jenwren's blog

Icarus finally made it off the needles this morning.  The casting off took an age.  I haven't bothered working out what the final stitch count was (since the numbers in the pattern didn't apply as I did two extra repeats), but it was lots.  I had started the second ball of silk half way through chart 4, and used 12-13 grams from the second ball.  I was always going to need that second ball...


After a good soak, and a number of rinses, since a fair amount of dye ran (I expected this from my Mother's experience with some Mollydale mohair) I've pinned it out to block.  It's not perfectly straight - I'm just not anal enough to spend forever getting it perfect.  Bite me.  I expect it won't be dry until some time tomorrow at the earliest.  We're having cool weather here in Armidale, with almost as little rain as you can have, but still have rain.

After a good 48 hours I finally dared to unpin Icarus.  I'm rather pleased with the final result bar one flaw - the silk isn't as elastic as wool, so the extra yarn in the yo4's forms loops at the points (if you look carefully at the photo you'll see them).  If I'd put in a lifeline at the end of chart 4 as I should have done, I'd have frogged back to fix it with yo2's instead, but since there was no lifeline, I'd decided to live with it rather than rip back three rows and try pick up the 600+ stitches.



In the last couple of days I've dyed one lot of yarn, and have a second lot I will do soon.  This lot was six balls of Cleckheaton Country Silk I bought back in July.  I was aiming for a light grey with the occasional bit of purple and sage green.  I got the grey okay, and the purple, but the green was too dark and looked fairly ugly once it was in the dye bath.  Thankfully it isn't so bad once dry - you probably can't even spot it in the picture.  The yarn is for a hexagon afghan.  There will be more yarn bought (on KMart 15% off days) and dyed for this project down the track.  I don't mind variation from different dye lots in this instance.  In fact, I dyed this yarn in my market-stall-bought old stock pot on the stove top.  The pot is huge - all 18 litres of it.  My microwave dyeing dish is only two litres and I needed something bigger for when I want more consistent results for a bulk lot of yarn.  This was the first time I'd dragged out the pot since I bought it months ago, and was a bit of a trial run for the next dye job - the half-kilo (or so - I can't remember) of wool/silk that Mum spun for me some time ago.

While waiting for the dyed Country Silk to firstly cool in the dye pot and then to dry, I started another sock.  I was bored of socks, but a few months without one on the go has cured that.  This one is the RPM pattern from Knitty in Patons Patonyle colour 4312.

This is hand spun yarn my mother spun for me from wool and silk.  It has taken some time for me to get around to dyeing this, partly because of the amount (600 grams) and a desire for it to be evenly coloured, and partly because I had to decide on a colour.

I got the colour I wanted, but I didn't get the even colouring.  This went into the mammoth pot I dyed the Country Silk in last week as a trial run.  I had at least double the volume of liquid and yarn in the pot this time, which led to unforeseen issues.  I think what happened was that the yarn on the bottom of the pot heated up fastest, and dye fixed to it more rapidly than elsewhere in the pot.  So seven of the eight skeins have a dark patch with lighter parts either side.  Seeing as it has happened fairly consistently, I'm not troubled by it, but next time I try an even dye job, I'm going to try putting a trivet of some sort in the bottom of the pot so the yarn can't sit on the bottom.

The next step is to start swatching to determine what stitch patterns will or won't work with this yarn, then plan a cardigan or jumper for me from it.

Meanwhile the first RPM sock has reached the heel.  I'm spending the weekend in Sydney (Charlotte, my youngest niece, is turning one!), and it will be coming with me.

I arrived in Sydney on Friday afternoon, and eventually got around to checking email and reading the latest blog postings on various blogs sometime late in the evening.  Kate mentioned that the Rubi & Lana's meet was on this Saturday morning at 10am.  I had already known it wasn't a SSK weekend, which keeps happening to me - I haven't been to SSK since last January!  So I decided what the heck, rearranged my Saturday plans, and went along.

It was so nice to put faces to some people whose blogs or podcast I  have been reading/listening to for some time.  There was Kate, David, Meg, Sally and Mandy (a fellow pink elephant alumni from two years ahead of me at Cheltenham!).  I showed them my Icarus shawl which I had brought to Sydney to show Mum, and got to see what they were all working on.  Kate has posted about it along with photos.  I worked on my RPM socks (as shown in the photo of me).  I stayed about two hours before I headed off to do the other things I had planned - buying some Tulip bamboo dpns at Tapestry Craft (I don't like the Clover brand ones), chocolate from Haigh's and beads from Empire Beads (Enmore).  And I got my gelato fix at the QVB on my way back to my brother's place.  I miss gelato, living in Armidale...

This morning I finished the first RPM sock with the aid of a needle borrowed from Jenny B.  I'll photograph it later.  Next I'm off to Charlotte's birthday party, then back home tomorrow.

Charlotte (aka "Strawberry", hence the magnificent cake) celebrated her first birthday in style.

Yesterday afternoon I dyed the second two balls of Patons Patonyle I bought last April.  This time I went with a 4 metre skein, which I wound on my warping board (above) on Wednesday and wetted out overnight.   I went with two colours this  time, hence the shorter skein, which was much easier to deal with.



Here's the dyed skein, which dried overnight, seeing as it is so hot at the moment.  I really love the colours the way they turned out, but I must work on dyeing the transitions between colours better - there are pale patches that I didn't want.



And here's the resultant dyed skein, rewound on the swift.  I don't know how I ever survived all the dyeing I've done without a swift.  I wound both balls of Patonyle off together into the 4 metre skein, so I set up both the ball winder and the swift and wound off the two strands from the long skein into a ball and a short skein simultaneously.  I could handle the 4 metre skein on my own, unlike the 8 metre skein last time that definitely required help!  This yarn is destined to become a pair of Jaywalker socks.  But I won't be casting them on until the RPM socks are finished.



This is where the RPM socks are up to.  After knitting a repeat an a half of the self-striping pattern, I discovered that the second ball had been wound in the opposite direction to the first ball such that the colour repeats are in the opposite order!  I used both balls from the outside (I tend to use commercial balls from the outside, but balls off my ballwinder from the centre), and I checked and they are definitely the same dye lot.  I've never come across this happening in self-patterning sock wool before - I assumed they always wound them the same way.  It won't matter since the spiral pattern makes it difficult to pick up (so I didn't even bother starting the second sock at the same point in the dye pattern) and so it will be most obvious only on the sole.  Still, it's something to keep in mind in the future.

I spent most of Australia Day at the local racecourse as part of the Armidale Spinners and Weavers display.  There are more pictures over at the guild site, including of me(!).  I was spinning up my dyed silk hankies and got quite a bit done.  Many of the people who came by were quite fascinated by the process.  I had to slow down towards the end of the day as the silk is hard on the hands and I nearly blistered my right middle finger from drawing out the silk.



The results so far sure are looking nice.  I can't wait to ply it up and see how it's turned out.

I finished the RPM socks yesterday.  It's a shame they won't be worn for a couple of months yet as they are nice and snuggly.  I didn't manage to keep myself from starting the Jaywalker socks before finishing the RPM socks as I was just too keen.  But about 9 or 10 repeats into the zig zag pattern, I had to stop and consult my knitting encyclopedia about the double decreases.  They didn't look right, and the encyclopedia confirmed I'd misunderstood the instructions.  So I discovered I'd been doing double decreases the wrong way for years, but it had never looked quite bad enough that I'd realised what was wrong (the right stitch was ending up on top instead of the centre stitch).  After putting the stitches onto scrap yarn and checking the fit (which was fine), I ripped back to the ribbing and started the zig zag again.  It hasn't taken long to get further than where I was before ripping, and some.  And the stripes are perhaps not as distinct as they could be, but I think they're great.