Recently in Dyeing Category

School term is well and truly underway - I haven't managed to finish sorting out the blog banner and commenting system. It may well have to wait until the Easter break now. I finished the first wave of marking this morning - the next wave starts from Tuesday. Then there's Year 8 camp, followed by a third wave of marking from the first round of assessments for the year that will probably see me marking through the break... Still, things are less stressed than they were last year, so far.

I completed two more chemo caps for my work colleague. I was part way through this second cap when I heard that the first one (the Shedir one) was now in full-time use. The photo below is of the second cap (Odessa - Ravelry link) last weekend when it was finished but still had a few lifelines (the blue yarn) in it in case it was the wrong length, and I hadn't yet tied the end off. It was tried on and found to be fine then the lines were removed and the end cut and woven in on the spot. So I don't have a final finished picture.



The third cap was the speediest knit. It was the Lace-Edge Woman's Hat from Headhuggers. The brown one is Rowan Calmer in "Coffee Bean" and this one is "Plum".



Charlotte's pinwheel sweater is moving slowly in between other things. Last weekend I bought some Bella Baby Layette from Spotlight, that is essentially a cheap version of the Sirdar Snuggly Bamboo I'm using in the pinwheel sweater. It does not come in as good a range of colours. I had been put off buying some and dyeing it since it is 80% bamboo and 20% wool - a mix of cellulose and protein fibres - and my usual dyes work only on one type each. However, I was inspired by Emily's Jaali in the same yarn dyed with Dylon Multipurpose Dye. So yesterday eight skeins of BBL went in the dyepot with two tins of Dylon Multipurpose in the Bordeaux colour. I heated the big pot for as long as I dared while stirring constantly in fear that the bamboo might melt (I'm not sure what its melting point is, but I didn't want to find out either...). Anyway, plenty of dye seems to have taken to both the bamboo and wool. Sydney's inclement weather means the skeins are still drying. And the stirring meant they got more tangled than I'd have liked, so they will need some TLC when I wind them back into balls.



I'm loving the colour.

Two posts on the same day! I wanted the Calvert stuff separate from the rest. There's been:



Work on a Pinwheel Cardigan for Charlotte. Now that I understand the geometry involved, I'm after a measurement of my dear niece to confirm it will actually fit her next Winter. I shall have to attack her with a tape measure on Christmas Day.





A crayon roll for a cute one year old. (I made three of these last Christmas for my three nieces - and forgot to photograph them...). And yes, I got into the spirit of the party.





Shedir, a chemo cap for a work colleague recently diagnosed with breast cancer.

A fun day out knitting in public at the Opera House, but I didn't take any photos of my own so you'll have to go here (I'm in the last photo). David interviewed me for his podcast.



And the yarn (Bendigo Rustic 8 ply) has been dyed for the Stained Glass Felted Bag. There are another two colours not in the photo - an apple green and a pink. The black was dyed with Landscape "Currawong" and the blue (front right) was dyed with Gaywool "Indigo", but the others are Queen Food Colouring. There is also another skein dyed with the "Indigo" that was way too dark. I might use it to knit a test felting swatch although I'm fairly sure this will felt the same way as Bendigo Colonial 8 ply - the only difference is the Colonial is crepe plied while Rustic is not.

Oh! And I nearly forgot. I bought a second spinning wheel. I haven't had time to play with it yet.

Now that Tangled Yoke is finished I am committed to knitting for the Winterwarm project for the next week. My friend Sally is collecting the knitted items next weekend, so I really need to get a move on!

I dived into the stash to come up with some yarn to make some baby hats. My stash, at least that part that is not already committed to specific projects, is dominated by cream yarns so that I can dye them whatever colour I desire when I do decide what it is to become. While looking in the boxes, I came across the yarn I bought (I don't remember if it was last year or the year before....) for another felted bag (Bendigo Rustic 8 ply in a November sale). Good timing, since I had forgotten I already had yarn for this, and came across the pattern I'd like to use a few weeks ago. The pattern is the Felted Stained Glass Fan Bag, and the variations I had been admiring used Noro Kureyon yarn. The Noro is really too expensive to me for a felting project, so I had put the idea aside before the forgotten yarn in the stash was found. This more-or-less coincided with a photo in last Sunday's Sun Herald that caught my imagination:



Considering the number of cameras pointed at the Water Cube in Beijing at any one moment just now with the Olympics, you'd think I could come up with another shot of it lit up like that on the internet. Er, nope. Hence I had to photograph the newspaper. Those colours have me thinking this:



Which made me think of my Mother's "jelly jumper", made for Charlotte:

As the name may have given away, Mum dyed the yarn for the jelly jumper with packets of jelly crystals. I've just cut to the chase and gone straight to the food colouring - no sugar or gelatin to wash out of the wool. So the yarn I picked out for the Winterwarm baby hats became a dyeing experiment. Two 50g balls of Nundle 8 ply left over from a blanket (pre-blog) and about 75g of Bendigo 8 ply Colonial left over from my original felted bag (also pre-blog) and split into two skeins.



Each dye bath was about 1.5L water in my 2L pyrex dyeing dish, 12 drops Queen food colouring (16 for the red) and a liberal sprinkling of citric acid. From left to right: red, lime green (yellow and green in 3:1 ratio), purple (red and blue in 3:1 ratio) and straight blue. For the felted bag I'll use Landscape "Currrawong" for the black, and I might need to use Gaywool "Indigo" for a proper blue, but the rest will be food colouring dyed.

Must do school work then knit colourful baby hats.

Charlotte's book arrived two days after my last post, but I still haven't got the amigurumi book - I cancelled the order when I was informed it actually wasn't in stock (the email I received the day I placed the order said "Today we sent you via Airmail" - a somewhat misleading statement since they'd done no such thing!) and ordered it from my preferred book supplier, who'd been out of stock but then restocked *and* dropped the price. Bonus. Except it still hasn't arrived. Must practice my patience skills.

I also came down with a chest cold following that last post, which derailed my plans for the last week of my holidays. I was just well enough in time for my first day at my new school a week ago, and today was the first day with some students - school starts in earnest tomorrow.



While unwell I did complete the second sock of the black beaded rib pair. So the first sock took more than six months, whereas the second took 14 days. The picture above does them no justice, but being black, it is simply too hard to get a good photo of the rather nice texture. Since completing those, the once-were-9-to-5-socks-now-handwarmers have come along well and the first of the pair is complete.



The Rubi and Lana knitting group was at my home last Saturday, and there was an excellent turn out. I forgot to get out the camera and catch the crowd since we were too busy enjoying ourselves. Before everyone arrived, I put my dye pot on the stove with 100 grams of tea leaves and about 2 litres of water and boiled it for an hour.



It was sitting and cooling while folk were here. After they left, I strained out the tea leaves (gee, 100 grams of tea leaves is a lot when wet!) and returned the dye liquor to the pot with more water, 10 grams of alum and 3 grams of cream of tartar. I added a wetted out 95 gram undyed skein of The Knittery Merino Cashmere sock yarn (with a few extra green cotton ties added to the skein), purchased about a year ago, and simmered it for an hour and twenty minutes. I let it stand until the pot had cooled before rinsing.



After drying, the skein is a lovely rich caramel colour. I'm very happy with it! The yarn is earmarked for a pair of Earl Grey socks (in keeping with a tea theme).

Every time I get busy, blogging stops.  I've been busy.  Really busy.  I'm going to be even more busy, but I'm not blogging about that for now.  But I have plenty of stuff I can tell you all about.

Last weekend was the Armidale Show.  The Spinners and Weavers put on a display, and you can see me spinning in public over there (first photo).  I was spinning up some blended possum and merino that Mum brought back from New Zealand for me late last year.  And I finished spinning the singles on Saturday night and plied it on Wednesday.  It was a bit overspun as I kept being distracted, but it will make a nice pair of fingerless gloves when I get around to it...



I also entered the Jaywalker socks into the knitting section of the show, which unfortunately only had two entrants - myself and Bronwyn.   Bronwyn took the honours and my socks were given second place.  You can see a picture of them both on display (last photo).  The number of entries was particularly poor this year - I almost didn't bother (I was really busy, and almost didn't make it over to the showground to enter them).  I hope something can be done to encourage more entries.

I made it to Virginia Farm on Monday and bought some more dyes to extend the range of colours I have on hand and had a long chat to Jenny about dyes.  I gleaned some valuable information about dyeing Optim wool that I will put into practice when I finally get to the 500 grams of it I have in the spinning stash.  Today I used some of the new dyes on some more silk hankies.  They were meant to have more blue and less of the purple, but seeing as these are my two favourite colours, it can't really go wrong.



I'll start spinning these hankies (this is only a fraction of what I dyed) once I've finished with the natural coloured merino I'm  working with at the moment.   I'm spinning it very fine because that's what it seemed to want to be, and as there's only 25 grams of it, if it isn't fine, it won't go very far!  (Sorry, I forgot to take a photo of it.)



I got home on Wednesday and found I had a glut of tomatoes.  I have a plant in a pot on the front verandah (grosse lisse) and several plants out the back (I don't know how many or the varieties, but they're the cherry-sized ones)  that were self-sown from the compost I spread in the garden last year.



This is the same garden bed that was hit hard by the hail storm last December, and my parsley was not really ruined (sorry, dead photo link removed) - that's it on the far right end of the plants, more than knee-high.  (Further to the right is a new extension to this bed which I finished about two weeks ago.)  The furthermost plant on the left is the most productive - it's right in the corner of the bed adjacent to the path, and most of the plant is sitting on the path gaining warmth from it and the wall.  The plant extending the furthest from the bed in the centre is very large, but has really only just begun flowering.  I very much doubt I'll get any fruit off that one before the first frost comes and knocks out all these plants.  I'd never have thought tomatoes would have grown here in the first place with only morning sun - the wall clearly makes a big difference, making it a bit of a heat trap.  And they've thrived on neglect as I was really only bothering to water the parsley until these plants really took off, and they've been virtually pest free whereas I've been constantly having to pick caterpillars off the plant on the front verandah.

And yes, I am knitting another sock.  But I forgot to photograph it, so I'll show that another time...