spaazlicious

actually, just a mixture of madder and cochineal, a bit of fustic and cutch.

But on the paper towel, it looks quite like blood to me:


I overdyed a pound of shetland moorit to sample and love the "passionate brick" color it became; there was also a little hundred yard skein of superwash sport that went into the bath too and came out a nice flag-like red.

Unfortunately, I just can't seem to get the color captured right in this uggy weather which boils the life right out of my plants.

The indigo pot is enjoying this heat though.

I woke up half of my indigo vat mixture and put it into one of those dark "graniteware" enamel 16 qt stockpots that Target has in its stores for $12.99 and have been dipping it solar style.

I love the miracle of the green to blue, every time. I'd have Nick take pics, but he's too busy making faces and gagging.

Anyway, I added a bit more cochineal to the exhaust of the red dyepot and dropped in a pound of superwash yarn, one hank of sport, one hank of the fingering, just to see how much color I could get back out, hoping for a nice girly pink.



Not too bad.

I then dipped it in the indigo vat, hoping for a light overdye to get some sort of violet

(aiming for somethin' kind of like that below I suppose, which is a pound of superwash singles [acid dyed in the roving] to be plied into a chunky worsted weight)





but when I woke the vat up, I added more indigo, a little thiorea dioxide to "sharpen it" and speed up the whole oxygen reduction process of the new indigo plus a fair bit of heat on the stove and it was such a strong mix of heat and dyestuff I got straight up dark blue.



The linen and superwash I've been dropping in since moving it outside and depending on this fiendish heat have been less extreme, but I've not had to dip more than once so the colors are quite strong.

I've mordanted some superwash, lincoln locks, and linen, so I'll be doing little random experiments here and there. I feel some yellow coming on.

I dropped some linen & superwash in the pink exhaust and turned on the heat. I was getting a lovely almost hot pink, but I turned up the heat (got a little greedy to get all the color I could) and turned it up too much; there must have been enough madder to turn the tones to the brown side. Bummer. I now have a hundred yards of meaty color superwash and a light flesh tone linen. The difference between the two fibers is pretty stark. I should probably have a picture here. ;)

Hmmmm...look over there! What's that?


A messed up slipped stitch heel!



I admit, I misunderstood the directions, on the purlside when it said "purl 1, slip 1" I kept slipping it knitwise, since it didn't say slip purlwise. Yes, sometimes details need to be spelled out for me.

I wondered why it didn't look like the pattern pic, but I really like the look of it as is, despite its inflexibility. It doesn't feel right on the foot either, but I'm being stubborn and not ripping it.



After all, I'm sort of in the home stretch of sockage, right?

yeah, I'll keep telling myself that. This is definitely a good knitting in public pattern, very simple repeat.

A while back, Claire sent me some lovely orange and yellow merino/silk fiber, like squishy sunshine. I spun it into this:




roughly 13wpi, 2.4oz, 408 yards



I love the loftiness of it. I plied it very spaaztically, some parts are barely plied at all. I was originally thinking to make it into a lace scarf, but now, I'm thinking I might save it for a special colorwork project.

Happy colors.

I found this guy hanging out in my garden.

(click to view bigger piccies)



I'm going to turn him into a sock yarn colorway.



Whaddya think of "Ginger Mint Caterpillar" as a colorway name?



I never saw him after the photo shoot, so I haven't a clue what he turned into--I do hope a bird didn't eat him though.


Footnotes, clarifications

I didn't buy the fleece in the previous post--I wanted to buy it, but was a good girl, I still have roughly sixteen pounds of 3 greasy fleeces to spin up. (Eloise, the lincoln, the biocut merino). I did take names and contact info for posting a list later--and shopping, when I've made some room on my plate. ;)

I was also going to talk more about indigo, but y'know what? It's so cool it needs a post of its own. It's stinky but I love it. Wheeee!Peeee!

not exactly hot as Hell, but I'm working on gettin' there.

Imagine your local churches were having a sign war...












It should be fairly obvious that this is my heat-addled idea of a joke. If it isn't, here's your sign.

And not because of a bad experience, but because of a fabulous time at the Del Mar Fair fleece judging and there was an abundance of loveliness:



More photos here & experience notes on flickr.

Coming soon, knitting, spinning, dyeing. Shocker.

I did a vanity Google (I have a ten year h.s. anniversary this July, after all) and there's a friggin' porn star with my name.

Also an equestrian. An interior designer. A draft horse. A dental hygiene instructor. A screen printing artist. A math Ph.D of OSU at NDSU. Some lady soliciting prayers on beliefnet. A public art student. A lovely lady inmate lookin' for love. A B.A. in psychology teaching Hatha Yoga in CO. A site that makes me wish I knew Czech. (NSFW, assuming your work filter knows filthy[?] czech). A trailer park fire victim.

None of these are me. Whew!

Who knew a made up anglo name plus the Scottish equivalent of "Smith" would get so many hits?

Dye-o-rama's deadline was Monday to send out your pal's goodies...which meant that Sunday night, I spun up this:



My pal didn't have a blog but said she likes pansies, chocolate, striped socks and purple, turqouise, green and was an art teacher (although currently a SAHM) and google brought up an exhibit of "mirth-enware" so I thought I might do okay with doing something different and funky. Hence the purple superwash merino, pink and purple superwash merino, purple silk loopy encasement of the superwash, purple & green & blue mohair, ice blue merino tencel, bright green superwash, green (but a sort of tealy green) silk, pale spring green merino tencel...spun to make somewhat random stripes and color changes and textures.

It doesn't look very good in the skein, it looks better when spread out so you can maybe see the colors and textures a little better:

(click to see it bigger)


If I had planned better I would have made an exact mirror pattern, but instead, if she makes say, a scarf, it will start and end pretty much the same but not exactly. I also would have had some S twist singles to add in as well for more random texture.
But on Monday, I waited for it to be dry, popped some cutesy sheep soaps and peppermint patties I snagged on Saturday's post-camel tour-Julian-browsing-shopping-pie-eating-spree and shipped it out, 'cuz I was outta time.

I was really nervous though, and almost didn't send it and just sent something more "normal," but she said she likes it, so it's all good.

Today I received yarn and a note from my swap partner, Siri of Knitting Iris who has a beautiful blog.



The color isn't quite right in this pic--it's more true in her post here.

It seems very similar to kona superwash, which is sportweight and I weighed it and there's 100 grams there, so I think I might try to knit the sportweight version of the "Lovely Lace Socks" from the Spring 06 IK.



I really like the colors in it (Nick does too, maybe I could make him one sock ;)) Nah, it's gonna be lacey socks.

Artichokes

Trader Joe's has those fancy purple artichokes again



and I think they're terribly sexy.



(and lemme tell you, they definitely cook faster than the others)
We steamed them and Nick made a lemon-garlic aiolli to dip them in and I made some salsa to fill them with (after scooping out the thistle) and sticking 'em under the broiler. They were good.

The color that came out of them was really neat--purple stains in the steam tray, and later the water was that beautiful vivid green. Then I made the mistake of adding alum and yarn and it all went gray. Bleh. Now I know, acid only.

Ladybug Lifecycle

I'm really loving all the ladybugs around lately, in all their forms:

The larval stage (when they eat the most) which you've already seen


The pupal stage (and ickiest)


More than a pupa, not yet a ladybug (and sorry, very fuzzy, but still you can tell)



And a full-blown (and full figured) ladybug



Ah, bugspotting...simple pleasure, simple mind.

Happy Anniversary

Thanks everybody for all your birthday wishes to Nick; he was very embarrassed by the whole post.

Today is our 4th wedding anniversary--it's odd, it feels like "is that all? Where'd the time go?" and at the same time, "four years? Good g-d, ONLY four years?" I think it feels like longer because we knew we'd stick together from the moment we, er, cleaved. We worked together first, then lived together just as roommates (although that only lasted a month) and we've kept the same anniversary. I proposed a year after we kissed at the G St Pub in Davis, and we got married a year after that. It makes keeping track of things pretty easy, because we aren't so good at that.

We had a relatively mellow day, reading and relaxing, one of our favorite kinds of days.

The picture of Nick in the post below is one of my favorites of him from our wedding day. I have other pictures that make my heart burst with joy, love, happiness and an incredible unbelievable feeling of luck, but he'd be mad if I posted them.

My irresistible charming man, I love you.



I love everything about you--and especially that smile. Happy birthday, handsome.

(Next year I'll actually figure out something wrappable to get you, really. Really.)



******

In absolutely unrelated news, the end times are nigh.

(...is the new yoga)

Oh, dang, I can hear your eyes rolling in your heads from here.

Alternately, this post could be titled: "this ho' be plumb wore out"



Cristina came over and helped me whack the crap outta the weedpatch that passes for our front yard.

Here in San Diego it's mostly clay and rock and my front yard is no different. So it's slow going putting anything in the ground. And frankly, since we rent, it's pretty stupid to even bother. But it looked awful, and there's been some bad vibes floatin' around of the homeowners v. the renters style (the noisy Navy kids have kind of brought this to a head) and I wanted a prettier yard anyway.

(And note to landlord, if I call you, ask you for permission to replant the yard, then send you a diagram of what's going to be going on with the request to CALL US if anything is a problem, don't e-mail a week and a half later. Too late. Sh!t's in the ground. Sorry, the yard looked like cr@p, you fired the gardener, and we'd like to live here with happy neighbors. Or at least neighbors that don't give us the stinkeye. Tearing up my front yard seems to be a major social event--it's taking me forever but everybody seems pretty thrilled and curious, so that's nice.)

I bought ladybugs because I saw what looked suspiciously like aphids on my mint, and hooray! some have decided to have babies. Really ugly babies.



Nowhere near the cute babies you see on FarmgirlFare who I found via Heidi who is too cool to post any more. ;P

Anyway, the Farmgirl has some great seed companies in her sidebar--I really need to update mine BTW. Puttin' it on the list. My favorite was Pinetree--scroll down and check out their dye plant seeds. Great prices. Only my red amaranth came up from my Seeds of Change dye seeds package, I'm not sure what I did wrong, so I reordered from Pinetree some of what I was out of and I was really excited to see indigo and woad available.

And Heidi's link to The Anti-craft made me look through it again and see the stuff I missed the first time, like Doll Parts as awesome-creepy planter funtime thingies. Speaking of, Cristina clued me into Joann's as a source of awesomely cheap planters and pots--and, oh, oh!
A metallic tubing bright pink flamingo windchime set almost four feet tall and on sale!
But I didn't buy it.
But now that I think about it again I want it. (Good g-d, WHY?)
I was really there to buy a hot glue gun for Nick, it's cute how much he loves it. Why does he need a glue gun?



The "spare room" is officially full. It's too hot for brewing beer, so Nick has picked up model remote control planes. Lots of fixing is involved. Nick had every kind of epoxy available it seemed, but the glue gun? The glue gun gives the real love.

Anyway, back to gardening. From Baker Heirloom Seed Co. I bought some fancy Italian asparagus seeds and then I read about them. D'oh! 2 to 3 years (but a low maintenance bed that goes for 15-20 years) I don't think we'll be here long enough. And coincidence--an Anti-craft article on asparagus. A weird loop my life is lately. Or at least, this post. A random. fragmented loop.

So, I now have more seeds than I have places for, and (predictably) more basil seedlings than you can shake a stick at.

Like everything about me, this is seriously delayed.

I am participating in the Dye-o-Rama swap project. They (not-so) recently posted an exhaustive list of questions. I wish my buddy had a blog as there's lots of useful info here. Anyway, this may be too late as some have already received their yarns, but since I'm still dithering about what to send mine...

Specific to this swap:

Your favorite colors?

Blue and green, orange and red (I like dyeing purples an pink, but not keen on them as part of my wardrobe) Not keen on pastels or florescents, but I do like bright saturated colors, and misty, twilight tinted colors. I like skeins that have colors that play well together, plus one that pops out and hits you in the nose (like oceanic blue & green & seastone with an orange Garibaldi flash)

Preferred yarn weight (Fingering, Sport, DK, maybe even Worsted)?
No preference.

Do you prefer solid or multicolored yarn?
Multi-colored or kettle-dyed solids are more fun to knit with when you've got less than a sweater's worth, for socks and scarves and such, IMHO.

If your buddy is able to do so, would you like a variegated, self-striping, or self-patterning yarn?
The latter two sound like an interesting challenge, but I know I am going to love whatever comes--serendipity is fun enough. I've never bought any self-striping or self-patterning yarn myself.

Would you be interested in a wool blend sock yarn (nylon, tencel, silk, acrylic, alpaca, etc.)?
Not real keen on the acrylic, honestly. But like I said, this is for fun, for both, so who knows, I might be pleasantly surprised--there's some acrylic out there that I think totally rocks (well, "micro-fiber" like Berocco's Plush)

Imagine the perfect colorway. What would you name it?
Oceanic Flight 815. Just kidding.
Scripps Pier? Garibaldi Flash? Maybe I'll dye a San Diego sunset colorway with occasional tints of green and call it Green Flash, although I've never seen the Flash myself.

What was the biggest appeal to you for joining this dye-along?
I love handpainted yarns, I do them all the time for the shop (though I'm cr@p at listing stuff) and I love seeing the infinite variety that comes out of other people's pots. It seems like everything I do lately is with an eye to selling it, I thought it'd be fun to trade a little, to create something completely different without having to worry about selling/pricing and play with the creation process.

General yarn/fiber questions:

Have you dyed yarn/fiber before?
Yes.

If so, what’s your favorite dye and method?
I don't think I have a favorite, just different methods for different effects. Mostly I use acid dyes and do variegated colorways.

Do you spin?
Love, love, love it.

Have you knit socks before?
A baby sock. And I have a sock on the needles now. I don't know where it is, but it's there.

Do you use sock yarn for just socks or in other patterns too?
Sock yarn is just a very general weight class term to me. So, yes. The Gems Opal is a great weight for socks and I did the BiColor Cardigan out of it. Which reminds me, I really need to finish it.

What are some of your favorite yarns?
Handspun. Handpainted. Like farts, I prefer my own brand. Ha, no, I also love the Fleece Artist that Amy just sent me, I'm drawn to Elsbeth Lavold's Silky Wool. Henry's Attic organic cottons, the thick and thin Colinette clone of the Le Bouffon. I love stuff that smells sheepy and/or has a sheen, like silk/wool 50/50 blends or merino/tencel. I'm trying to love linen.

What yarn do you totally covet?
I must be too self-indulgent. If I want it, I buy it or make it.

Favorite patterns?
Norah Gaughan's new book looks very cool, and I have Teva Durham's Loop-d-Loop. I like those patterns that are classics with a twist and inspired by flowing natural shapes. I like cables, but I also like easy. I like comfortable and I like cute.

Any pattern you would love to make if money and time were no object?
Totally stealing Heidi's idea of doing Teva Durham's Cabled Riding Coat out of handspun vicuña.

Favorite kind of needles (brand, materials, straights or circs, etc)?
I have Denise interchangeables. For the smaller sizes I like the Chiao Goo bamboo or Brittany DPNs, Inox circs or Addi circs. I hate crappy joins.

If you were a specific kind of yarn, which brand and kind of yarn would you be?
I see a quiz out of this. I don't have a clue. Some sort of handspun, spun in the grease maybe.

Nothing to do with knitting/yarn/fiber in any way but seemed kinda fun:

Do you have a favorite candy or mail-able snack?
I love trail mix with chocolate in it; my secret pal made some that was so good, the dogs stole the package from where the mailman had dropped it over the fence and dismantled it in the yard (thankfully, she'd packaged the mix to be whippetproof) and they've NEVER done that before or since. Chocolate, sour, and/or funky candy. Whenever I make the mistake of buying Red Vines they go way too fast and I get a red film on my teeth.

What’s your favorite animal?
Dogs. (and don't tell the dogs, but I'd really like a cat. Or cats. And I have a thing for chickens. And it would be neat to have the space [well, the zoning really] for sheep and goats.)

Do you have pets? What are their species/names/ages?
Tahoe, whippet, 5 years old, neutered male. Libélula (Belu [BAY-loo] for short), fat whippet, 3 years old, spayed female. Two parakeets, Junior is nearly six years old and Pollo del Cielo (Heaven's Chicken) is of an undeterminate age as he was a handoff from a neighbor. He didn't come with a name either so we gave him that one, a spoof from a folk song. They live in a cage on the deck so they're more like noisy fish than pets.

If you were a color what color would you be?
Blue or green. But not teal.

Describe your favorite shirt (yours or someone else’s)..
Umm, ratty around the neck and probably stained in the armpits. But the cotton is soft and comfy. If it's being worn by me, it's probably on backwards (I almost always catch this before leaving the house).

What is your most inspiring image, flower, or object in nature?
My husband.

Tell me the best quote you’ve ever heard or read.
Best? No clue. I'm not really a quote person, besides movies, and even then, it's a joke thing. Uhhh, "Have fun stormin' da castle!"


Do you have a wishlist?
On Amazon.com

Anything else you’d like to share with the group today?
Safety first!

It's probably all over the lists, but just in case:
Women Steal a Shitload of Yarn.

Y'know, if you've been named "Michaeleen" I'm sure you've got some anger to work out at the world, but still... And I have some questions about some circumstances in the article--it's pretty obvious that all this yarn didn't just come from one store:

The trail led to thefts at other yarn stores in Dunwoody and Roswell, wherepolice arrested the 2 women. Woodstock Police haven’t added additional charges
because they’re waiting on Ms. Light.
“She hasn’t made a decision on whether she wants to press charges against these subjects or not,” says Lt. Will Merrill with the Woodstock Police.

Ms. Light is perhaps indecisive, because the husband of one of the accused thieves invited her to his home to recover her yarn.

“We came back with 12 great big, huge garbage bags full of yarn,” says Light.

“We thought, maybe, you know, a couple of thousand, but we totaled it up and Debi and I both just went white,” says shop manager Caryn Southwick.

Shocked because the total was almost $13,000!

So they pretty much know that there's yarn there that didn't come from their store (or the shop manager needs to slap herself around, because I know that even yarn stores have shrinkage, but I would think the neighborhood of $13,000 would make an impression)--I hope they track it down and get it back to the right shops, otherwise they're pretty much taking a bribe of ill-gotten goods.

And what's this about not pressing charges? There might be some sort of mental illness involved, but that's for the courts to work out. Did a crime occur? Do you want to give people the idea that it's okay to steal from your store (or any) store?

Geez.

Edited to add: here's a thread on it on Knitter's Review, I guess it's kind of an old story and been hashed a bit. The information seems to be flexible.

"Hey, neighbor, I'm trying to listen to NPR, could you not rev your engine? Please?"

What kind of a wussy request is that?

*****

The dyeing party was treated to my across-the-street neighbors' displays of manliness--tinkering with their little engines to make 'em sound bigger and look shinier.

I'm only sorry you guys missed my next-door neighbor's skimpy-bikini clad leafblower operation on Sunday. Drink in one hand, limpwristed swinging of loudly whining leafblower, booty jiggling for a couple hours, only pausing to refresh her drink.
I need a spy camera.

*****

The first part of this post, I just talk about my neighborhood. Scroll down to The Dye Party to get to the interesting bit.

*****
I put headphones on and PropertyOwner'sSon-in-Law's-Orange-Bonco is still drowning it out. This is where podcasts come in and save lives because if I wasn't able to pause, go back and replay, I would probably beat him to death with his own cracked muffler. He likes to tinker, rev it, then do a very fast circuit through our generally quiet residential neighborhood, and spread the love. I'm sure the person whose car alarm he keeps setting off in his sonic wake is loving him too. Being incredibly manly, he sustains this pattern for six hours or more.

The thing is, I don't want to call the cops--I've complained about La Mesa's idiotic and nonsensical regulations before. Our sound regs are so sensitive people apparently can't even legally operate a lawnmower (max db level for ANYTIME is 70db) and this provides 90 db as a lawnmower's level. They define an "ambient base level" and consider things above it as noise violations. Even though they have a landscaping specific amendment to their regs La Mesa doesn't let the realities of the equipment interfere, so it's a reg that essentially reiterates what is said elsewhere and amends nothing.

But hey, I hate lawnmowers too.

I do realise though that if we all had to use pushmowers and grass shears instead of lawnmowers and weedwhackers then...well, it would be the end of lawns as we know it. Not neccesarily a bad thing actually, considering we live in high desert. Still, I'm saying I don't begrudge my neighbor's their expensive landscaping follies.

And while I don't have a decibel meter, I'd love to borrow one, because I bet you this guy's rig is in the 110-130 range. Partner this with loud parties with underage drinkers (okay, this, I'm guessing. I'm sure that there are young women out there older than 21 who screech out, "I'm going ustairs to pee--who wants to f&ck me!?!?!" at 1 in the morning, but I dunno, it just seems an awfully young behavior) and I'm feeling like an old woman. On the one hand, I think my neighbors are highly amusing, but when I can't listen to Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me... without having to pause, wait for cessation of racket, rewind, replay, repeat, several times within the less than an hour long program, I get a little ticky. Hence, I feel like an old woman, bitching about those demmed whippersnappers and their loud trucks and drunken "friends"...I still don't want this to be a neighborhood were we call the cops on each other--except in the case of the guy down the street who sometimes knocks his wife around. Screw that guy.

Okay, one more thing about my neighborhood. So when people are leaving the dye party, I notice that there's a drawstring sunglasses bag laying on the sidewalk. Grace opened it carefully with sticks (see! this is how my neighborhood makes people feel, yikes! but really, we are safe and good, I swear! I haven't used my housekey for almost a year because we never lock our doors, really!) and found a stone inside. Huh. Whu? Nick clued me in--it's to smash car windows with when breaking into cars. Oh, fan-tastic that that was sitting on the sidewalk in front of our house. Where the hell did it come from?

Alrighty, enough of the ravings of the neighborhood grouch...

The Dye Party

On Saturday, Heidi, Nancy, Hilari, Cristina, Yoly (currently sans blog that I know of, who works with Nancy) and her step-daughter Grace, Jessica, and Susan all came over to take some perfectly good yarn and fiber and make it beeeeeyouteeeefull.

Cristina has a great picture set on flickr of the stuff going on, and Susan has some good pics in her post here too. Bella is aptly named, a total cutie patootie, very smart and well-behaved (and when she wasn't well behaved [at some point she had Nancy's Lady Eleanor in her adorable grip and was attacking it adorably because the Lady E is in its own way irresistible and she could probably smell the fluffy bunny in its korchoran soul] was still unbelievably adorable, a veritable black hole of adorableness [or is she a red dwarf? being a vizla and all...]).
Anyway, I forgot to take pics so it was all about the beautifully colored aftermath for me.



[note: The Noisy Orange Bronco in the background]

I'm hoping everybody had a good time, I loved the colors people came out with.

Check out Hilari's terracotta fabooolussness--it matches our windchimes from Nicaragua!:



I wasn't quite sure how to handle the logistics of everything; I set up tables on the deck and we mixed dye solutions at the sink. I showed the basics of making a strong dye concetrate base to mix other colors from, we had a mixing table, an undyed yarn table, and a painting table. The only rule was: don't get dye on anything but your own stuff. As far as I know, we did well on that. People brought lots of fun stuff to dye and crockpots, dust masks, and mixing bottles and a Vizla puppy and Nancy brought vinyl gloves for the people with manhands. ;P

When we do it again, we'll have two painting tables.

We rode Cristina a little for her methodical by the book nature (okay, maybe more than a little, she approached dyeing like Deb Menz's redheaded lovechild) and I acted as counterpoint by slopping dyes all over the place like a spaaz.

I took pics of all the dyed yarn on the towel that was under the bottles on the mixing table--I really like all the colors and the resist pattern of the table top on it...so I'm easily amused by pretty colors...

I dyed some Lincoln locks, a pound of mohair/silk (70/30) worsted weight yarn, a skein of 100% bombyx silk and some superwash yarns. I was feeling in a blue, purple, green, red mood...






I love dyeing. I don't know what to call these colorways, but there's something about them that seems so familiar. There are lighter, less saturated pieces in the skeins and areas where the colors mingle and I think they are beautiful. So I'm happy with my results. ;)


I had presoaked a fair amount of stuff and set it out on the table and Yoly's stepdaughter Grace was a guest artist for Lanas de Libélula--she painted a hank of superwash and a hank of silk.



Great work, eh? Preteen labor is where it's at! :P Water colors and fall leaves...

And later I dyed my presoak leftovers:




*****

I haven't been really feeling the blogging lately...I think this blog may be moving, changing...I'm not thinking of killing it. I can't do that until after I've actually spun aand knit the Rogue.