Blah!

I am not sure what went wrong. These all started out blue (you saw it in the last post!) but then faded to gray. The silk hankies and the wool are the worst. The cotton/silk/tencel was a little better (I actually like the color). I have read that if you heat the leaves to over 70 degrees c you will get tans. I had a thermometer and I don't think I ever went over 70. Also, Tara suggested that maybe the chemicals (washing soda and color run remover) were old. This is true. I should have gotten fresh chemicals. Maybe that was it. Something was definitely off. Dyeing must be one of those things that takes a lot of experience and a sort of sixth-sense about when things seem right or not. Ah well. Now I will have to think of a way to over-dye the wools and silk. I do have those elderberries that Hal picked for me a while back taking up space in my freezer...

Japanese Indigo

Hal asked me to harvest my Japanese indigo so that he could plant some lettuce. The plant was HUGE. I got it at MD sheep & Wool and it was about 4 inches tall. It had thrived in the spot we planted it and had spread to about 5' x 5' and was covered with pretty hot pink flowers.

So I yanked the whole thing out. It had sent out roots to different areas so it seemed like several plants even though it was only one. I was able to fill a bushel bucket.

Then I had to pick off as many leaves as I could stand to. I filled my crockpot with the leaves and cold water and slowly started to heat it.
Until it looked like this with a kind of oily surface:
Then I drained it and added washing soda and whisked it to add oxygen to the dyebath. It was supposed to get all frothy and blue, but it only got a bit blue and a bit frothy. So I was kind of worried that I had done something wrong...
But then I put it back in the Crockpot and added the color-run remover which is supposed to remove the oxygen from the bath. And right after that, I tried to dye some silk "hankies" (processed cocoons) and some handspun yarn and some cotton/silk yarn. Before:
And this is how it looks on the bath:
And here is a video of the dyeing magic:



It worked!!!

A Sock Challenge

I'm still working on my herringbone socks. As you can see, one is finished except for the toe. The other one I'm having more of a challenge with because of the color pooling that's happening. All the colors keep repeating at the same place, hence the concentration of browns and blues.

Here's another view. See how the sock on the left is nice and evenly striped, even at the instep. The sock on the right is not as even.

So, there's no choice but to rip back, from this:


To this:
Since this is color knitting, I had to tink rather than rip, which I did over 21 rows, back to the instep decreases. Then I started at another place in my ball, hoping to get to a place in the yarn where the dye was closer to making even stripes. And now the pooling is worse:

It figures this is happening at the top of the foot, where it's most noticeable. I'm not sure what the solution is. Maybe I'll put these aside until our SnB and hopefully get a good consult.

Ideas??

A Feeling of Accomplishment

Today I finally got around to washing all the hand knitted stuff. I was a job and a half, but when I was done everything smelled so good and I could see a lot of the stuff I knit in the last few years. It was kind of satisfying!


Oh, and I turned the heel...

I was babbling away to Wendy yesterday that I would never really change the way I make a sock (the one I can do from memory without a pattern), but I have to say that this one works pretty well. It almost makes you wonder why it is made the other way. And it has the benefit of continuing the pattern if you are using yarn that has color changes because the only back and forth is on the bottom of the heel. So you don't get the abrupt change when you knit the foot after the heel. But I don't know...your first sock is kind of seared into your memory and it will always be the "way I make a sock". Sorry to get all philosophical...

Knitting in Australia

Good Morning everyone. Australia is amazing! I've got some hand dyed alpaca wool, and will hopefully get some more of something special while I'm here.
This morning, like every morning, the birds woke me up. The kookaburra's start arguing promptly at sunrise and they are loud. Then of course everyone else starts in too. So I was up getting a glass of water looking down on my friend Julie's back yard, and a wallaby hopped slowly across the grass! I made a cup of coffee, bundled up, and went outside and worked out the heal of our socks on the back porch. I was hoping to see more wild life - but just the birds were around. And yeah, I didn't understand the instruction either - so I just wung it, and they look okay.
Cheers! - Tara

Starting the Gusset

After a bit of frogging and tinking- I think I have the gusset figured out. My tip: cross out all the K1's and p1's that you don't need in the instructions so that you can see what you have to do. It is very confusing otherwise. My other wish: pointier needles to pick up all those yarnovers. But other than that, I really like these socks and I am excited to try a new heel.

Free Library Find

I popped into the Free Library bookstore on Friday and as usual made a dash directly to the arts and crafts books. They had a few new knitting books -- one on knitting tips and the other, The Urban Knitter. I couldn't really get enthused about either one and was on my way out when, nearly around the corner, I spotted this little book sitting on top of the others. The spine was really boring -- scientific, almost. I'm not sure what made me pause to pick it up. Maybe its size -- it's small, about 4" x 6".

Look at the cover. Dull, right?


What language is this, anyway:


Once I looked inside it was clear what it was/is. A knitting book of patterns, in Czech as I found out (published in Prague, 1972), composed entirely of knit and purl patterns. No increases. No decreases. No yarn overs or ssp's. Just knits and purls.



Yes, you're seeing this correctly -- OVER 200 DIFFERENT PATTERNS of k/p straight up. Amazing.

The photographs aren't very good, but see the charts below the illustrations? (Clicking to a close-up helps a lot.) I've no idea what they are. An internet translator tells me that "Poznamka," up at the top, means note. And then the actual note says something about the reverse side for #240. "Rub obrace" in #232 means reverse turns. Hmmm.

Of course, I'm interested in what else Zdenka Pudilova has written, and whether this is part of a series of books of knitting patterns. Or whether the poor Czechs thought they only had knits and purls to work with.

It's missing one signature (some 45! patterns) but for $3.50 it's quite a bargain.