This was yet another pretty good weekend. There were lots of walkies, we stopped in at my old house to turn on the AC so the place wouldn’t become a closed-up moldy disaster in the current heat wave, we had a good gaming session, I dyed some wool, and I finished up my little green stripey shrug thingy (it’s drying on the front porch today and should be ready for pictures this evening!).

The cats had an important Sunday afternoon meeting in the Upper Conference Chamber. I assume they were deciding who would barf on the couch next.

Shastes was apparently relegated to a non-voting role. (I got this box from someone else. I did NOT write “Fraigle” on it, I swear.)

Ada is the one cat of the five who really likes being outside, so we picked up a harness and leash on Saturday, and on Sunday afternoon we hooked her up and took her outside. She’s a very mellow cat and didn’t mind the harness at all, but for an animal who’s taken many unauthorized tours of the garage and attic, she was strangely reluctant to move beyond the front door.

Eventually she started exploring the porch.

Some petting from daddy reassured her that all was well.

Soon she realized that there was Exciting Stuff to see beyond the front steps.

She wandered around the sidewalk and then proceeded into the yard. We watched bemusedly as she crept around at the limit of the leash and nibbled away on grass stems.

About 30 minutes later, we watched even more bemusedly as she horked up a stomachful of grass and food on the living room carpet. I didn’t take a picture of that.

It was a good day to dry wool outside; I dyed around a half pound of Shetland in 2 colorways. One in deep blues, greens, and purples, the other in russets and purples and browns/bronzes. I’ll probably post fiber braid pics later on.

I can’t wait to spin these; I spun up a batch of Shetland for my mom’s “fiber club” and it was lofty and soft and spun itself, really.

I also made some pretty kickass grilled beef kabobs with zucchini, red onion and orange bell peppers.

The End

This was a good weekend. Being on call Thursday and Friday made me cranky, so I was very very happy to have a responsibility-free weekend.

There were yummy mismatched farmers market eggs.

And yummy grass-fed farmers market steaks.

(Have I mentioned that I am now the Charcoal Queen and love creating happy flames in my charcoal igniter thingy and wearing Jag’s welder’s gloves to empty the charcoal into the grill? Because it is FULL OF FLAMES and I am just that BADASS.)

And the new Liesl is coming out great, and I bought a handmade Insane Cat Head Pin to wear with it at the totally unexpected craft fair in Hillsborough on Saturday.

And I may have bought a drop spindle made of moss agate. If I did so, I may have bought a sparkly BFL/bamboo/angelina batt too.

And the spindle would look like this.

And be all translucentlike.

The End!

And so it was that I was very excited and happy about my lovely green multi-yarn cardigan sweatery thing. But while knitting along, it came to my mind how stretchy and draggy my first garter-stitch sideways-knit sweater had turned out, and I was having second thoughts, so I decided to turn what I had knit so far into a shrug. A nice rectangle, seamed for the arms, whereupon the stretch would be an asset instead of a liability. I knitted and knitted, and when it seemed big enough I seamed it. And lo, the neckline seemed a bit plain, so I picked up stitches around the neck hole, and knitted some nice 2×2 ribbing, and bound off.

And the bind-off was a little tight, and I was thinking that I probably should have seamed the arms a little less. And so it befell that I decided to unravel the ribbing, re-seam, and knit the ribbing again, since it had only taken about an hour to do the seaming and ribbing. And yea, it came to pass that I was home sick, and bleary-eyed, and sneezing, and became impatient with the unraveling process, and I did take up some scissors. And the lightning and the thunder of doom did rip through the sky, much like the blades of the scissors ripped through the ribbing and about 3 inches of the actual shrug. And I was forced to sup the watery gruel of misery with the spoon of crushing disappointment.

But from the ashes of the cardigan shrug of doom came an idea. I love the wine-colored Liesl I just finished knitting a few weeks ago. What if I knit another one, short-sleeved for summer, using 4-row stripes of all the green yarns???? Oh, hell yes!

The End ….or is it?

Well, it’s that time of year again. Time to buy 3lbs of prunes and make lekvar!

Despite feeling like absolute crap today, probably due to a bug one of my coworkers passed on to me, I made the traditional Sarik Easter breakfast pastries, with apricot, lekvar, and walnut fillings.

Pile on the filling…

Roll it all up…

Tuck it in…

And here are 3 of the 6 rolls, bulging with yummy filling. I made 3 lekvar, 2 apricot and one walnut, mostly because the amount of walnut filling turned out to only be enough for one roll. I should note that I used a half pound of walnuts for that one roll! I am all about cramming in the fillings.

I also received a little gift from Jag: a cupholder for my spinning wheel! Sleeping Beauty could have avoided a lot of trouble if she’d had one of these to keep a triple espresso at hand. (Mine has OJ, to help with the crud.) It’s very sturdy and quite cleverly designed; you can get one for many models/brands of spinning wheels here. Just remember, be responsible: don’t drink and ply.

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I finished plying mom’s yarn this evening, wound it off the bobbin onto the swift, and took a good hard look. It’s actually…pretty! Jag had told me he thought it looked good while I was still plying, but I thought he was just being nice. He has a better color sense than I do; I should have trusted his opinion! I have nearly 6oz of yarn here, which hopefully will be plenty to finish the afghan.

I’m calling this colorway “Pappap Egg”. My grandfather (Pappap) used to dye his Easter egg in a solution made of all the leftover dyes poured into one container. Since this yarn is made up of scraps and bits of leftovers, I think the name is pretty appropriate.

Speaking of those scraps and bits, I won’t be buying any more 1-pound grab bags of leftover fibers from anyone. A lot of them were so compacted, matted and felted, they were an unholy pain in the butt to draft, and the spinning suffered. This is some of the worst spinning I’ve done in a while in terms of evenness. Luckily the crochet pattern and the bright colors will hide some of the texture flaws.

I was so curious about how this stuff would ply up, I broke my stern “let the singles rest overnight” rule and threw the bobbins in the kate this afternoon. Plying this yarn is like reading a novel with very short chapters: there’s some new plot element coming up constantly. The most unlikely colors actually look decent next to each other in a 2-ply. I think it’s actually going to be a reasonably attractive yarn, especially when set off with black borders in the afghan.

Eboneeeeee and ivorrrreeeeeeeee (and hot pinkkk and teallllllll and hunter greeennnnnn and orangeeeeeee) live together in perfect harmoneeeeeee, side by side on my jumbo flyer, oh lord, why can’t weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…..

After finishing up the Liesl, I’ve embarked on a new and very different sweater project. Being a lover of scrap quilts and multicolored anything, I’ve been a fan of Jane Thornley’s designs for some time, but have never gotten around to buying a pattern until now. I was torn between the Seagrass Capelet and the Blue Sky over Sienna cardigan. After a lot of thought, I decided I’d get a lot more wear out of the cardigan, and proceeded to start picking every ball of green yarn out of my stash.

This is the original color scheme:

Here are the yarns I’ve chosen, all greens. Almost all of them are stash yarns, some handspun, some commercial, ranging from sock yarn to heavy worsted. I did get crazy and buy a couple of ribbon yarns and one sari silk yarn from yarnmarket.com (a place I go to drool over the gorgeous art yarns, but rarely buy from) to provide some interesting texture.

Here’s the first 2-3″ of the back:

It even looks pretty on the wrong side.

I love it! It’s insanely brainless knitting, and the color changes are totally random and up to me. It’s not really a carry-around project, unfortunately, because you’re changing yarns every 2-5 rows and hauling around a bag of full of 12 balls of yarn really isn’t practical in most situations. And boy will I have a ton of ends to weave in at the end, since a lot of the yarns are superwash and can’t be spit-spliced. I think it’ll be worth it, though! The coolest part is that she suggests using a few strips of fabric scraps as part of the “yarn” for the sweater, so I could end up using some quilting stash too!

Speaking of quilting, I used to be a pretty active quilter until I started knitting and then spinning, so once I moved and had my fabric stash unpacked, I bought a 60-degree pyramid ruler and decided to start on a Thousand Pyramids scrap quilt. My general vision here is to start with dark blue and graduate to light blues, have a sort of horizon line with some sunny yellows in the center, and then have the rest of the quilt in gradually darkening greens and flower colors, with deep greens and browns toward the bottom. I’ve cut out enough fabric now to do a proof of concept layout, to see if this is going to work. I grayscaled the colors in GIMP to see if the values were working out like I expected, and they seem to be.

I’m not good about ironing fabrics after prewashing them, so I have an absolute heap of fabric to iron before I can cut out any more pieces. I’m still not sure how big I want this thing to be…could go wall quilt, could go couch-snuggling-quilt.

My mom is still working on the black-and-handpun afghan, and asked for a bigger than usual dose of handspun in bright colors, because she needs more yarn as the circumference of the afghan gets bigger. I decided to use some of the dyed fiber grab-bag I got form dyepot.com along with some smaller amounts of my hand-dyed, and see what happens. There are purples, blues, pinks, reds, greens, oranges, you name it. This is either going to be the ass-ugliest yarn ever, or really really cool. The first bobbin is done and I have my fingers crossed.

Oh yeah, and I turned the heel on my poor neglected blue sock. I might finish this pair before Fall at this rate.

Liesl is finished, and I used a butterfly pin I bought a year or so ago on eBay to close the neck. I love this sweater. Perfect for spring, warm but not too warm. Jag very patiently took the pictures for me.

Yippie!!!

The front:

The back…

And the side…

First off, I’m really happy with my latest dyeing experiments. The BFL came out very vivid and I can’t wait to see how it spins up.

The alpaca came through the process just as soft and fluffy as it was before I started messing with it , and since it was in such narrow sliver form, I decided to loosely wind it into puffballs for storage, or what I’m now calling ‘PacaPuffs. They look like cute soft squishy little Tribbles!

At least that’s what I thought, until I saw this picture. Does that thing look like a screaming Cyclops Mummy, or what?

I’ve also just finished knitting Liesl. I loved this pattern. The sweater is washed and blocked and still too wet to wear, dammit. I need to decide what to use as a clasp at the neck…I could use a shawl pin, or a regular pin, or a big button. I’ll need to audition some possibiities.

There’s also been a new addition in Fairy Door Land. My fairies now have their own spinning wheel!

I could not resist when I saw this at Enchanted Gardens. The selection is amazing: fairy doors, fairy houses, and anything you could possibly need to furnish them, inside and out. They ship very quickly, too!

I haven’t done any dyeing in months, so it was great to drag the dye bottles and fiber out of the closet and start playing again. I was a little nervous about making a mess in Jag’s kitchen; it actually worked out very well, with no permanent staining of walls, floors or countertops (at least that I’ve noticed so far). I pre-soaked the wool in the very hard well water, but I used filtered water to mix the dye solutions, and the colors took just fine.

I dyed up 4oz of 70% Alpaca/30% Cormo blend that I bought recently from AMIA (Alpaca Made in America). I mixed up some teal, bright green, and spruce, and let them bleed together and make a some lovely shades of aqua blue/green.

I had a bag of about 6oz of Bluefaced Leicester leftovers sitting in the closet, so I used the whole clump and chose my favorite color combo of teal, purple, brown and green. I tried to leave some undyed or very light fiber, since I’ve come to realize that a little white usually blends in nicely instead of showing up as a big blaring pale spot. I used to be obsessive about coloring every last inch of wool, but there’s really no need.

Here they are, drying on the porch! It was really nice to mess around with fiber without thinking in the back of my mind that I might end up selling it, which makes me wonder if I really want to re-open the Etsy store or not.

I’ve also been spinning up some fiber that was previously for sale in my Etsy store, was purchased, and then was returned for being “too green”. After adding a disclaimer about computer monitors and colors to my shop verbiage, I decided to keep it for myself. It’s going to be my first 3-ply, and I’m actually almost done with the second bobbin now. Plying is my favorite part of spinning, so I can’t wait to see how this turns out later this week!

I’ll add the 3-ply to a collection of small amounts of worsted weight green yarns (some handspun, some commercially spun, some new, some leftovers) that I want to combine into a single project…a shawl, a sweater, a weaving project, I can’t decide what. I’m poking through my knitting books and on Ravelry for inspiration.