White and Lacy

Pegging along at the christening gown for Joan's grandbaby-to-be. It's this christening gown from Marie Connolly's 'The Expectant Knitter'. Getting very close to the end - I have one sleeve left to do, then the finishing.

The lace pattern for the skirt and trim is only a total of 3 patterned rows, 15 stitch repeat, so it was easy to memorize. I ended up making the skirt about 20" instead of the 29" the pattern gives you, but I think that was about the only modification, apart from adjusting the needle size to get gauge. The shortened skirt was because Joan sent 3 balls of light fingering, but the pattern called for 3 balls of lace weight with more yardage, and I was worried about running out of yarn partway through the bodice, when the first ball got me 12" of skirt. Now that I'm almost done, I think there would have been enough to make the skirt longer - but I'm not ripping back now! Only 6" or so of plain knitting to go (albeit on 2mm needles), and sleeve 2 will be done.

I will have to think about the blocking. The yarn is a nylon/acrylic mix, so maybe that's better steamed than wet-blocked, like plain acrylic? Must research.

And then? Tomorrow will be Saturday, and I will get to start something new and fun. Socks for my cousin, with colourwork bordering. Grey for the socks, from the blackberry canes I cut over the holidays, with a trim of daisies on a blue ground. I can't wait to see if they look as good in real life as they do in my head.

Comfort Fibre

It is Saturday, and I'm so glad. It hasn't been one of my best weeks at work, and finished with a major screw-up Friday afternoon, and a migraine triggered by sun and stress. Suffice it to say I went to get changed out of my work gear when I came home, and unconsciously started getting PJs out rather than pants - apparently my brain just wanted the day to be over already.

So I snuggled on the couch with a movie, had chips and only chips for supper, wound wool, and started a shawl. Serious fibre therapy needed this weekend, especially since the cat is still at the parents' - she was potentially supposed to get returned today, but looks like she's been avoiding capture again. So I figure I will see her next weekend - going down to the parents' and bringing stuff to sell at the local Corn Festival's craft sale.

The socks I was working on are done and blocking, so the shawl is my new knitting project. Onion and indigo-dyed lace weight wool, planning a triangle with gold accent stripes on a green body, and a lace edge.

I have the grey Jacob skeins finished from my Tour de Fleece spinning, and washed them along with 10 other skeins of handspun, last night.

During the week, though, I only got a little tiny bit more spinning done, of the Rideau Arcott from my cousins.

And I should be working on that, but I really want a wee break from the undyed stuff. So I broke out a braid of cochineal and onion merino roving dyed a while back -

And got about a quarter of it spun and navaho-plied this morning. Man, the spinning goes so much faster when you don't have to stop and pick out bits of hay and nupps all the time!

New Toy and Scrap Socks

So...both fibre and garden content today. For those who couldn't care less about garden stuff, here's the pic I promised of the scrap socks I'm knitting.

Caroline wanted neutral to warm colours, so this is just a bit of everything I had partial balls of that looked like it might fit the colour scheme. She even gets four colours that are natural-dyed. The yellow ochre for rib, heel and toe is dyed with rose canes, the black/grey variegated is logwood, the warm brown is walnut and coreopsis, and the dark olive-brown (in the center of the stars above the heel and the ochre/olive band near the toe) was originally dark blue, which I overdyed with onion.

I am digging the socks, and my mother would steal them except for the fact that they're the wrong size and have Caroline's name knitted in. So I expect there'll be another pair of these in my future.

And for the garden content, I just have to share a picture of my new toy. The head gardener at work introduced us to it, and it does almost everything. Officially it is I think a big grip garden knife. She refers to it simply as 'the tool', which is appropriate, since you can do the week's maintenance on a garden bed with only this in hand.

Sturdy as can be. Works as a trowel, a dandelion/taproot weed extractor (it's been super for lawn weeding), soil cultivator, and slices roots and stems. All those edges and teeth are sharp, though, so definitely keep out of reach of children. I did my garden weeding with it yesterday and it went really fast. Sweep under the surface to slice weed roots and loosen soil, use the tip for any stubborn taproots, and the serrated edge for any stems and branches on perennials that need removal, or root balls that need sawing apart. 10$ at Home Depot if you want one of your own.

Out this morning transplanting eggplants, cucs, and tomatoes, lavender and basil. I know it's a horribly hot day to do it (28C high predicted, and before 10am it was already hot to work outside in a t-shirt). But I only have time on weekends, so today it is. I gave everything a good watering, and shade cloth or a screen of some sort for the afternoon sun, so hopefully they will be all right.

Something New

A friend of mine wanted a hat, so she was over looking at patterns and yarn yesterday. I'm very happy with the fact that the pattern that caught her eye was the Something beanie by atelier alfa, because I had been eyeing it previously. It looked like a neat construction, I just had no excuse to make it - until now.

And it is just as neat as I thought it would be. I'm not normally a magic loop person, but I'm wrestling a slightly stiff circular (it's an old Aero, but the only one I had of the right size and length) into service, and the hat is coming along nicely.

See that? The hat's kind of like a shaped ribbon, attached to itself as you go. You're working in basic back-and-forth garter stitch, but coming out with a round hat. Reminds me a little of the Baby Surprise Jacket, but with no seams involved. And like the BSJ, stripes are good. Which is perfect for me, since the yarn going into it is some handspun I had natural-dyed last summer - 4 colours but only about 60-70 yards of each.

I really like the construction. The designer has a matching cowl, but I'm wondering now...can I use it to make mittens? Socks? Suddenly, I see more magic loop in my future. Definitely Something fun.

Lots of Colours

I've got a new acquisition which I love. Seems one night at knitting, one of the coffee-shop regulars, Mike, mentioned he'd seen something at the second-hand store next door that some of the knitters might like. So Teresa went to check it out the next day, and decided it would be perfect for me, wrapped it up in shiny paper, and delivered it as a gift!

And she was right, it is perfect. It's a dye sampler, inscribed on the back as being from New Mexico. I recognize the plants used as southwest US, and the language as Native American, probably either Hopi or Navajo, since I know both groups have lovely textile traditions, and I think both from that quadrant. And I love the concept of using the little tapestry loom to show off the colors. In any case, I am now extremely curious to know how they got that gorgeous green from the red onion (my efforts have been more yellow-green, if anything), and whether some of these other plants can grow here... I know Johanne has a book on the Southwest dyes I will have to consult, but since she loves the dyes and tapestry weaving as well, I shall have to keep an eye on my sampler!

Not that I have any shortage of colours about. Packing up and labelling  has begun; it's only a few days now to the OVWSG Ex and Sale. Friday at 4 is door-opening, and I'm hoping it doesn't rain. The suitcases are on loan, and I don't want them to get wet or dirty. But they make a great dual-purpose carrying and display tool for the yarn.

Bucolic

That is definitely the way to describe my weekend. Saturday's class went really well, and everyone had fun. I think it was just a great combination of people. It was supposed to be 1-4, but at 4:30 everyone was still there talking - always a nice sign.

Anyone who thinks the perfect Sunday morning means sleeping in and having a leisurely brunch would have been out of luck at the farm this week. By 9:30 or 10, everyone was up and fed, dishes done, Mom was taking the dog for his walk before work, Dad was taking the lawnmower for a walk before church, and I was hanging my second load of laundry on the clothesline - slightly delayed, since I hadn't wanted to interrupt a pair of flycatchers who seemed to be discussing the possibilities of the shed eaves near the clothesline as a nest-building site.

After the parents went off to their respective destinations and the day started getting warmer, I settled on the porch to do a little picking. Not banjo, like in some country song, but llama fibre. It's a mindless task, but rather nice to do it on a sunny spring day in the country. All the birds were chirping like mad, about mates and territory, and nest-building. Maybe some of them will have llama-lined nests from my discards!

The llama is my cousins' from last year's shearing. Lots of second cuts to pick out (it was Shawn's first time shearing, and he hadn't been thinking of it going to me at the time), but I got about a 50% yield, and what I was keeping was nice.

It was so nice to be able to sit out and enjoy the spring, and I spent the whole morning there. From the porch I could look out to the front border and the new bush, and to the left, past the apple trees, a gleam of yellow was visible from one of the gardens, where crocuses and daffodils, and forsythia were in bloom.

I wasn't alone in enjoying the weather, or the fibre, either. Abby was stretched out on one of the other chairs, and Rex was busy holding the door closed. Then Gail wandered over, and helped with the picking. She can't resist raw fleece - behaves like it's catnip.

It was, despite the help, a productive session, since about half the garbage-bag-full got picked. I spent the rest of the afternoon in the dye garden, hacking back the greenweed, and collecting the weathered stems from the madder. Last year's experiments showed that stems dried green give an olive colour, but stems that weather overwinter like these will give a peachy-pink similar to bedstraw. No point in wasting them!

 

WoolGathering Weekend

So the Hemmingford WoolGathering was a wonderful weekend, as far as I'm concerned. Some of the veteran vendors said there were less people this year than last, but not surprising considering there was rain predicted for Saturday (it held off until literally 5 minutes before closing), and it was cooler and windy (but sunny) Sunday. From the milkhouse, where we were set up, it looked like there were plenty of people visiting and enjoying themselves, most of them seemed to be in a buying mood, and lots of people I knew (plus a large handful of interesting sorts I met there) were happy to chat for a while. I've found a new source for roving and yarn, a new fiber festival in Quebec, and plans for a dye session at Sue's (our hostess) next month. I may have to do more dyeing anyway, since sales this weekend knocked out a number of my new skeins, and I now have holes in the color selection. Also I now have a lot of knitting to do to be ready for craft sales, since a bunch of that stock went as well.

It's the atmosphere at Sue's which is great. Everyone is relaxed and enjoying themselves, even the animals. Sue's chickens wandered about between the people, her dog trotted here and there supervising, and the cats went about their own business. A mother duck and 6 ducklings (including one with an adorable little tuft like a crown at the back of its head) came and swam in the trough by our building while we set up, but she took her children away when the traffic started getting busy, like a responsible mother. So many people visited with their dogs - often more than one dog per person - but I never saw or heard any of them fighting or causing trouble.

Kids were everywhere too. There's a grand tree fort (in the tree center of second picture) which there were kids in all weekend. A puppet show twice a day and some craft sessions were given. And the tent for an animal adoption agency near us, with several kittens and a pair of dogs, was rarely without a few kids (and adults) playing with the critters.

In point of fact, there were only a few small things wrong with the weekend as a whole. We had no chance to see Havelock Fair, except for dropping off and picking up entries, and little time at home to do other chores. I managed to pick up a bushel or so of walnuts (but not crack them for drying), cut greenweed to be dried, and pick part of the ripe pokeberries. One or two loads of laundry got done while the water was temporarily on again Saturday, but for most of the time, the toilet was behind a tree (fun in the middle of the night, eh?), and the water was coming from the old well in buckets. Hopefully this week my parents will get that fixed - for two days it's OK, but a week of it starts to be inconvenient.

Early Bird

For whatever odd reason, I was awake this morning before 6. Not the groggy, lemme sleep a bit longer sort of awake, but eyes open, willing to get out of bed and get going. And since in the heatwave the mornings are by far the nicest time to be up and doing, I accordingly got up.

And hell, it makes for a productive start to the day. Here it is not 9:30 yet, and I'm up and breakfasted, the cat has had her walk, and I've had time to harvest some beets, clean them, and make a batch of beet pickles, do a little spinning, and get most of my online stuff done. I'll be able to do my groceries before it gets really hot, and plenty of time for other errands, then back in to spin during the worst of the heat.

And am I having fun with the colorful spinning. I finished spinning and plying the first harlequin skein yesterday. It came out a fingering to sport-weight, about 228 yards in 70 g.

Now I'm several stripes into the second skein, and can see a definite probability of a third one...might try doing more coordinating ones instead of completely random. Or chunkier ones. And I think I need to dye more fleece...so many possibilities. How do the people at Noro ever control themselves?

Down On The Farm

Back in the city, after a lovely weekend out at the parents'. A busy visit, but enjoyable for both me and the cat. She's napping, worn out by all that hunting she did - I don't think she settled down in the house for more than a few hours the whole weekend. And I'm nursing the usual assortment of mosquito bites and stiff muscles garnered in the garden and field.

The strawberries are ripe early this year, and the wild strawberries are amazing. I never remember there being this many or this big. Usually you get a couple handfuls to nibble. But Mom and I spent part of Saturday afternoon hunting them, and came out with a few cups of them! Enough to make strawberry shortcake with the wild berries only, which has to be the height of summer decadence. Real shortcake, none of this sponge-cake stuff, and freshly-whipped cream.

The year's batch of baby chicks have arrived. This bunch is more curious, or less timid, than the last, some of them being willing to come right over to you instead of running away, and not fussing if you pick them up. One even didn't want to get off my hand, but sidled up my wrist, with the apparent aim of perching there for a nap. The dog, Rex, is in his element. He loves the babies, and has to come and see them, and herd them with his big nose, make sure no-one wanders off. Poor Rex looks like an accident victim right now, though, and very sorry for himself:

It's his own fault, really. He had an insect bite or something, and he licked it raw. Mom put the purple livestock disinfectant on it, and he licked that off, and made the spot twice as large. Bandages wouldn't stay on, so it's a pad now with antiseptic salve, taped on. Fine as long as he's supervised, but overnight he got an old t-shirt as makeshift pants, held on by cloth strips for suspenders, to ensure he didn't remove his bandage. His dignity was so injured that I didn't take a picture, but think of Eeyore. He was so sad and insulted he sat on the lawn with his back to the house, and didn't come in to clean the dinner plates!

And then there was the gardening. The weather has been very good for the plants, it seems. I took an entire wheelbarrow of tops off the madder patch, and spread them out to dry - I'm looking forward to trying the fresh tops, given that the bits that had spent the winter on the ground had color enough to dye with. The bedstraw was close to flowering, so I cut that down to compost. Dug out a couple dozen baby pokeweed that were de trop, and set out my Japanese indigo seedlings. Amazing how many fit in the one small pot I started - I dug over 20 holes, and planted 2-4 seedlings per hole. Happy to have plenty, though, since I came across a new technique for dyeing with them that I'm anxious to try - it uses vinegar and water only, and no heating.

 

Golden

I got the snowdrop shawl I was working on blocked last night, and this morning it was dry and ready to go.

That kills three or four birds with one stone, as far as I'm concerned. I've removed 700 yards of laceweight from my stash, finished a project which can count for both the lace and destash KALs going on in our group, produced a sample of my pattern I can use to show people, since the original is still off at Storey for their contest, and have a finished item I can sell at one of the craft fairs, perhaps.

The only thing I'm still a little dubious about is the color. I may throw it in a dyebath to tone it down at some point. It's a nice gold, and it certainly makes a statement, but I suspect it's a hard color to wear for most people, including me. The remaining skein of the same yarn in stash is definitely going to get overdyed as well, probably to a green or brown.

Color and Lace

I finished cria shawl #2 Thursday and took it off the blocking pins Friday morning, but hadn't had a chance to take pictures until today. I'm pretty happy with it, and glad the yarn didn't run out. Two tiny balls are all that's left, however, so I was definitely right to stop at 8 repeats.

Off to the parents' for a few days over the weekend. Yes, there is Internet, so why didn't I blog? Too much to do. And no prizes for guessing what most of it was, given that I had undyed rovings and yarn around:

I had lots of fun in the dyepots (indigo, cochineal, coreopsis, and walnut), and the results will be heading for my Etsy shop over the next week or so. I finished spinning almost all the remaining peacock batt - only one bobbin to ply and that will be done and I can start my sweater with it! The pysanky family is growing  - 8 knitted and 5 of those stuffed and finished. These are a bit bigger - maybe the Palette stretches more than what I had for samples, so I will try a couple with a needle size smaller, and can't wait to show them off when they're done. Two testers have finished the Bargello tam, and there were and are adjustments to make to the pattern. Ah, never a dull moment!

Timing

Long weekend due to Remembrance Day, and a lot got done.
I finished Jen's sweater; the pieces are blocking on my bedroom floor, and I've sent a few possibilities for buttons off to get her opinion.

I boiled up a pot of onion skins for dye and got some lovely colors. (The pinky-red isn't onion, it's a strong batch of poke.) Orange is strong onion, yellow and blue-green, exhaust from the dyebath on white and indigo-blue, olive green, exhaust plus a 10 min simmer with a bit of iron added.

I did 5 loads of laundry and 2 batches handwashing of woolies, mended my cousin's wedding dress and her mother's braided rug, made a batch of lotion, and helped move stuff of my brother's that was in storage back home, since there's space from rearranging and redoing the shed. He gets to do the final sort when he comes home for Christmas.

And then Sunday night my nose started running. Don't know who gave it to me, but I've got a lovely cold - runny nose, itchy throat, headache, nausea, the works. At least I got to enjoy the weekend. Skipped work yesterday, though, because I wasn't up to moving, and I figured better to rest, even if I hate to break my perfect record with only a couple weeks left of the contract. Today is better - all the symptoms still there, but more energy - so I will drag myself off to work later and try not to cough on anyone.    

In Which There Is Dye. And Pizza.

Saturday proved to be a rather unpredictable day weatherwise - sun, rain, cloud, wind, and many combinations thereof. However, if you are having a dyepot party in a friend's garage, with potluck pizza and pumpkin pie, the weather is less of a concern.
We boiled up a pot of black walnut hulls, some cochineal, a cochineal-madder blend, and a slow cooker of pokeberries. The black walnut hulls, even boiled, are a potent squirrel lure, it seems. At one point, Deb P went out to check on wool in the walnut bath, and we heard exclamations coming from the garage. I worried that the pot had boiled over or something, but turns out that the excitement was due to a squirrel having snuck into the garage who was busy searching (and scattering) our discarded hulls to see if we had left a nut in there. Seems Deb T's squirrel T-shirt was a better choice for the day than expected.

The pokeberries produce a deep reddish-magenta dyebath, but the colors on fiber can vary between peach and magenta. Wool in poke last year produced a melon in standard dyebath and deep magenta in a cold ferment in a pumpkin. This time the slow cooker, with alum and CoT mordant produced a bright red orange on wool the first go, and a peach in the exhaust. Silk and cotton picked up more of a pink - once it was rinsed, the cotton was pale pink, and the silk more of an old rose. Although the color proved a little fugitive on some fibers, it seems to be sticking quite well on my drying rack.

For some reason, the cochineal came out purple. Quite an astounding shade, actually. And mixed with madder, the shift was more towards burgundy.

The cotton, happily, did better in the cochineal and walnut baths than in the poke.

This is some of the results straight out of the dyebath, before rinsing. The bright red/orange lower right is the poke on wool I mentioned (Deb T's sample, not mine. Happily, I have more poke in the freezer, so I am aiming to get some red for myself.)

After rinsing at home, my results are, left to right: Walnut on wool, silk and cotton. Cochineal purple on cotton and wool. Cochineal and madder on wool. Poke on cotton, silk, and wool.

New Season, New Experiments

Dyeing season is beginning again, and I’ve got a couple experiments going already. My bathroom windowsill faces south, and generally does not have a cat in it, so it is holding two bottles of things soaking for dye.

One is avocado pits and peels, which are supposed to give pink. I tried this last summer, and was disappointed in the results, but I only had time to let it soak (in ammonia water) a couple days, and most people seem to get better results with longer soaking before cooking/dyeing. Looks hopeful – it’s really dark red-brown and there’s only the remains of one avocado in there.

 The second bottle is plume poppy (Maclea cordifolia? I'm sure that's not the spelling, but anyway...) roots. Every year it tries to sprout from runners in the garden, and I have to dig the runners up. The runner roots are orangey-yellow, as are the sap spots on my hands (it washes off easily, though). So I chopped up the runners from this session, and popped them in a second jar, along with water and ammonia, same as the avocado. There is some color coming off, (more green than I expected, but that may be the ammonia) and I don’t doubt there will be more runners to add.

Now with any luck the weekend will have some decent weather and I can start cleaning out the dye garden.

Pink is my new obsession

I’ve had the song stuck in my head this weekend because of a new spinning project. Well, not pink per se, but the oranges and magentas I dyed last year (cochineal, madder and pokeberry), and have been looking forward to doing something with.

One of the local Quilter’s Guilds had their show this weekend, and several of the other fiber and handwork-oriented guilds set up shop there to demonstrate skills and advertise. I spent Saturday spinning there. But what do you bring to spin at a quilt show? Weavers and knitters are producing a fabric, so that is sort of relevant, but spinning is a step before that. My figuring was that there are more people who are doing mixed-media things now with quilts, and maybe they’d be interested in something colorful and textural for yarn. Besides, I wanted a break from the unending cria.

I noticed shortly after starting that I apparently didn’t rinse the dyed fleece thoroughly enough. Pink fingers. Which, after all, doesn’t look quite so bad as walnut staining or indigo.

But the singles were turning out lovely. I figure there’s about enough for three skeins.

I couldn’t resist plying up the first one before finishing the singles, just to see. Pretty, no?

Oh, the cria? I measured what I have done, just for the heck of it. There are 328 g spun, which is approximately 1640 yds. I can fit about three times the yardage I normally do on a bobbin. This explains quite nicely why each bobbin feels like it’s taking a looong time.

A Family of Bookworms

I was down to my parent’s place this past weekend, as the cat and I both like to have a visit to the country every couple of weeks, catch up on what’s new and interesting. My parents are currently redoing the TV room, which also includes the computer, games, puzzles and books. That is, the part of the books that is not my personal collection, or the random stuff in crocks and cupboards, or the magazine archives, or most of the how-to books. It’s funny how I always realized we were maybe more than average readers in the family – it was not and is still not unusual for dinner conversation to be completely absent because everyone is reading at the table – but it never quite hit me how many books we’ve managed to accumulate. Mom and I spent part of Saturday going through the books to see what we might get rid of, as Dad wanted to see if we could clear some shelf space for him to use for filing. We went through old university texts of Dad’s, novels, children’s books, comics, local history, dictionaries and phrase books, gardening books…you name it.

A couple hours later, we had 6 boxes of books to donate at the second-hand store, plus some puzzles and games, and some stuff set aside for my aunt’s children. Now those 6 boxes do not represent more than, say, a quarter of the total of the books in the TV room, and that room has maybe, maybe, a quarter of the books in the house. They get read, and re-read, and on top of that, Dad and I still make good inroads on the public library, I have my stash at the apartment, Mom trades books with her sister, and my sibs do a fair bit of reading too. Almost makes me wonder how we manage to get anything else done.

Sunday, we boiled up a pot of walnut husks and chestnut hulls and onion skins to dye old sheeting. Mom is going to weave a rug to go with the TV room's new look. It;s going to be very cool. Pictures, though, will have to wait until my next trip.

Brilliance in Action

A couple summers ago, I dyed a bunch of fleece with logwood and indigo, and got it all carded together on a drum carder to make nice tweedy batts. I finally finished spinning and plying it, counted the yardage and decided there's enough for a sweater. I think it's going to be this one.

So I set the twist, and then noticed one of the skeins looked a bit funny. Most of them looked like this:

One of them looked like this:

It was still all kinky and hadn't smoothed out at all. Now occasionally I try to ply something in the wrong direction, so I checked and that wasn't (quite) the issue here. Turns out I spun one of the singles S-twist and one Z-twist. Yep. And didn't notice anything wrong before this. Some days ya wouldn't think I managed to make it through grad school, eh? Now I'm going to have to take the plies apart and ply each one to itself if I want a decent yarn. Good thing I wasn't planning on starting the sweater right away!