Here are the 5 rovings I made for the store Wooly Belle, in Vinton, VA.
I’m kinda jealous, and as always, I want to keep them all for myself, but they’re headed to the post office tomorrow morning. From left to right we have Vixen, Toxic Mayhem, Rose Garden, Moss, and Tiger Lilly. Each is Superwash Merino wool and nylon. I think Moss is my favorite one. Feel free to leave a comment and tell me which is YOUR favorite. I sure hope the fiber lovers in Vinton like them too!
I’m sitting in a warm house, with leftover tacos and a chocolate chip cookie in my belly. The snow is still falling outside and I get to have a long 2 hour lunch break. The house is semi-clean, I just finished another knitting project last night, and I’m enjoying the anticipation of starting a new one. My family is healthy, and aside from a small case of sniffles, so am I. For whatever reason, as I sat here next to a fake fire, sipping a cup of tea, I felt suddenly overwhelmingly thankful to God for EVERYTHING. The big things, the small things, and everything in between. My life has been a blessed one since the day I was born, and I’m so undeserving, and so thankful.
This is what I’m spinning.
I’m in love with the colors and I’m going to try to dye some yarn with these variations.
This is what I finished last night. It’s the Gaptastic Cowl. It can be worn in different ways. See?
My brother in law, Chip, picked out the yarn for this. Good choice Chip! If I haven’t mentioned it before, Chip is a leatherworker, and sells his wares on Etsy too. You can check out his shop here. He is the owner of Hawk Studio. Crazy talented, and has great taste in yarn too.
I think I would like to start the Juneberry Triangle next. My sister bought me the yarn for it last year, and it was supposed to be my February project for this year. I’m a little ahead of schedule, but no doubt, it will take me longer than a month to complete. I will need help with the edging, I can tell already, but the incredible ladies in my knitting group will help me there.
I’m very lucky to have become friends with a group of ladies who get together on Sunday nights at Starbucks, all of them way more experienced than me, and soooo nice, as I find most knitters are.
Vicki, our fearless leader, (third from the left) is knitting a sweater on SIZE ZERO NEEDLES. A sweater! I would not believe it if I haven’t seen her doing it each Sunday. She is the one who inspired me to spin on a drop spindle. I watched her do it for 2 hours the first time I met her, and I couldn’t wait to give it a try myself.
I’ve had two sales so far in my Etsy shop! That makes me very happy. 🙂 Taking the pictures and trying to get an accurate representation of the color has proven to be the hardest part so far. Below, you will see my photography studio. (Otherwise known as our bedroom with a white fleece blanket.)
The yarn is very well behaved, each quietly waiting its turn. (The red gets a little uppity, but it’s red, and that’s how red is.) It’s the lighting that gives me problems. And my horrible camera. But I can’t complain about the subjects.
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Well, now it’s late and I’m going to bed. I wrote this blog at lunchtime today but had to wait until tonight to upload the pictures. Goodnight everyone…my bed and my book are calling to me.
Last weekend I had plans to go to NY on Saturday to hang out with my sister (Shelly) and come home that night. We were going to take a dye class together. But on Friday, my little sister (Liana) got into a bad car accident and was in the hospital with lots of stitches in her face and a broken orbital bone and broken nose…among other expected discomforts. So I didn’t come home Saturday night, I stayed with her to see if I could be of any help or comfort. As sad as I was for her, I was just so happy and thankful to God that I still have my little sister. Last weekend could have been a LOT worse.
Dye class was fun though. I don’t really feel like I learned anything new, but I DID learn that I don’t really like dying yarn in a microwave, which was a method I hadn’t had a chance to try yet. Here’s a picture I stole from my sister’s blog showing all us ladies in the process of pouring the dyes over our yarn. We were in a super cool room above a bar in Chatham NY. That’s me in the back right corner, and my sister is in the front right.
All the women there were so friendly and fun to hang out with. But I was not happy with the results I got for my yarn. (If you’d like to see Shelly’s yarn results, click here.) First I had this:
It was bulky yarn dyejob gone horribly wrong. My colors turned to mush as we were told to squeeze out all the liquid before putting the yarn in the microwave, so in an attempt to save my skein, I threw on some red and purple, hoping for the best. When I saw it hanging here I thought…hmmmm…maybe it’s not going to be so bad…almost cool? I was wrong.
I don’t like it. It looks like a color blind monkey dyed this. I call it Muck.
Next, I thought I’d go for a purple and red skein. I love purple and red together. But again, when we squeezed out the excess water and dye, I ended up with this:
That’s a whole lot of raspberry and purple, and when I spun it into a skein, the pinkness of it was overwhelming…just too…raspberry. So today, I could not bear it anymore and I took that skein of raspberry vomit and tightly tied off 4 even sections and threw it in a pot of black and boiled 90% of the raspberry right out of it. The result is hanging in the other room right now, drip drying on the rack, and I got exactly what I wanted. I will post a picture of it here tomorrow or Saturday, as soon as it’s fully dry and wound into a skein or a cake. I think you’ll like it. Yes, you.
My third skein also made me unhappy.
Now, I’ll admit, it doesn’t look all that bad in this particular picture. But it was actually blue, teal and white. Is there a worse color than teal??? It’s just offensive really. I was not having this in my house, so a couple days ago I made a pot of what I thought was brown…a yellowish brown, I guess….and look at what happened to this blue/teal skein!
Good Lord! It’s fabulous! Now the above picture isn’t showing just how rich the mix of colors appeared, and it’s actually much more green than this. Try this one:
That’s a little closer to the actual color but still not as rich, and it’s hard to make out just how many hints of different colors show through. It’s a mix of different greens and hints of brown. I’m finding the hardest part of this whole yarn dyeing endeavor is trying to get a picture that’s accurate. I don’t think I’ve been successful once yet, and that’s frustrating, since I want to sell my yarn online and this is the only way people will be able to see each skein. But anyways, I’m seriously happy with it. What do YOU think?
Next, I have some of my hand spun yarn to show off. Can you even believe that fluff turned into the skein you see in front of it??
Now that is one ply of Blue Faced Leicester wool and right now I’m working on spinning the rest of it into a second cake. When done, I will ply them together to end up with a real skein of (hopefully) finger weight yarn. I will be sure to show you when it’s done. It’s a slow process, as I spin on a drop spindle, but I love it. My sister is learning to spin on a spinning wheel and she let me try it out this past weekend and it was sooooo HARD! It always looked so easy when you see other people do it. Nope. Not easy. She tried my drop spindle and felt the same way about it! Ha!
So I’ll do my best to post a picture of how the raspberry skein turned out as soon as it is dry. Make sure to check back in a couple days!