...a coupla things…

I spent the afternoon browsing the web, researching yarn dyeing and I kept running into two things, generally offered as assertions, that didn’t make much sense to me.

1.  After you have dissolved your dye in the dyebath, if the color is too strong just add more water.

On the surface, this seems to make sense because if you add more water to your dyebath, your dyebath does appear lighter in color, less intense.  However, assuming that both the quantities of dye and fiber to be dyed remain the same, the amount of water is irrelevant.  Well, you do have to have enough so that your fiber isn’t crowded.  But if you use, say, half an ounce of dye to dye 100 grams of wool, it doesn’t matter whether you do this with one gallon of water or 100 gallons - the resulting color will be the same in both cases.

2.  How do I set my yarn?

This one really confused me because with some small exceptions, I have never had any problems with the dye being fast and not crocking or bleeding.  It seems to me that there are three reasons why this might happen.

1.  Not enough acid
2.  Not enough heat - either too low a temperature, or not applied long enough.
3.  Too much dye.

That said, I consistently have problems with blues and greens in terms of exhausting the dye bath.  Since I usually use Easter Egg dye, my tentative conclusion is that these colors somehow contain more dye than other colors.  The thing is, once the yarn has been washed, rinsed and dried, the color is stable and will not crock upon subsequent washings.

For the last couple of months, I have been responding to comments privately.  I had been responding in the comments section of the blog but, after reading some folks’ thoughts on this, decided to switch over lest someone get the impression I was just doing it to up the comment count.

I have decided this is bullsquat :)

The reason I always answered in comments is because I was trying to foster a conversation.  It didn’t always happen, but sometimes a comment would foster a response which then might, in turn, provoke someone else to share an opinion or an experience.  And I finally realized that if I continue to respond privately in e-mail, that hoped-for dialogue will never happen again.

So I am going back to responding to comments in comments :)

Hope your Friday wasn’t too stressful and that your weekend (daylight savings time, remember!) is fun.

I finished the Ilene bag (see previous post for pattern links) and am very happy with it.  The size is perfect I think - big enough for larger items but not so big that it’s immovable when full.  I knit the handle to about 14” which works well for either hand or over-the-shoulder carrying and the whole feels sturdy and solid.

The author warns that the stitch pattern for the bag’s body biases and offers a means to counter that tendency.  I didn’t bother with it because I don’t really care.  So long as that bias doesn’t affect the bag’s ability to carry things I can’t see why that would matter.  Besides - it kinda looks cool.  The stitch pattern is very simple:

Round 1:  *YO, K2tog*
Round 2:  Knit

For the next bag, I might try this instead - just to see what happens…

Round 1 *YO, K2tog*
Round 2:  Knit
Round 3:  *YO, SSK*
Round 4:  Knit

...or on Round 3, I might try doing *SSK, YO* to see how that works.  Actually, I confess that I’ll probably try out the options before I ever start the next bag because I’m terminally curious :)

I also got a start on the third panel for the blanket.

My mindless, TV knitting :)  The yarn, as previously, is Classic Elite La Gran mohair but the solid is one I dyed some time ago.  Originally it was a pinkish color that looked dirty to me (it wasn’t, it just struck my eye that way) so I decided it was a good candidate for the dye pot.  This color, Indicolite, was the result of a great deal too much liquid, blue food coloring.  Given the gorgeous shade though, I’m not sure it really was too much after all.  As Myria is fond of saying, “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing!”

We have babies again.  We had been sure that the degus were both female but they presented us with another litter in February so that’s clearly not the case :)  There were 10 pups this time.  Honest to god, I have no idea where she was hiding them all before they were born.  She did appear to get somewhat more zaftig, but we never suspected the horde (For the Horde!) she was actually carrying!

They’re about three weeks old now and will be going to the pet store in another 5 or six weeks.  Cute little fellas…  As strongly as I feel about not breeding animals (this is an apartment for heaven’s sake - not a farm!), even I have to admit that babies - any kind of babies - have a unique charm and are lots of fun to watch.

Jade is in the coveted sunspot in the living room.  The sun shines in that window all day long and both cats like it for their afternoon naps.  Unfortunately, she vacated it shortly after this picture was taken and Goldie promptly took advantage of the vacancy.  She won’t get it back now as it would take a bulldozer and an act of God to get him out of there.

Maybe my lap will do for a while :)

We had planned on doing our weekly shopping tomorrow (Monday).  Normally we do it on Tuesday when we’re going to be out for my chemotherapy anyway, but this particular Tuesday is going to be a looooong day at the oncology clinic so we figured to get the shopping out of the way before hand.  Except that we’re supposed to be getting (in our area) about 15” of snow…

So we did the shopping this morning and I guess we’ll probably be staying in tomorrow :)

I have finished the first two panels (and started the third) of the mohair blanket.  Panel 1:

...and Panel 2:

After calculating the amount each panel is going to take (they’re about 9” wide and about 65” long) I have come to the tentative conclusion that I may not have enough yarn to make a good sized blanket.  I’d like it to be about 54”-56” wide.  That will require six panels and I don’t think I have quite enough yarn for that.  Eh, if I have to buy a few balls to finish things up, I can do that.  I must say this has so been an exceedingly easy and pleasant project so far - stockinette with garter stitch borders and the occasional row or two of eyelets.  What could be simpler?  You can probably tell I’m having fun with this :)

I finished the last hat.  I wanted to do something a little different with the top, so I played with making the bobbles out of a different color than the body of the hat.  I imagine there’s a way I could have stranded this but I was afraid of the length of the floats it would leave.  So I worked each bobble with a separate length of yarn.  It’s totally do-able but maybe only once in a while because it is kind of a pain in the butt.

Finally, there has been legislation proposed, here in Massachusetts, for a surcharge on plastic grocery bags.  Without getting into the eco-arguments for or against, my first reaction is: You mean I’m now going to have to pay for these cheap-jack bags that fall apart half the time and spill my stuff (and sometimes break…) across the parking lot or down the apartment building stairs?  Not in this lifetime!  I don’t honestly think the legislation going to pass this time, but I do think it will pass eventually.  So I started this:

This is Hannah Ingalls’ Ilene bag.  There is also an Ilene Bag available on Ravelry.

I’m liking the pattern quite a bit so far and the only change to it I have made is to convert to worsted weight yarn and larger needles.  I want to keep to about the size indicated in the pattern - at least for this first bag - but I didn’t have ay sport weight yarn nor enough of any DK weight, which might have been an acceptable substitute.  Well, the fiber isn’t cotton either, it’s acrylic - which will be strong and sturdy as well as washing and drying very easily.  Making this will give me an idea of acceptable size range.  Do I want it taller?  Wider?  Maybe sectioned inside?

I think I’m going to be making quite a few of these things!

I suppose we all have our obsessive-compulsive areas.  One of mine is visual balance.  I have been trying to analyze this, but I’m not really getting anywhere.  Like art, I may not know what makes it good or bad, but I know what I like :)

I had thought, at first, that it had to do with numbers.  I tend to like odd numbers because they have a specific mid-point around which everything else is arranged - like the hub of a wheel.  There’s a center kind of holding everything together.  That doesn’t happen with even numbers.

Take 7 for example:

1…2…3…4...5…6…7

4 is the clear center here, with as many numbers following it as preceding it.

Now look at 8

1…2…3…4...5…6…7…8

The center of this sequence falls between 4 and 5.  But there’s nothing there.*  Yeats would understand this instinctively :)  The center cannot hold, because there is no center!

This is balanced.

This (which is how the stitch pattern is written) isn’t.

I was tempted, at first, to think of this purely in terms of numbers.  Odd numbers balance and even numbers don’t.  But, of course, as soon as I formulated that theory, the following popped into my head…

This only has two parts.  I suppose you could say that it has four parts if you count the dots as separate items - but in either case you’re dealing with an even number.  And yet this balances perfectly.  There is no impulse in the viewer to either add or subtract anything or to adjust it in any way - it is perfect as it is.

So I put it to you - what makes for visual balance in your eyes?

The next hat is under way…

This is the Coraline that I dyed a few days ago.  It’s really too bright for a whole hat (for anyone over the age of six) but it will do nicely for the central panel with darker or more muted shades filling in at the top and bottom.

And please note that it is “balanced”, though it’s the garter stitch that carries the day, not the cables :)

Myria is mightily pleased with her new monitor which she occasionally refers to as “concentrated L33T sauce”.  I take this to mean that it’s good :)  Unfortunately, Jade seems to like it too - likes to sit behind it which drives Myria crazy…

...because Jade is one of the universe’s clumsiest creatures.  See all those tchotchkes on the monitor stand?  Whenever Jade…uh…dismounts, she attempts to take several of them along with her.  In our house, the fog doesn’t come in on little cat feet.  It galumphs in wearing spiked clodhoppers and dragging broken bits of everything it has passed on the way behind it :)

* Yes, there’s an infinty of values there if we’re talking about the number line.  But we’re not :)

There’s a new color over at The Dye Pot.  As well as the color itself, it is named for the book (and now film) of one of my favorite writers - Neil Gaiman.  It’s called Coraline.

One of the issues I’m running into with the Do-it-Yourself Hat is this.  Just because I can make it up I go along, doesn’t mean I have to.  My own psychological make-up seems to mean that I go one way or the other with little or no middle ground.  Regarding these hats, that works out to mean either I come up with something new every time or feel mildly guilty about using a design or design element more than once.

Let’s just say that I know that’s pretty silly and that I am trying to remind myself that re-using a design element means that the element is successful - not that I’m lazy or unimaginative :)

The other side to this is that when I run across something I really like, I’m often tempted to write it down, capture and trap it into a much more regulation type of format - a pattern, in other words.  And this impulse slightly dismays me too because I do not want to spell things out where this pattern is concerned.  The whole idea in the first place was to set up a few general guidelines (and the fewer the better) so that anyone could plug in their own ideas and come up with anything at all.

All of that aside, the hat that fell off my needles this week pleased and greatly surprised me - probably because I almost frogged it a dozen times :)

The central panel is a pair of opposed twist six-stitch cables with a bobble between them done on the same row on which the cables are twisted.

I lovelovelove the look of cables turned on their sides - talk about a fresh perspective!  I mean, after a few seconds, it’s obvious what the trick is but when you first look at it, it looks like something wholly other.  There’s something almost architecturally satisfying in this and these sideways cable panels remind me of mouldings and Victorian gingerbread :)

Then I decided I wanted more cables and, knowing that they would pull the fabric in seriously, realized that I would probably need to pick up quite a few more stitches than I would if I were just going to go with garter or seed or regular ribbing.  I wound up with 144 stitches on my circular.  Really, when I had counted all that out a couple of times I hit the first you-should-frog-this(YSFT) point.  I kept thinking that couldn’t be right and, really, that was way too many stitches.  However my fingers, as though they had little minds of their own, had already worked twice around the circumference and were embarking on the first round of cable twists - 24 of them around the body of the hat.  Up to this point, I had been uncertain about whether these cables were for the brim part of the hat or for the body and I think it was about here that I finally decided they were definitely for the body.

So I built cables for a while and then decided to terminate half of them as well as getting going on the decreases.  For the first set (the shorter ones in the picture) I wound up doing the cable twist, doing a K2tog twice on the next round (they’re four-stitch cables) and a final K2togB on the round after that.  I rather fancy that the truncated cable looks somewhat candle-like and I was quite pleased with the result.

I went on, doing an additional decrease buried in the purl stitches, until the remaining 12 cables were as long as I wanted them to be, and decreased them away as well.  This time, I did the 2 K2togs before I did the cable twist and followed that, as before, with a K2togB on the subsequent round.  It was easier to manage and produced a slightly different (but still pleasantly candle-like) look.

After purling a couple rounds, I went back to stockinette and a more standard decrease mode.  I debated about adding a top-knot or a pom-pom or a tassel.  But it seemed to me that the hat had enough going on with all the panel and body cables, so I skipped the upper-story decoration, and finished things up with simple K2, P2 ribbing on the other side.

I feared that the hat would be enormous (given the number of stitches in its upper section), suitable for smuggling basketballs perhaps, but not really for wearing.  To my surprise, it didn’t turn out that way.  The hat is a perfectly ordinary ladies size medium though it is a bit heavier and more solid than an ordinary beanie or watch cap.

Now, let’s see if I can come up with another one before next Tuesday :)

We’ve had a bit of a computer crisis here which is why I’m a bit late posting this week.  See, I managed to trash two computers Monday morning :(

My beloved old laptop was beginning to show geriatric signs and so we decided something needed to be done before it became an out and out emergency.  Myria moved to a desktop system some years ago, which left her Dell laptop free.  Since it was in good shape, it was decided that I would move my files and software to the Dell and shelve the old VAIO.  I did this over the course of the last couple of weeks, not hurrying because the VAIO was still running just fine - if a little noisily.

Monday morning, the transfer and set up of the Dell was finally completed with the installation of a cordless keyboard.  I was up and running and I put the VAIO away for what I thought would be the last time - barring emergencies.  About two hours later, the Dell blew its video display :(

This was troublesome, but I figured I still had the VAIO, so I dug it back out.  It wouldn’t even turn on.

We finally got things resolved this afternoon when Myria bought a new monitor for her desktop and hooked up her old monitor to the Dell laptop (which was otherwise just fine) for me.  Ahh, finally - I have access!

In the meantime, I’ve been knitting away.

This hat uses both the Wood color and the Cedars of Lebanon color (central band) which I spun off from Wood last week.  Until I saw the finished article, I continued to think of both tones as woody in nature.  When I finished the hat and sat back to take it in, I couldn’t think of anything but chocolate and caramel.  I finally had to remand it to the hallway - out of sight - pending delivery next week because it kept making me hungry :)

This one got a little more complex, with cables in the center band (yes, bobbles too) and cables in the top as well.  I fudged in a lot of stitches when picking them up around the band because of how much the cabling would pull the pattern in - but I think I overdid it a little :)  I really don’t want to frog it, so I’m trying to tell myself it’s an interesting experiment and surely someone else out there has a melon as big as mine!  Surely?  Shirley?  Eh…

I am having fun playing with the cables though.  Funny, I’ve been craving cable work for about a month now and really have been enjoying working them for the hat.  A few weeks ago, I even made a much-cabled swatch with the idea of (Shhh - don’t tell anybody!) maybe making a sweater.  The attempt didn’t go anywhere though because the yarn wasn’t up to the job.  So I will find a different yarn and make another attempt :)

In going through the stash, searching for hat-appropriate material (and playing with colors is also something I want to do with these chapeaux…) I discovered that I had two different bags of mohair - a fairly substantial amount and decided that, perhaps, another mohair blanket was in order.  It’s moving slowly because I’m obsessing over hats and cables, but it got under way a couple of nights ago.

Nothing fancy here, just a length of stockinette with garter stitch borders and a row of eyelets thrown in whenever the knitter thinks of it.  I have decided this will be worked a bit more densely than the original (more stockinette than lace) and on smaller needles.  For me, there is nothing to match the luxury and warmth of a mohair blanket.  That said, it seems entirely possible that in addition to the one I already have (which I have dragged with me everywhere), a back-up wouldn’t be out of the question at all :)  The colors I have are many and diverse so this will be a sort of patchwork, I guess. 

I succeeded in finding Easter Egg dye that I liked.  In addition to it being an acceptable price (for what is usually six tablets - red, orange, yellow, green, teal and purple), extra tablets and colors were included so I wound up with roughly twice the amount of dye I would normally have gotten!  And with new colors to play with too - whee!  I was especially pleased because I wound up not acquiring any E.E. dye at all last Easter - not that it slowed me down much :)

But, speaking of dying (we were, right?) I finally have something that’s old enough and has seen enough wear to give me an idea of how the E.E. dye wears over time.  I made Myria’s mitts out of one of the first yarns I ever dyed - Tea Rose.  The yarn was dyed in May 2006 and the mitts were made in July of that year.  During the cool and cold weather of the last two years, they have been in almost constant use - In fact I had to repair a couple of minor holes last week which is how I really noticed the color change.

The upper left side of the picture shows what the mitts’ color looks like these days.  The bottom right part of the image is what I saw when I turned the glove inside out to do the repairs.  As I also had been able to find a scrap of the original dye lot, I was able to confirm that it matched the color of the inside of the gloves while the outside had muted and faded somewhat.

I’m not seriously distressed by this.  These mitts have had, what I would consider to be fairly hard wear, indoors and out and will have to be replaced next year.  Given that, I find the performance of both the yarn (Knitpicks merino, “Bare” fingering weight) and the dye (PAAS E.E. tablets) quite satisfactory.  YMMV, of course :)

And finally, after looking in every supermarket I found myself in, I found this:

My knit-buddy Opal, over at The Akamai Knitter recommended it a while ago and I’ve been searching for it ever since.  I’ll probably have it for lunch tomorrow and am looking forward to it.  Opal, I finally found it!

Last, but not least, I am closing down Knitting Chatters.  Thank you all for participating, it’s been great fun, but its time has come.  Blogging will, of course, continue as usual :)

Hope your weeks are all going well!

I can’t seem to get my head out of the dye pot these days :)  I suppose there could be worse things, eh?

This is Cedars of Lebanon; the whole story is over at The Dye Pot.  This is an over-dye of Knitpicks Palette (fingering weight) in the color “wood” (discontinued)...

...and I am completely enchanted with the results.

I have also started the next Do-it-Yourself hat in a pattern I have always loved.

It’s called “Slip Stitch Ovals” and can be found in Stanfield and Griffiths’ The Encyclopedia of Knitting - a book I have found to be endlessly useful.

The yarn is a batch of Cashmerino that I dyed ages ago and I’m remembering why I haven’t knit it up yet.  It is incredibly soft - as you would expect from something made of merino, microfibre and cashmere - but it has no body whatsoever.  I’m hoping that working it this way will make that less of an issue.  I have made hats out of Cashmerino before but remember deciding that it wasn’t quite the yarn for what I wanted to do :)

And, of course, I’m rushing this hat a bit because I can’t wait to get something going with the newly dyed yarn pictured above.  I’m such a sap for color!

Chatters is on for Saturday night - drop by if you’re in the virtual neighborhood!