and the shop was well worth the trip.  I drooled over the Lorna's Laces (I just couldn't justify spending $30/skein to make a $60 pair of socks), the "Royal Silk" from Art Yarns, and numerous other imported yarns, and browsed for ages.  They also have Addi Turbos, but as I hadn't received the shawl pattern before leaving Armidale, I didn't know what size I wanted (or if I already have the size I need).  No matter, as I'll just order from STYK again.  But I ended up buying some "Rubi + Lana" 100% wool 2 ply (pale blue) and 3 ply (brown).  I took ages to settle on which colour to choose because there was quite a range.

I've added a picture of the yarn under "Stash Enhancement" over on the left.  And just for my Mum, if you click on the link above the images in that list, you'll get a bigger version.

When I arrived in Sydney on Tuesday, I went to see my sister Katherine and go for a swim, and I finally had the opportunity to give her Strawberry’s Surprise.  I can now reveal the pattern was Kate Gilbert’s “Samantha”, which I knitted in Bendigo 8 ply cotton in “snow”.  I also gave Kath a couple of other baby items I’d knitted - “Daisy” (the hooded version), and a little jacket with a lace border I’ve made a few times now and is quite nice.  I think I have photos of them somewhere but I can’t be bothered to go in search of them just now.  I hope to get some photos of “Strawberry” wearing them before too long...  The bub is due on 13 January.

It took a bit of effort to get my laptop onto my brother Tim’s wireless network - many hours of stuffing around with security settings to get it to work.  I don’t bother with the same level of security at my place.  My next-door neighbour’s network is not secured, so I figure if anyone wants a connection they’ll use theirs before trying to break the encryption on mine (I also regularly check my router’s log for suspect activity).

I’ve been visiting folk here in Sydney as well as doing a fair bit of shopping.  Not present shopping for Christmas, as I did all that before leaving home.  This has been shopping for all the little things I don’t get to buy in Armidale.  Like walking into a shop of just earrings (Starfish Earrings).  And I did my usual drop in to Tapestry Craft (sale!) and Haighs in the city.  Calling into the Gardens Shop at the Royal Botanic Gardens was particularly damaging to my credit card - the fifth and final volume of the Horticultural Flora of South Eastern Australia was there, and I needed to complete my set with it - at $160.  I like books too much!

A little more shopping tomorrow and SSK on Saturday...

I’m staying at my parents home in Port Stephens before travelling on to Sydney tomorrow. Today my Mother and I went shopping in Nelson Bay and Salamander Bay. Mum had to renew her driver’s license at the RTA (I went looking in op shops for knitting needles to teach some of my students to knit) then we went to buy some Crocs.

I first heard about Crocs on Kris’s blog, but didn’t have a clue what she was on about. Then she showed a picture and I was agog! Bright red! Then, on the weekend, Mum was talking about them because they were mentioned in the Sydney Morning Herald travel section as really comfortable shoes to travel in (my parents are travelling to Great Britain next northern Summer). So we got on the ‘net and visited http://www.crocs.com/ and http://www.crocs.com.au/ to have a look. I was really interested in the Aspens because they have a solid top - I could wear them in the Science labs at school. But the Australian site didn’t include them, so I thought I was going to be disappointed. Mum liked the Beach ones. We determined where we were able to get them locally from the list of shops on the Australian site.

And so we found ourselves looking at a range of many coloured Crocs in a menswear shop in Nelson Bay. To my joy, they had the Aspens, but only in three colours (Black, Brown and Taupe). I went with the Taupe.  Mum picked out some lovely Lilac Beachs. She so enjoyed their comfort she left the shop wearing them. When we got to the Salamander Centre, she quite enjoyed stunning those people who were walking around staring at the ground.  The sight of the shoes caught the eyes of some who looked up to see who was wearing them! I’ve been wearing mine around the house since we got back, and I’m starting to think I might have to seek out a pair of Beach Crocs in Butter at Rebel Sport once I get to Sydney.

I’ve finished the back of the Denim Pinafore, and could easily finish the front before Christmas. I didn’t bring any other projects with me because of the yarn needing dyeing (or the pattern to arrive) first. So while I was in KMart I picked up some cheap balls of Holiday 8 ply wool (not machine wash treated) to make a Wine Sock from the first issue of Yarn magazine.

If you visited my blog on Friday or over the weekend, you might have wondered why my progress on the Denim Pinafore went backwards to 0% and my previous post went missing, then came back without images. TypePad was having some problems and had to restore people’s blogs from backups. It should all be fixed now.

The denim pinafore is coming along nicely.  I've nearly finished the first ball of yarn, despite the heat.  When I knitted the test swatch I didn't get any indigo on my hands, but now I've knitted this, I keep on getting blue fingers.  I don't know if it is because it is a different ball and I didn't rinse this one as much, or if the hot weather is making my hands more clammy, causing the indigo to come off the yarn.

The order of dyes I was waiting for arrived on Monday, so yesterday I did a little test dyeing of the silk and ivory yarn to check to colour was going to come out right.  The colour I'm using is Landscape "Mist", which is a grey colour.  And it did come out pretty much at the shade I wanted.  I'm still sort of undecided about the grey though.  It seems a bit of a boring colour to go with, but now I have a sample I keep looking at it and I've found it looks really nice teamed with blue.  Since the pattern isn't likely to arrive until tomorrow or Friday at the earliest, and I'm heading off to see family over the Christmas period on Saturday, I think I'll leave the dyeing until after Christmas, by which time I should be more sure of the colour.

I'm a little paranoid about greys.  I tried dyeing some tencel grey with the black Procion MX dye I had, and found it was actually a blue dye.  So this parcel of dye also had some grey Procion MX dye because of this (I also got brown Procion dye because I had difficulty mixing colours to achieve the desired brown).  My previous attempt at grey wool was a couple of years ago with Landscape "Quarry" (before the Landscapes Elements range of colours existed).  Thanks presumably to the chemistry of Armidale's town water, grey is *not* what came out of the dye bath.  If I use that dye again, it will probably involve obtaining some rainwater first.  I hated the resultant colour (I can't even describe it - it's a sort of green/deep aqua), which wasn't suitable for the intended purpose - part of a striped felted bag with brown, blue and purple.  I ended up making it into a felted pencil case.  That pencil case has been used a lot in the last two years, carrying odds and ends around several schools while I was casual teaching, and around various parts of the school I now work in.  It's indestructible, and distinctively mine, in all its ugliness.

As I said yesterday, I have no works in progress.  I finished these socks in Heirloom Jigsaw yarn last weekend, and they are lovely and snuggly.  Not that I'll need them until next autumn/winter - this week has been hot.  Being Armidale, and 'hot' being only around 30 deg C, I won't complain too much - elsewhere it has hit 40 deg C - yuck!

The Miami Socks went to the frog pond.  I hated knitting them, and realised they were also going to be too loose.  I haven't decided what that strange Miami yarn will become - it's gone back in the stash.  I have other projects awaiting my attention, but they involve some dyeing first, and I hadn't been home from school early enough to ring and order the necessary dyes in business hours until this week.  In fact I've splurged a bit this week - more dyes, more yarn (Bendigo Woollen Mills sale) and a pattern (it's for that silk and ivory yarn in the stash enhancement list on the left - after I've dyed it).

And I picked up a copy of the first issue of Yarn Magazine, released today.  It looks good and I hope it gives 'Creative Knitting' (an oxymoronic title!) a run for its money.  I'm just happy to have an Aussie magazine worth buying that should have patterns in locally available yarns and has ads for local yarns - it can be a real tease to open one of the overseas mags and see ads for products or patterns using yarns you can't get here (or can if after exchange rate and shipping it proves not too costly).

I won't bore you with why I've been too busy to post - just put it under the heading of "school".  I'd rather cover the more interesting things I've done in the last nine weeks.

In early November, my Spinning and Weaving group had an Indigo Dye Pot day.  It wasn't just indigo dyeing - there were some other methods employed, but as my interest was only in the indigo, that's all I participated in (I can do other types of dyeing any time I like).

I had 400 grams of Bendigo 8 ply cotton in 'snow', and a tencel warp (which I still haven't weighed)  prepared for the indigo pot.  Indigo is an interesting dye - as I understand it, the  indigo is insoluble in the oxidised blue form.  To dye fibre, you need to put it in a reducing vat, which is an alkaline solution.  It is soluble in this solution and is a bright green colour.  Where the solution is exposed to the air, some of the indigo becomes oxidised and forms a skin on the surface.  Ours looked sort of metallic-coppery on top.  You dip the yarn into the vat for long enough to take up the vat solution, then remove it slowly so that the excess liquid in the yarn runs back into the vat before it can oxidise.  We weren't very good at that part, so vat solution went all over Pauline's lawn, turning the grass blue!  We then hung up the dipped skeins and they were left to oxidise and turn blue.  Mine seemed to take forever - whenever I opened up a bit of a skein to look inside, there was lime green fibre, which then  exposed to the air would oxidise and darken, eventually becoming blue.  The indigo was tending to form a skin on the yarn preventing the oxidation until it dried out a bit.

Then came the rinsing.  Lots of rinsing.  I made lots of buckets of yucky, murky blue water (so more of Pauline's lawn turned blue).  Thankfully, Pauline has a couple of rainwater tanks (as well as a town supply) from which we took the water, and it has rained a fair bit since, so she won't have ended up short of water.  Then I took them home and rinsed them some more and hung them to dry.  Once dry, I wound the cotton into balls and rechained the warp.  I'll probably rinse the tencel warp again before I use it as I want to team it with a pale weft, and I don't want the colour to bleed (much?).  Rinsing it again will indicate if it's going to be a problem.

I've knitted a couple of swatches in the indigo dyed cotton so that I can modify the pattern I intend to knit from it.  The pattern is the Denim Pinafore in Erika Knight's "Simple Knits for Little Cherubs" designed to use Rowan Denim yarn.  Rowan Denim yarn shrinks by something close to 20%, but in length only.  My indigo dyed Bendigo cotton won't do anything like that (and my stitch gauge is way off the pattern's, while I like the drape produced), so I practically have to rewrite the pattern.  Knitting with it is divine - it has come out quite soft after all the washing, and it has a nice variation about it.  The pale stitches here and there are from where the  skein was held while being dipped in the vat and consequently didn't take up much dye (and I unwittingly did that with every skein).  And I suspect the slight dark/light variation over the rest of the yarn was caused by the solution in the skeins being held in the fibre towards the bottom of each hanging skein while the oxidising took place.  I like it a lot.

And until I actually rework the pattern, I can't cast on.  I'm actually WIP-less at the moment.