jenwren's blog

A long weekend and I'm still not on top of all my marking *sigh*.  It's school report writing season, and while the marking is not in check, the reports are fairly much done from my point of view.  With all the school work, not a lot else is getting a look in.  Only two more weeks to the end of the (private) school term.

As promised, a picture of the finished Kid Mohair scarf.  It is getting a lot of use - I wear it most days because it is so lovely.

I've had a lovely collision between my fibre pursuits and teaching - using natural substances to dye wool.  My experience of dyeing wool or tencel has involved only synthetic dyes, and the indigo dye pot day my spinning and weaving group was to have last week ended up being postponed until later in the year.  But my year 8 Science classes have been studying "Natural Resources" and the textbook even had a wool dyeing practical in it.  So I jumped with joy at the prospect of trying some natural dyeing.  I modified the practical a bit with some other references and some totally experimental plant substances.  The results were quite fantastic.  In the picture they are (from left): skeins 1 & 2 - wattle (yes, yes, I'll identify the species once it flowers...) with copper sulfate mordant; skeins 3-6 - rosehip and hibiscus tea bags (very convenient!) with either alum or vinegar as mordant; skeins 7 & 8 - blackcurrant and lemon peel tea bags with either alum or vinegar as mordant; skein 9 - eucalypt (again, yet to be identified) with alum mordant; skeins 10 & 11 - beetroot (yes, really, that green is from beetroot) with copper sulfate mordant; skein 12 - beetroot with alum mordant (was meant to turn out apricot - the only disappointment of the whole bunch); and skeins 13 & 14 - onion skins and alum mordant (the first one was brown onions, the second was red or Spanish onions).  I've yet to test how colour fast any of them are.

My biggest news of the past few weeks would be succumbing to buying a spinning wheel.  It's a Sickinger wheel (made in Coffs Harbour) and bought second-hand (or, more likely, third or fourth-hand) from a local woman via eBay.  It's almost exactly the same as my Mother's spinning wheel (also a Sickinger), with a few minor differences.  I've been so busy that all I've had time to do with it so far is glue some of the mistreated bobbins it came with back together again, and give it a good clean, polish and lubrication.  I'm looking forward to those school holidays...

And lastly, I finished the first blue Patonyle sock last night.  As this sock was started last October, I now have to work out how to start the second one (this was my first toe-up sock and I didn't use a pattern) and try and make it match the first one...  I'm keen to finish the pair because I love wearing my other four pairs of handknitted socks during winter, one pair at a time, naturally!  It has been getting colder, with frequent frosts.  But it has been dry - the promised rain this weekend has amounted to little more than drizzle - nothing on Saturday (I even put out two loads of washing to dry as encouragement), 3 mm yesterday, and maybe about another 3 mm today.  Not exactly great for the farmers around here.

Remember the Ugly Socks?  Well, I ordered some suitable undyed yarn (Kona Superwash from the Wool Peddler) which arrived on Thursday.  Today I dyed some of it for the Sideways Sock pattern.  I hadn't done any wool dyeing in ages - and this was the first dyeing I've done since moving house in April.  Note to self: careful what ends up in the laundry tub - this one is cream acrylic, not stainless steel...

I dyed one lot of about 50 grams with Landscapes dye in Marine Blue, Wild Rasberry and Cyclamin, and a second lot of 50 grams in Gaywool Indigo.  This was the first time I'd used the Indigo colour.  I like it, but I don't think the two skeins combined will give the effect I want.  I might wind off another 50 gram lot tomorrow and dye it with the Cyclamin and use the Indigo for something else later.

Along with the Kona, I bought a skein of 'Silk and Ivory' for the stash.  Today has actually been quite productive on the fibre front - I also finished spinning my second bobbin of Merino.  The second bobbin has taken nearly two months, thanks to my having virtually no spare time during school term.  I'm looking forward to plying and actually producing my first skein of yarn.  That probably won't happen until next weekend since I've left everything else that needs doing this weekend to tomorrow.

There has been very little knitting lately.  I bruised my left hand Friday week ago trying to quietly deal with a heater while supervising an exam at school.  I didn't close it hard enough and the door fell back on my hand leaving me with a nice swollen lump and bruise.  It's fine now, but Strawberry's Surprise #1 is awaiting buttons (hopefully I'll get a button-buying opportunity while in Sydney on Tuesday as I've ruled out all of the limited Armidale button range as unsuitable), and the Miami socks are not all that enjoyable to knit, so progress is almost non-existent.

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.

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.

Happy New Year!

SSK turned out to be something of a fizzer on Christmas Eve.  Barmuda was closed and no one else was stupid enough to be out in the heat like silly me.  No matter.

It has remained horribly hot over the last week or so, and even here in Armidale I'm frying.  So I've been doing very little, as I really don't tolerate the heat all that well.

The Denim Pinafore was virtually finished on Christmas day, with only the neck and armhole edging and side seams remaining to be done.  But I didn't get around to finishing it until yesterday.  I'm really happy with the finished product.  Very cute.  I ended up using just under half the indigo-dyed yarn, so I might make another one in a smaller size for about 12-18 months age (this one is the 2-3 year old size - the smallest in Erika Knight's book).  I got that idea from this blog.  I won't start on that too soon as it would be a little boring.

I started a Wine Sock on Christmas Eve and finished by fulling it on Thursday.  It ended up far too tall - I thought I'd fulled it enough (two times through the wash parts of the heavy duty cycle on my machine, and seemingly not willing to get any smaller), but it seems to have stretched as I pulled it over a rolled up towel in plastic to dry.  It's about the right height for one of my stoppered glass bottles I keep in the fridge with water or fruit juice in them, but it is too tall for a standard wine bottle.  If I make this again (and I probably will, as it is a great way of using up leftover yarn), then I'd make it shorter than the 46 cm the pattern specified.

Today I dyed the silk and ivory yarn with the Landscape Mist dye I mentioned before Christmas.  Once it has dried and I've wound it into a ball, I'll be able to start the Flower Basket Shawl.  I knitted up the small  sample I'd dyed previously to be sure of the needle size I'll be using, and after having been concerned about having enough yarn when I first got the pattern, it looks like there's no problem.  Meanwhile, I keep itching to start another shawl with the blue 2 ply yarn I bought at Rubi and Lana.  But I don't think I want two shawls on the go at once, so I'm trying to resist the temptation.

I finished the DNA Scarf on Tuesday - just as the weather warmed up again, so I haven't had the chance to wear it.  I stopped knitting it when it reached about 2 metres long, which meant I have about half a ball of yarn left over.

I've gone back to knitting the Lorna's Laces socks and I've turned the heel of the first sock.  I'm not as annoyed with the colour pooling as I was before.

Today I've done a whole lot of fibre dyeing - mainly some cotton for a project you won't see on here (as the intended recipient may be reading...) and some wool tops to be spun and plied with the silk/merino blend I've been spinning (or, rather, that I was spinning a few weeks ago - no spinning has actually occurred in the last couple of weeks).  Pictures soon - I have to go pull the last of the cotton out of a Synthrapol bath and finish rinsing it.

Here's the cotton I dyed on Friday, being checked out by a Pink Lady chocolate bilby.  The aim was purple, fire-engine-red, and orange cotton yarn (Bendigo 8 ply, originally 'snow').  This was the first time I'd gotten around to dyeing cotton with fibre reactive dyes - my previous use of these dyes has been with Tencel.  I had bought a second violet dye from Kraft Kolour  because I didn't like the colour of the violet from Batik Oetoro.   Sadly, both violets are pretty much the same red-violet colour.  I hate red-violets but absolutely love blue-violets.  So the purple yarn had a second trip to the dye bath with some blue to make it a yummy blue-violet.  The red also had a second trip to the dye bath - I failed to put enough dye in the first time around, and it came out too pink - certainly not a fire engine!  A heavier dose of dye overcame that issue.  The third was meant to be orange.  It looked more orange when wet, but really it at the yellow end of yellow-orange.  Next time, more red dye needs to go in that mixture.  I didn't bother revisiting the dye bath with that skein since the colour works just fine with the other colours.

Sorry, no pictures of the wool yet - it's a yummy purple, but is not quite dry yet.  I've also had fun planting some bulbs in the garden, and cleaning the house.  And the bilby is now headless...

Take two balls of cream Patons Patonyle.  Calculate the amount of yarn needed to knit a sock stripe of desired width (about 2 metres - thin stripes).  Decide how many coloured stripes to have (four) and therefore how long one color repeat will be (8 metres).  Wind both balls simultaneously into an 8 metre skein on a warping board.  (Sorry, I forgot to photograph that bit.)  Wonder if you will regret winding both balls together...

Wet out skein in water and detergent overnight.  Measure each two metre section and mark with a tight tie to minimise the dye wicking into the adjacent colours.  Paint yarn with the dyes of the chosen colours.  Wrap with plastic wrap and microwave in a heatproof dish.  Realise you've forgotten to remove the tight ties.  Scald fingers while removing ties...  Allow yarn to cool completely.  Rinse and hang to dry.

Take skein of yarn to spinning and weaving day and with the assistance of four friends (three to hold the skein and two winding off the two strands of yarn) wind skein into centre-pull balls on toilet rolls.  Wind the balls again with ball winder after getting home.  Start knitting socks.

This has been a much-delayed post, mainly because my computer chucked a hissy fit every time I wanted to edit a picture, and I was determined to have this post contain pictures!

Firstly, better pictures of the moebius scarf.  Since it isn't flat, no matter how this scarf is arranged, it doesn't seem to show it off well.  And since it is a dark colour, much of it was lost in the shadows.  So I've adjusted the contrast so that some of the detail is visible.  On the right I've laid a small section out flat so you can see the chevron pattern created by the "right side" and "wrong side" worked from the centre double-sided cast on.

At the start of the school holidays I decided to knit and full some  pencil cases from the yarn my then Year 8's dyed in June last year.  I had made one of these pencil cases before from some yarn that went horribly wrong in the dye pot.  I hated the colour but made it into a very nice pencil case.  It's the one I currently carry to and from school with many essential bits and pieces inside, and the kids love it (although they threaten to use it to wipe the whiteboard every once and a while).  I sorted the natural dyed yarns into pinks and greens for one case, and yellows and creams for the second.  I forgot to take some 'before' photos, but couldn't resist a shot of the mucky water that came out of the washing machine - I could see it was quite bad so I had the machine pump it into the sink with the plug in, rather than directly down the stand pipe.  The bucket with the pencil case in it was filled with cold water (the machine water was hot) for shocking the wool to speed up the felting.  Clearly a lot of the dye wasn't too colourfast.  The rosehip and hibiscus tea in particular was a flop as all the nice dusty pinks became various shades of green.  I thought it might be the colour bleeding from the wattle (olive green) and beetroot (sage green), but the yellow pencil case didn't pick up any of the colour.  The beetroot became more bluish too.  The best ones were the brown onion (bright yellow) and eucalyptus (lemon yellow) in the yellow pencil case.  They don't appear to have faded at all.

Kathi arrived from Sydney via Bellingen on the Thursday of the first week of the holidays, in time to see the pencil cases above in the final stages of completion prior to fulling.  By the time she returned from a bell ringing practice a few hours later, they were fulled.  She liked them so much that I pulled out my bag of scrap non-machine washable wool and told her to pick out some colours, together with some matching beads for the zipper pull.  She pulled out some colours that work really well together, and I knit up another one (before fulling - left; after fulling - right).  I didn't finish it before she left last Sunday.  It's in the post now so she'll have it early next week.

On the Friday while she was here we went to visit Saumarez House.  I've nearly visited several times since moving to Armidale in January 2003, yet this was the first time I actually got there.  The picture on the left is of the part of Thomas House that is still standing at the farm site down the hill from Saumarez House.  Sadly we missed a tour of inside the house, but spent nearly two hours taking in the garden and farm.  On Saturday we went to Uralla to visit Peter, and walked down into town with him to visit The Wool Room.  The shop is now run by Nicola Wilkins, who also runs Mollydale Knits.  Back in April I had bought some of Mollydale's silk in pink and purple through Purl Yarns.  This time I got to see her yarns in all their glorious colour and touch and feel them.  I couldn't resist some more silk, this time in purple and blue, and bought a skein despite still not having touched the first one.

On Tuesday my parents arrived for a visit and do a few jobs around the place that needed doing - the main one being creating a means for me to put some shade cloth over the outside of the lounge room window to cut down the heat load of the Westerly sunshine it receives in Summer (and I'm pleased to say it was very successful).  We celebrated Mum's birthday on Wednesday by going out to dinner and on Thursday we made a trip to Uralla to The Wool Room (Mum bought two skeins of blue mohair) and then back to Armidale to Wool On Wheels (WOW).  WOW's shop opened only last Saturday (before that she was doing the Sunday Markets at the end of each month), and has a range of interesting yarns, including soy silk and bamboo.  There were some really great buttons too (buttons are not easy to get in Armidale!).  I didn't buy anything, but Mum bought some lace weight alpaca that she might ply with something else.  I now have quite enough lace weight yarn on hand as it is...  After returning home, we wound the Mollydale mohair into balls on my ball winder, and my skein of blue/purple silk.  I forgot to photograph it in the skein, so there's a picture of the ball.  The purple doesn't photograph well.  Mum and Dad went home yesterday.

I've managed a few more rows of the kiri shawl (right) I started months ago, but mainly haven't had the brain power.  The Mollydale silk, however, was crying out to be used.  And I wanted to do the Icarus Shawl from Interweave Knits Summer 2006 issue.  The first chart has plenty of stocking stitch in it and does not require too much brain power, so I cast  it on two days ago (left), since I need an easy project once school returns on Monday.  I actually ended up working yesterday (and today and tomorrow) following a rather last-minute call to teach at an HSC Study Camp after another teacher pulled out.  Where did the holidays go????

Since I finished up at school last week I've been very productive.  I had a lot of my own books and resources that had to come home and have a place found for them.  In the meantime, they got stacked up in front of one of the bookcases.  I forgot to take a "before shot" so here's a "during" shot of me trying to put more things into already-full bookcases.

In the course of this exercise, I decided the DVD collection needed a new home, since it was taking up a whole bookshelf, yet still didn't have enough room.

For the first time since the last school holidays, I found the living room floor!

And it got a good vacuuming, along with the rest of the house.  The DVDs look much better too.  I added several more to the group with the white spines - they're recorded on my DVD recorder.  The Set Top Box hard drive was almost full since I hadn't had time to record off anything in over two months (if the ratings period had not ended, I would have been stuffed...).  Eight hours of MythBusters, six hours of Catalyst and two hours of miscellaneous Science documentaries came off the drive, and I finally watched a few programs that were only on there for time-shifting.  The drive is now almost empty.

The downside was that the knitting/spinning/weaving books and magazines had to be relocated to a small bookcase in my bedroom.  I tossed out a heap of old cooking and computing magazines I hadn't referred to at all in so long that they simply weren't work keeping (I checked eBay first, and issues of the same magazines weren't selling).  So out in the recycling they went.

I've made more progress on Icarus, and have completed the requisite number of repeats of chart 1.  As silk won't block to the same dimensions as the yarn the pattern calls for, I'm doing an additional repeat of chart 1.  Thankfully there is no danger of my running out of yarn since I bought a second skein some time back, just in case.  I'll use any leftovers in weaving.  I have come across the fact some pattern corrections now exist for chart 4 (not on Interweave's site), and that the pattern (which is from Interweave Knits Summer 2006) is now available from the author as a downloadable pdf.

And I've even had the chance to dye some silk hankies.  This was a new experience, and I'll probably do it differently next time.  I'm looking forward to starting to spin them.

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.

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.

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 - 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...

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).

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: