Alpaca

March came in like a lion and left like a lion! Today is kind of yucky- all grey and rainy, with lots of high winds, but it is warmer! There is hope! There is also a huge "lake" in my side yard since the ground is frozen but the snow is melting...

I have been playing with fiber these past few weeks! Just Friday I called a local alpaca farm that I knew about and asked if I could trade handspinning services for fiber. I was able to bring home a first year alpaca blanket (the best bits of the fleece) to spin. It is a brown and white mix and I am carding the colors together. There are about 12 ounces, now that it is washed. I will keep half, then take the other half back to the farm. Hopefully, they will like it! This is from last year's clip, I think they like to send two years worth together when they have it processed into yarn. The fleece is so soft, but it has a lot of second cuts that I have had to pick out!

I just received yesterday some mill end rovings that I ordered. They are fabulous! I guess I will be dyeing some up tomorrow! Being able to sell some of this stuff gives me more freedom to play with color and to dye a bunch at once! It is so much fun. I hope that my buyers enjoy it as much as I enjoy doing it. I enjoy dyeing the yarn just as much, it just costs more, so I am a little more cautious.

Brenda

Busy dyeing!

I got a shipment of wool at the end of last week, so I have been busy dyeing lately! It is so fun to play. I have been doing some batches of wool where I dye it, then blend it with other colors and fibers on my drumcarder. I enjoy the results.

As for the pictures, I call the purple roving "Amethyst" and the orange one "Autumn". The "Autumn" colorway was a lot of fun because I started out with a beautiful white roving streaked with brown, so the brown continues throughout while the other colors are fading in and out!

As for knitting, I have nearly finished the pillow project that has taken forever. Yesterday, my chiropractor said "Are you still knitting that?" I mostly work on it while I am waiting in offices, etc. so it really has taken awhile...

On the mend

I am off the crutches, but my foot is still sore. I think I am ready to let my chiropractor touch it:). I have fallen arches, so foot pain isn't an entirely new thing to me...that is probably much more than you really want to know about me, isn't it?

The "Ocean toes" sock is progressing nicely. It is pleasant enough to knit, as long as no one is vying for my attention! I just have maybe half of the foot, then the toe left. I'll have a picture soon.

Actually, the exciting thing for me today, is some of my handspun yarn was selected to be in an Etsy Treasury here:

http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list.php?room_id=28169

You have to look fast, this one expires on Wednsday. It features EtsyFast artists. I have enjoyed my time in EtsyFast (fiber arts street team). I do love all things fiber, so it is fun to check out what everyone else has been making!

Have a great day!

Brenda

p.s. Here is a photo of the selected yarn. I wish I could include everyone else's stuff too!

Fun Yarn

I have been having so much fun playing with this wool! It started out as undyed Fine African Top from Louet. I hand painted it with fuchsia, yellow, turquoise, and blue, repeating the sequence around the loosely skeined top. I let the colors blend where they met. After the top was rinsed and dried, I divided it into five color groups:fuchsia, blue, turquoise, green, and yellow/orange.

Next, I took each fluffy pile and spun it seperately. Each color has bits of its neighbors, so the yarn has a lot of complexity. It is so much fun to watch the blending as I spin, and to examine the finished yarn once I am done. Anyway, I wound each color off the bobbin into a center pull ball as I finished it. The picture of the five yarn balls is the singles yarn.

When I had all five balls of singles ready, I went back to my wheel (which is a double drive Asford Traveller that I assembled from a kit) and plied each ball back on itself using the end from the outside and the one from the middle.

I just love this yarn. It has been so much fun to make. It makes me think of tropical colors (because of the fuchsia and turquoise?). I found myself thinking of the green as "lemon-lime" and the fuchsia as "sunset". The orange/yellow one I wasn't sure I was going to like. The bits of green mixed in with the orange and yellow had me worried, but as I plied it, I fell in love with it. It really reminds me of autumn leaves. Often we will find maple leaves colored with incredibly rich fall hues and flecks of green like this.

I posted these yarns on Etsy. I wasn't sure I wanted to, but I find that I don't want to knit it anyway! I just want to look at it (and feel it, it is rather soft). I love to knit, and I love to knit handspun, but I can't keep up with it all. I am really enjoying the freedom to experiment with color that having my own little etsy business has allowed me.

I am thankful!

It is lovely sitting in my nice warm house watching the snow drift past the window. I was going to do a little shopping, but I really hate to drive in snow if I don't have to! I missed the whole thanksgiving with the family thing because I wasn't feeling well (I hate throwing up on road trips!) so I have had a couple of days of quiet. I am very thankful for my family, and for all the things that we have been blessed with. I have also been thinking a lot lately about how grateful I am to be able to make things with my hands.

That brings me to the above picture! This is the shrug from Interweave Knits 2005 summer issue and it would really like me to finish it someday. I started it not long after I fell in love with it, but then got side tracked with the wedding gift mittens I pictured in another post. This shrug is knitted from the center back to the cuff, then the provisional cast-off is removed and the second half is knitted. This shrug is exactly half done. Maybe I will take a few minutes to pick up the stitches later today. I actually really enjoy knitting lace, but it does take all of my concentration, which I cannot spare most of the time. My current mindless knitting project is a pillow that I am knitting in the round in stockinette. I don't even have to look at it as I knit.

Anyway, I dyed the yarn for the above shrug, so I thought that I would share a pic of the yarn in a ball and in the skein. I have been very pleased with how it looks knitted up. I use KnitPicks yarn for almost everything. They carry good quality yarns and the wools are soft!

Swatch mitten cuff (soon to be frogged...)

I wanted to post a quick picture of my poor mitten! You can see the beautiful yarn (Thanks Holly!), that I would most certainly run out of if I continued as originally planned. Once I have taken a quick count for gauge, I will frog the thing and start again.

Knitting time has been at a minimum. The kids have been keeping me quite busy. Yesterday there was no school, so I took the three girls shopping for new coats and jeans. Gives new meaning to the phrase "shop 'til you drop"!

I posted some hand dyed sock yarn at my etsy store today, along with some very soft bamboo fleece throws that I hand dyed. www.dye4fun.etsy.com I am absolutely in love with bamboo fleece! It is fabulous to touch, and dyes wonderfully. I have been keeping my eye open for some naturally colored bamboo yarn to try (since I'd rather dye it myself...). I've also read about cutting polar fleece into thin strips and knitting with that and I have been wondering how that would work with this bamboo fleece, since it really is quite a bit different than polar fleece. I really must try it one of these days...

Life in general...

Halloween was a great event at our house this year. The evening was not too cold- the girls didn't have to cover up their costumes with bulky coats, or put on multiple layers underneath! By the time we were done, the wind was picking up, so it did get chilly, but what a beautiful night. When we woke up Thursday morning, I was surprised at the puddles. It had rained hard sometime during the night. That made the beautiful evening the night before even more amazing!

I have spent much of this week dyeing various things. Today I wanted to just relax and do some sewing, but being a bit fuzzy headed messed up my sewing machine. So I spent much of the day driving to the sewing machine dealer and letting her figure out what I did, and then fixing it, and then coming back home. The dealer is 45 minutes away (yes, that is the closest one...).

So now I am going to go fold laundry, and then maybe I'll dust (it really has to be done when it reaches around 1/4" deep). I probably can't mess up those two things, at least not irreparably.

It is definitely not a good day to start a new knitting project!

PINK HANDSPUN DONE!

I just posted my latest handspun yarn on Etsy. It has been a lot of fun to make. It is so soft. My daughter wants me to give it to her so she can feel it whenever she wants. I have been knitting some socks with commercial sock yarn, and I was amazed at the contrast in texture when I knitted the handspun swatch. It really is nice yarn.

Hopefully I will get better at organizing my pictures as time goes on! To the right (and below) is the hand dyed roving drying last week. There is also a skein of dk weight yarn on the bottom, and felted mittens on the top. It is always hard to wait for the roving to dry after I dye it. I can't wait to spin it and see how it's really going to turn out!

Below is a lovely picture of the roving in the sink getting rinsed. I have to be very careful at this stage to not felt the wool.

I was going to post a picture of my actual spinning wheel in action, but I forgot to have someone snap a picture. I will do it with the next yarn, for sure!

New Handspinning project

Looks like my yarn picture from the last post did show up!







Two days ago I handpainted some roving that I had on hand. I divided it in half and did two colorways. The first is a blue-white-violet-navy repeat, the other is a blue-pink-navy repeat.





This picture shows one of the rovings painted, and ready to wrap and steam.

Yesterday morning I divided the rovings up. The pink one I pulled apart along the blue and navy divisions. I have been spinning these little fiber bundles from the fold. It makes a yarn with a lot of depth. So here is a photo of my little fiber piles from both rovings.

I also started spinning yesterday. I should have yarn pictures to post in the next few days!

Yarn experiment

This yarn is something that I have wanted to try for a few years. Now that my kids are all in school, I am getting to a lot of projects that have been waiting in the wings. I haven't been spinning much this year, and it is great to have some time to do it.

One ply of this handspun yarn is Bluefaced Leicester wool from Louet, the other ply is silk, from predrafted silk hankies. Both plies are softly spun, and a bit fuzzy, with the wool being much to loose in some places. The yarn is very soft. I have wanted to see the sheen of the silk next to the wool texture. It is a nice contrast in this yarn, but the silk has quite a bit of texture on its own, because of the preparation. I will have to try it again with a silk brick and more twist to maximize the difference.

I waited to dye the yarn until after it was plied. I wanted to see how the different fibers reacted in the same dye bath. I know that silk has a strong affinity for dye, but it was very interesting what happened. I was using a roasting pan (that I use only for dying) and I heated the water, vinegar, and yarn up to just below boiling. Then I poured the fuschia dye in- but only in certain spots. At that temp the dye usually strikes fairly quickly and you can get some great effects. After the fuschia, I added some blue in other spots. Instead of getting pink spots and blue spots, I got pink silk and blue wool. Very few areas look truely purple, which is surprising...

Here may or may not be a lovely picture of the dyed yarn. I have been having some trouble uploading the picture, and currently can only see the dreaded "x". I will try again tomorrow.

Alien tie dye

I wanted to show a picture of one of my favorite things to dye. This is from a long sleeved t-shirt that I have for sale on Etsy, in a youth size 14. I can do this on almost any t-shirt or fabric, as long as it isn't too small. I made one for my son, and it is one of his favorite shirts.

It is amazing how much fun you can have with some white fabric, and a few bottles of dye... It was fun how the mouth turned out. The dye travelled in just the right way. It is hard to actually plan stuff like that.

Etsy store

I've opened an etsy account to sell handmade stuff. This is an exciting move for me! Later this week I will post some of the yarns and clothing that I have hand dyed. If you haven't checked out etsy.com you should. They sell hand made items. There are lots of neat things there!

My etsy store is http://www.dye4fun.etsy.com/