Kiss My Knits!

And here it is! This is the overdye of that hank of sock yarn I handdyed back in 2006, shown in a previous post. It was pretty, but not saturated enough. I enjoy dyeing monochromes with tonal variations now. This is a mixture of Jacquard sky blue, gunmetal, primary blue, and black.

This came out a bit darker than I was expecting. My plan had been to dye it in the crockpot, then take it out before it had soaked up everything, rinse out any excess until it was at the level I wanted, and set the dye with more acid. I put it in and went to run some errands. Then I got stuck in traffic. I wound up pulling the yarn out a little later than I had planned. It’s a bit darker than this picture shows. As a consequence of all the rinsing, it’s felted to itself just a hair. It’s still quite knittable, but I’ll probably have to go slowly when balling it up. Something to watch out for next time.

I’m pleased with how this turned out. I think I’d enjoy knitting with this more than the other. I could do a more complex pattern in this and not worry about it getting lost in the color changes. All in all, a success – and a learning experience.

I had dye leftover in the crockpot, so I’ve got 440 yards of worsted weight in there now. It’s a bit crowded, and of course the dye isn’t as strong as it was before the sock yarn soaked so much up, so we’ll see what happens!

About 1200 yards of earflap red yarn arrived on my doorstep today. Hopefully it will last me until the mill sees fit to send out my main order, which I’ve been told should hopefully be happening in the next week or so. At the very least, I can now accommodate all the people who e-mailed me last week for kits. I’d had to put them off until I was stocked back up. I may yet have to halt kit orders again, but at least everybody whom I told to come back later can be taken care of.

Today I was packing up hats when a visitor arrived. I’d been about to sew the pompom onto a 23″ hat bound for a guy in the Midwest, but got sidetracked with my guest. After she left, I couldn’t find the hat anywhere. How does a Jayne hat just disappear? It’s baffling! I feel like Coleridge and his visitor from Porlock, although my visitor was welcome. So instead of knitting for myself tonight, I’ll be finishing up another Jayne hat to stay on schedule. That will surely be enough to make the amazing disappearing Jayne hat reappear. This principle works a lot around here – buy a new gizmo and the old gizmo shows up. It’s the same way we’ve wound up with three digital thermometers and about 20 tapestry needles. Go figure.

I’ve got some non-Jayne projects to do, but I’m also trying to figure out what my next “just for me” project should be. Probably socks. I’m building up some hand dyes, and kind of feeling like I need to either use them or sell them. The two skeins pictured were dyed in 2006, so I reckon one of those should be the next to use. I look at them now and think “I’d make those richer in saturation now” but am trying hard to resist the temptation to overdye. Not everything has to be just perfect, nor is there a “just perfect” outcome for everything. Although a dark wash over the one on the left… Hmmm…

Any thoughts? Column A or column B? Patterns? Decisions, decisions.

Every year I make FuzzyFeet for my kid’s teacher as a Christmas gift. Em picks out the color yarn that I should use. I send them with her unfelted, along with a zippered pillowcase and a sheet on how to felt and the science of why it works. We’ve had good teachers every year, so I tend to think they’ll appreciate a fun little project that’s also educational.

Every year I leave this until the last minute because I put the Jayne hats first, and every year I’m frantically knitting the night before school lets out because I’ve forgotten that school lets out sooner than I expect and I don’t have the time I thought I did. One year I even drafted Turtlegirl76 to knit them for me because I had absolutely no time and I really needed it to be done.

Not this year! This year’s FuzzyFeet are in Lamb’s Pride worsted colorway Red Hot Passion and they’re finished! Another item I can check off the list. Hooray!

(For those wondering how big those slippers are before they shrink and felt, voila.)

I missed last week, so I must rely on secondhand reports of what happened.

According to our wizard, last week “a badger killed a zombie by crunching his undead-boy-parts.” The kobold hireling who robbed me the previous week ran off with another kobold we rescued in the mines, so it looks like I’ll never see my money again. I was told that I need to not miss weeks anymore, as “we need you to absorb the bad luck.” Thanks.

Also, the group killed a necromancer and discovered a magical puzzle, which we worked on this week. Details of that exciting adventure to come later!

Girl Scouts today was an unmitigated disaster that ended in us leaving after 20 minutes and me lecturing Emily that she would have been able to do the activity (making a kaleidoscope) if she’d paid better attention and listened. This was true, mind you, but I shouldn’t have been saying these things while I was so upset. At least I didn’t yell. In hindsight, if she didn’t want to do the activity, I should have pulled her aside again (I’d pulled her aside twice in the 20 minutes we were there) to remind her not to be abrupt when rejecting the other girls’ help and not to continually complain that she didn’t want to do the activity. Then we could have just watched the other girls, or gone to another area while they finished up that activity, then seen if she was ready to join in the next one. (I should add here that she told me as we were leaving that she didn’t want to do the activity because she didn’t know how to do it.)

I could have handled the whole situation better. I shouldn’t have been so quick to take us home. It’s just frustrating, because she consistently says she wants to be a girl scout and go to meetings, and yet sometimes she also says that she doesn’t want to go. However when I ask if she wants to stop going or really not go, she says no. She wants to do it, but it’s just too much for her sometimes.

But while I know that she’s got issues, she really COULD have looked in the general direction of the girl telling them what to do, or watched the hands of another girl, or accepted their offered help, or tried harder to listen, or remembered to say “I don’t understand.” Em gives up easily. I can’t let it slide every time just because she’s different – it’s not fair to her in the long run. It’s a lot harder to help her if she won’t help herself. And yet, she’s only nine, and I wasn’t the boldest child either. I can tell you how effective “just suck it up” would have been with me (not that I said that or anything even close). It’s just tough to know where the balance is.

If this troop did more guided activities, like singing or playing structured games, it would be better for Em, yet I don’t think there’s another troop with room for her. Anyway, now I’m upset and sad and frustrated and angry, and I know Em knows it.

I’m taking five while she plays “pretend girl scouts” with her dolls. I’m taking this time to reflect on how I could have done things differently today. I think I’ll handle things better next time, and I think Em will too.

I have to go out briefly this evening, and I’m bringing home mini-marshmallows for hot cocoa. Sipping hot cocoa with marshmallows and bashing kobolds while playing D&D tonight sounds like just what the doctor ordered.

<----Never used breadmaker manufactured in 1995, purchased from a yard sale two weeks ago, complete with instructional video, docs, and original price tag for $185 (on sale from $260).

Awesome rosemary bread baked by my husband the excellent Italian cook, with fresh rosemary from our yard and extra garlic for more kick.—->

Best eight dollars we ever spent.

Cribbed from .

That sounds about right.

A while back I came up with a design for a warping board made out of PVC pipe. It would be used for dyeing self-striping yarn. The design doesn’t seem to be quite like any others I’ve seen out there in blogland. That could either mean that it’s a new idea or a poorly thought out one with pitfalls I haven’t foreseen. I’m hoping for the former. The last time I dyed self-striping yarn it was a pain in the neck to unwind again and I don’t want to magnify that with some sort of Rube Goldberg-esque contraption.

I was going to use my Dremel to cut the lengths I needed, as I did when I made my PVC niddy noddy. In that case, though the edges were uneven and rough and I wound up having to use the Dremel again to sand down each cut. It was a lot of trouble. Right now I’m trying to decide if it’s worth $10 to buy a PVC pipe cutter to save me the hassle, since a PVC pipe cutter really isn’t a tool I’d be using a whole lot. I dunno. Probably what will happen is that I’ll decide to save a few bucks and painstakingly cut down about four of these with the Dremel, then throw up my hands in exasperation and go buy the cutter.

I’ll keep you posted on just how tangled and unruly the yarn gets using this contraption. This could turn out to be genius, but even in the worst case scenario it could still be comedy gold.

For your entertainment:
Rube Goldberg beer dispenser
Office Rube Goldberg
Best homemade Rube Goldberg machine ever.

S’mores socks
Yarn:Knitpicks Memories in colorway “Smores”
Needles: Two circular US 0 / 2mm
Pattern: MUMTU toe-up pattern by Zhenya.
Design: Beaded rib from Sensational Knitted Socks by Charlene Schurch.


Comments:
This yarn was a gift from my friend Turtlegirl76 who gave it to me after I ogled it in her stash a while back. It’s been in my stash long enough to be discontinued by Knitpicks. It’s quite soft.

The MUMTU pattern is hands down the best-fitting sock pattern I’ve ever used. This is my second pair of socks with it and I predict many more to come. It’s customizable to any number of stitches and that it’s toe-up, which is my preferred construction. I’m a loose knitter, so I did 70 stitches on size 0 needles, which fit my 8.5″ circumference feet just fine.

The five-stitch two-row repeat pattern was very easy to memorize. Once a few rows had been worked, I didn’t have to pay too much attention to it, so I could read or do something else at the same time, which is always nice.

I had to eke out bits of time here and there to knit these rather than tackling them all at once, so these were knitted mainly in waiting rooms over the course of months. I had jury duty earlier this week and finished up the leg on the second sock while waiting around. Unfortunately, I was so keen to finally be done that I eyeballed the length wrong and bound off the second sock a few rows sooner than I should have. D’oh! Oh well, you can’t really tell when they’re on, and they feel fine, so that’s all that matters. Since the mistake was made while at the courthouse, I may rename these my “Justice is Blind” socks.

I was pleased with how these turned out. I’d use both the MUMTU and the beaded rib patterns again. Onward to the next pair of socks!