Mustard Seed Yarn Lab

Ok, well, not really. But I’m getting closer. My friend asked me to make her a hat like the one I made for Evan, (remember the hat knitted on toothpicks?), but she wanted it to be charcoal gray with a lime green stripe and a white stripe. Now, this hat is made with sock yarn, and 3 different colored skeins of sock yarn would be pretty expensive, so I offered to dye the yarn myself from one bare skein. So I guess starting from scratch would be actually shearing the sheep, carding the wool, spinning and then dyeing it. I’m not quite there yet. But I can dye, and I’m learning how to spin too!

So here we are, looking like a tangled mess, right after coming out of the pots.

Above we have all 3 colors waiting to turn into balls, and below we have 3 beautiful balls waiting to be made into something special. They stare at me while I work on other things….I can see their patience wearing thin.

It’ll be a great project to work on during the long ride we’re going to take this Thanksgiving. They’ll just have to wait a little longer…or maybe I’ll start earlier. After all, I did finish THE SUPER SECRET PROJECT and it’s blocking right now as I type! It’s quite lovely and I don’t know how I’m going to restrain myself from posting the pictures before I give it to its recipient. Must. Hold. Back!

Well hello there! Just checking in to see if I’ve posted? Well, sorry to disappoint you, and I promise a productive spurt is on the horizon, but the flu knocked me down, and I just couldn’t get back up. The flu lasted a week, then the inevitable bronchitis came, along with gurgling weirdness in my lungs, and chest x-rays. Turns out I don’t have pneumonia (Yay!) but after a week of antibiotics and Claritin and Flonase and an inhaler and prescription cough pills…I’m still coughing. (I coughed as I typed that.)

But fun has still been happening. My son got to go trick or treating twice, once with friends and once with Nana. He’s the scary ninja below….

The other cutie is not a shark, nor is he a Klan member…he’s an…..

…..airplane! My friend Maiya actually made that costume.

So I’ve been knitting on the super secret project, and I’m almost on the last chart! I’m going to see if I can finish it next week. That is my big goal right now. I’ve also been spinning wool into yarn on my drop spindle. I must say, it’s coming out very nicely, and very thin. I’m working on some BFL top right now, and I promise pictures in the next post.

The dyeing has stopped temporarily. Being sick doesn’t make for a desire to stand around the kitchen in front of pots of boiling yarn…too much like cooking. But I’m feeling much better and this coming week I’ll dye some more, and I will take pictures of some of the yarn you haven’t seen yet. My husband is working on the graphics for my logo, and as soon as that’s done, I can get some skeins up on Etsy. I’m even going to a yarn dyeing class with my sister this coming weekend!

Well, I must now get back to the super secret project. At about 400 sts per row, each row takes me almost a half an hour to complete. Sigh.

I think it’s been awhile since I last posted, but I have been VERY busy. Busy dyeing all the yarn I ordered, mostly.

I still have 5 more skeins to go, and today I dyed a skein that’s part silk and drying in the other room. And check this out:

This is the last part of my Christmas present from my sister who just went to Rhinebeck! Wow! That’s 4 skeins of Sanguine Gryphon yarn, 3 bags of roving for my new drop spindle and a niddy noddy. I squeal every time I look at it all!  Thank you Shelly! So now I’m going to re-skein all my skeins on my new niddy noddy and make them look even better, and I already started working on spinning yarn on my new spindle:

How amazing is that? You can’t tell from my picture but this roving has some sparkly thread in it and it’s gorgeous. It’s not that hard to do but it hurts my back, so I’m going to have to limit myself. With all this fun going on, my Christmas knitting is suffering, and I’m going to have to really put in some knitting hours this weekend.

In non-knitting news, my son banged his face against the coffee table table last night and split open the section above his lips. It was small, but deep and after it had stopped bleeding and he calmed down, we dragged the poor kid to the hospital and ended up getting a stitch in it. He did soooo good. He didn’t make a peep during the whole procedure. When I told him how proud of him we were for being so brave, he said, “I’m not brave, it just didn’t hurt.” Haha! Thank God for Lidocaine.  As if that wasn’t a bad enough night, when he finally got to go to bed, he started coughing. It got worse and worse as the night went on and I immediately recognized it as croup. He sounded just like a barking seal. And when I went to check on him at 3am, he was so hot with fever and uncomfortable from the coughing. Sigh…it was a looong night. But today, when I was trying to take a picture of his wound, he posed for me and asked that I take his picture like that, because he looked so cool:

This is Emmet looking cool. (See his cut?) And that is the stupid hat he insists on wearing everyday. He got it from his daycare and he loves it.

Well, enough typing. I’m exhausted from a long night with almost no sleep at all. Goodnight everyone! I promise I will post more pictures of the newly dyed yarn as soon as I figure out how to get an accurate photo of each skein.