Crafty Snargle

I’ve been training for about 7 years now… the road has been long and hard. There have been setbacks, momentary defeats, but I’ve perservered and I’m ready.

Four years ago, I tasted gold… two years later I did it again (a little less ambitious this time to be sure, but with a 5 month-old baby and packing and moving across the country, still impressive; didn’t manage to make it on the blog, but here’s the ravelry link).

Here’s where things stood on Feb. 12th at 5 PM:

Ready for Cast-On!

After browsing through about 30 pages of cardigans on ravelry (Love Ravelry! Love it!!!), I finally found the Twisted Cardigan, which involved cables (yay!), knit sideways (fun!), in bulky yarn on large needles (Huzzah! I’m ambitious but not stupid… I do have a toddler) and I knew that I had found my Knitting Olympics/Ravelympics project. For those not familiar, I have challenged myself to complete a knitted garmet during the 2010 Winter Olympics. I cast on with the Opening Ceremony, and my goal is to compete it before the Closing Ceremony. Here’s my progress so far:

A front and a half!

Of course, while working on the right front (the second piece), I realized that I missed a few increases on the left front (the first piece I did), so I’ll need to rip back a bit… to just before I bound off for the side seam. But I’m still making good progress!

Calling for a bulky-weight yarn, this project also helped me check off another criteria for a project, by knitting with yarn from my stash. A few years ago (three, to be exact), I purchased some Rowan Cork (back when it was being discontinued) from E-Bay. I haven’t done anything with it since. One of the reasons was the color. Although I do lie the brightness of “Bug” (OK, it’s closer to acid green), I wasn’t feeling it for this sweater. So I grabbed some Kool-Aid, and this is what I got:

Before & After

In Progress

Finished Product

Of course, my knitting progress might be set back a little bit because I need to finish dyeing… but Dan brought home the Kool-Aid I needed tonight, so I should be back on track. Wish me luck!

I’m about to set off on crazy whirlwind trip #2 (the 2007 edition) tomorrow morning at oh-dark-thirty. It won’t be quite so crazy as last year’s version (5 cities in 8 days!) because we’ve cut out Honolulu and Anchorage. So this time it’s just San Francisco and Seattle, then more east coast next week. Sadly, I don’t have much free time in any of them (other than hosting a meeting). But I will find time to stop by my happy place and most likely buy another sweater’s worth of yarn, never fear! Actually, I am getting a bit of time in San Fran (hence the early morning flight) to hang out with some old grad school friends. Very exciting!

But a few photos to round out the last entry… some of my recent dyeing escapades. They don’t always turn out exactly as I’d planned, and some of my happiest color combos have been the ones where I was just trying to empty out the dye pots so I threw a bunch of things together. But here you go:

Rose Red

Forest Floor

George

I can’t tell you what my inspiration was for Forest Floor because it would most likely ruin it for you, but I’m happy with how it turned out! And George is one of my mostest favoritest creations ever. I love, love, love the turquoise and orange. Slight variations on that theme will keep coming up, I’m sure.

And one more before I go:

Linus loves to help me ply!

So, as you may have surmised by checking my flickr acount, I have a new spinning wheel!

Whee! Wheel!

It’s a Fricke S-160 F: a single treadle folding wheel. I’ve been playing a lot with it, and after a few growing pains, I think I’m in love! Here’s my first product:

English Rose

This is the wool roving that I dyed and blogged about here (well, the pink on the left - I haven’t gotten to the blue on the right yet). It’s about 80 yds and a pretty good worsted/bulky weight 2-ply.
I’ve moved on to some of the Spinners Hill top that I bought at Rhinebeck - I don’t know how much yardage I’m going to wind up with, but it seems like I’ve been spinning forever!

I’ve also been doing a bit of dyeing -

Tequila Sunrise and Swamp Thing!

Merino/Silk. Yummy.

Oh, and you know all of those knitting works in progress that I blogged about earlier? Yeah, no progress on any of them. In the time when I’m not spinning, I’ve been sucked into the baby-knitting vortex. Hopefully I’ll have this sweater done by a shower on Sunday:

Love!

And it’s even from Stash yarn, hooray!

…all I’ve ever wanted…

Yep, I’ve been on the road for the last week visiting friends and family in the exotic land of the midwest. We stayed with Dan’s grandparents, saw his parents, stayed with my parents, saw my grandparents, and have had a generally relaxing and fun time. Tomorrow, of course, it’s back to the grind, and today it’s the drive back to DC. But first a few pictures…

Hello there!

When I first came in the door at my parents’ house on Tuesday, this little cotton ball of fluff was there to greet me. He’d been home for all of two hours, and was excited to have more people to love and chew on. His name is Albie, and he’s just so tiny and cu-uute…

awww…

He’s made the days fun - playing in the yard, chewing on everything around, and crashing hard for naps (giving Mom & I time to go out shopping!).

We also spent a lot of time in the kitchen (official puppy territory), and what better activity to do than dye yarn, using up some of that Kool-Aid I just bought, as well as some of the Wilton’s icing dyes that I wanted to try out.

Mom got in on the action…

…and so did Dad!

That’s right, dyeing is a family affair here at Chez Snargle. Dan did some of the winding of skeins into mega-skeins, too.

Here’s the final result:

pretty!

Six skeins of sock yarn. The three on the left are self-striping and the three on the right are variegated. Mom is keeping the one on the far left (which is why it’s in a ball). I’m not exactly sure what I’m doing with the rest - two will be prizes, and I’ll use a few, but I know I’ve got a log more dyeing in me. Maybe an etsy store is in my future… What are your favorite color combos?

or, why watching Grey’s Anatomy can be bad.

What could have been…

But first, some background. A little while ago, I signed up for Zarah’s Project Spectrum hand-dyed sock yarn swap (say that ten times fast). (ETA: Sign-ups are on a monthly basis, so if you’re interested for May you can still get in on the action!) An even littler while ago, I signed up for Project Spectrum, but I digress.
So I ordered 10 skeins of KnitPicks Dye Your Own sock yarn (I wish it was superwash, but you can’t beat the price!), and stocked up on Kool-Aid. I toured around the Blogosphere looking at everyone’s lovely dyeing, and was especially drawn to self-striping yarns. There are several good tutorials - Eunny, Scout, and Jessie have three.

First I knit a swatch - a fake sock. I marked a column of stitches, and then unraveled my swatch. The marks were about 27″ apart, so that was my one-stripe length. I don’t have a fancy-schmancy warping board (although I think that will change, soon - I just need to go to Home Depot), I set two chairs apart across the width of my house and used a third in the living room to make a triangle. Any bigger of a skein, and we’ll have to move outside. Linus helped me wind my center pull ball into a ginormous skein (440 yards of walking!).

Linus is a good helper! (not)

After I got it skeined up, I counted out my stripes, and then figured out my color pattern. I decided to use my Klass Latino drink mixes - Limon, Mango, Tamarindo, and Naranja, plus mixes of two different flavors. My goal was to get a color gradation - light to dark and back to light. All in all, I had 8 different colors to stripe.

To make a long story short (too late), most of the weekend later I had 5 fabulous stripes and put my yarn on the stove to get the last three stripes:

Whew, almost done!

Then I went to watch Grey’s Anatomy. I had been successfully balancing TV and the stove all night, hopping up at each commercial break to check, but that show sucked me in. The next thing I knew, I was turning to Dan to ask if he could smell something… bad.

It’s done, all right.

Want a close-up? (You know you do.)

When yarn dyeing goes horribly wrong

Um, yeah. Don’t let your yarn boil dry. As Dan was quick to reassure me, at least I didn’t burn the house down. But my beautiful self-striping sock yarn was not meant to be. I had to cut the burned portion out. That hurt.

I couldn’t bear to watch

I had bought a pot at Value Village specifically for the purpose of yarn dyeing, so my total investment was only $1.41 (pot) + $1 (drink mix) + $3.99 (yarn). And now I just have to live with what could have been:

So pretty. Too bad the ends don’t connect

But not to worry - I jumped right back on that dye pot horse. (that sounds painful!). Yarn Swap Pal Theresa is getting some beautiful (and still self-striping) yellow and orange yarn:

Not burnt! An improvement!

And when I went to the grocery store last night, Kool-Aid was on sale 8/$1. I did what any rational knitter/dyer would do and filled a basket. Then the poor cashier had to ring them up individually. In fact, a manager took pity on the poor cashier (and the customers in line behind me) and opened up an aisle just for me. But look at this impressive receipt!

That much Kool-Aid should last me for a while.

More dyeing updates to come… as well as the Meet-up on the Mall recap and meeting Mason-Dixon Ann and Kay!

ETA: This is my 200th entry! And it only took me 3.5 years (what can I say, I’m the quiet type). FYI - the 1,000 comment is coming up soon, and there might just have to be something special for the commenter…