mama-of-purl

06/26/2006

The mama-of-purl kitchen...

now with a hint of orange!

So I ran out of nice and colorful roving and decided to dye some more late last night. With the ususal 1-hour period of trying to keep the dye bath just below the boiling point, dip-dyeing in pots requires way too much attention, therefore I've started putting the pots/other containers in the oven. Last night, though, one of those containers was an old glass bowl. Not a great idea.

When I'd placed the roving in the different dye baths and added more water so it'd be covered, the baking grid couldn't support the weight anymore and crashed to the bottom of the baking oven. Yeah, that was quite a mess already. After a few attempts to slide the grid back in, and the whole set-up crashing down again, that old glass bowl busted right though the middle. 

Even a greater mess. There was an orange river in my kitchen. Had to sacrifice a few towels. 

Lessons learned: use the baking TRAY! no breakable glass containers!

Anyhow, I transfered the pot and dish to the baking tray and let the rest of the roving dye in the bottom of the tray that was completely filled with orangey liquid. What a MESS! 

You wouldn't think that the dye job worked despite this chaos.

Actually, I'm quite pleased with the result- pretty much what I had in mind. And it didn't mat/felt like the last roving I dyed.

Spinning with dyed fiber is so much more fun, too. I love seeing the colors change and how the fibers intertwine. So beautiful.

Here's the single I've spun from my last kool-aid dyed roving and a 2-ply that I used scraps of colored wool I had leftover from wet felting and the natural color roving I had. It's wonderfully lightweight and I'm sure it'll knit up very pretty. Only 50 grams (2oz?) though, that'll only be enough for a hat or something.

10:15 Posted in dyeing , spinning | Permalink | Comments (9) | Email this

05/02/2006

I'm on a roll!

I've been making some great mileage lately:-)

The striped raglan sweater got finished Sunday night, just in time for the weather to warm up... I'm quite happy with how it turned out, although the sleeves are not as long as I'd thought.

Anyhow, they may be long enough to fit Johanna in the fall. I also realized she didn't have any pants to go with the sweater, so I gotta pick up some jeans for her now- great excuse to go clothes shopping, hooray!

Last night I also turned the heel on the 2nd Alberta sock and it's almost identical to the 1st, maybe 3/4 of a row off, but who's counting?

Here's a new shot of the 'Fun' (haha) Nation Socks. They're going to be plenty long if I bind off after the yellow stripe, but that knot incident really bugged me. I sent an e-mail with evidence pix to the Regia customer service, I'll keep you posted on what's going to become of that...

Did you see I signed up for the dye-o-rama swap? I've actually done quite a bit of secret dyeing that I have not yet blogged about, and I'm lovin' it! I got my swap partner's address today, and I actually know her:-) Well, not personally, but I've read her blog before and she's cool! What a nice change being able to check out my swapee's blog!

The sockapaloooza socks will be off to the US today, and I feel comfortable about sending them after all the lovely comments I've gotten on them. THANKS!

10:30 Posted in Baby Stuff , dyeing , Knitalongs , Sockapaloooza , Socks | Permalink | Comments (10) | Email this

04/18/2006

Some kool dyeing and nonsense knitting

Sorry for my absence, but I've been in kind of a bad mood because I'm not getting enough university stuff done and it's really bugging me. On top of that, my stomach has been bothering me and that makes it even easier to procrastinate some serious hard-core typing. WHINE, WHINE.

Nevertheless, I've had an amazing pick-me-up on Thursday when a completely unexpected package from Steph of craftoholic arrived: KOOL-AID! YAY!! How sweet of her, eh? And check out the awesome hand-SEWN card with some incense-scented Indian silk on it- such a great idea! THANK YOU SO MUCH, STEPH!!

I'd won some Kool-Aid on ebay lately as well (not realizing it came with some 'invisible' varieties;-)) and I did my first experiments with it. Wowza, is that stuff ever so potent. The SMELL! And how incredibly bright those colors come out! I used some odd balls of wool my mother gave me which actually amounted to about 400g, so I can make a sweater for Johanna with it. I was going for longer strawberry red stripes with some turquoise/green variegation and it turned out quite well. At least there are no weird white spots. The yarn soaked up more dye than I'd expected so I had to dye the red part twice. This time I dipped the yarn in a big pot with the prepared dye, then threw it in a bowl which I put on a baking tray and painted the greenish tones. Off it went into the oven on 95ish degrees for an hour.

I started knitting this cardigan for Johanna with it because I happened to stumble across this pattern and really liked it. After about 15 cm into the pattern I realized that making a cardigan with this yarn I dyed somewhat stripey and using a variegated and quite bright yarn with a structured pattern is not a great idea. Frogged it. Loved the pattern, though, I'm going to make one of those cardigans in the future...

Then I cast on again for a sweater knit in the round and it just occured to me at midnight last night that I'd forgotten to add extra stitches to get a similar width as the cardigan's which would've had a button band. Ripped it. Now the yarn and I need some space;-)

20:55 Posted in Baby Stuff , dyeing | Permalink | Comments (4) | Email this

04/07/2006

Adventures in Dyeing Pt II- Natural Dyes

My head's been hurting for the past few days and when I went to the pharmacy yesterday, I saw they had natural easter egg dyes- sandalwood, rosewood, logwood and mate tea. I still had mate at home, so I bought a little pouch of logwood and thought I'd try dyeing some wool with it.

You've all been extremely generous in your comments on my first dye job, so thanks for encouraging me!

Also, this sock yarn diet is really making me creative;-)

Well, I've gone on and on about this horrifying yarn I'd received from someone, and I've been thinking about selling it on ebay, but since I can't buy new white yarn, I thought I might as well use yarn that could only get better.

I wound it into a hank and prepared the dyes- I put 50 grams of each mate and logwood plus a teaspoon of the metal salt Alum in a liter of water and cooked it to a boil, then let it steep for almost 30 minutes. That's the yerba mate

that's the logwood- some POTENT stuff! Just one little spot on my stovetop was pretty hard to remove!

This is my little setup.

I soaked both yarns in the pots for about 45minutes and kept the solution close to a boil.

Then I rinsed it in warm water and then some water with vinegar, just to make sure.

Then I washed it with shampoo and rinsed it a bunch of times as there still was a lot of the purplish blue dye coming out- I could've easily dyed a lot more fiber with this solution!

Here's the yarn coming out of the dyepots- much better already

Here it is all dried and pretty- I'm so impressed with the logwood, it's a very rich purplish blue that somehow gave an extra shine to the yarn. And the mate still shows the former dye, but transformed it to more delectable colors. The white turned into a bright green-yellow and there's some aqua and bright greens, very nice! if I looked at this part of the hank VERY enthusiastically, I could say the colors reminded me of some koigu colorways.

Of course, I had to knit up a swatch in form of a sock cuff;-)

11:30 Posted in dyeing | Permalink | Comments (9) | Email this