emchick

First, the finished Harmony in Red skein:

69 yards, 2 oz Targhee. I had a difficult choice to make when after splitting the roving in half, one finished single came out to be 68 yards and one came out 95. I considered joining them and plying from both ends of the ball, or adding some of the second skein to the first, but in the end decided to leave them alone and ply them as is. The skein is still longer than my other fun ones, and the two skeins are uneven in kind of a nice way, where the first is more thick-thin and the second came out much more evenly thin. I'm very happy with the finished result - I got the deep red I was after, and the light blue comes out, in tiny bits, making for a nice change and a nice contrast to the deep red.

The Targhee is also more squooshy and soft than the Corriedale I've been using, but was harder to spin. I think my predrafting was to blame, since I have a new skein started that's going along much much better. Here is the painting and inspired roving:




Van Gogh, Irises. White, light gray blue, and dull green-blue. I'm psyched.

I think my dyeing experiment was a reasonable success:

The red gets as deep as I wanted it too, and I like the light blue. I'm not sure if the light blue will show up enough once the yarn is plyed, but for now, it's looking good. I have one skein spun, with 68 yards, and am about half done with the second skein. I should be done by the end of the week! (I guess it sounds kind of lame taking a whole week to spin one skein of yarn, especially such a small skein, but that's drop spindling...slow. I've been admiring wheels online, but for now I know nothing about them, have no space for one, and want to get better more into spinning before committing to something so huge.)

I also bought See Eunny Knit's Deep V Argyle Vest Pattern...I wear lots of collared shirts to teach and have been wanting a vest like this. And it'd be my first time steeking, which seems so exciting! What will this mean for my other projects though? Eek.

I named this yarn Tigerlily in my head while I was spinning it because of the tiger stripes the singles had when the orange met the dark blue. Now that it's done, the name doesn't feel as appropriate, but can't be changed. That'd just be too crazy. And, as I suspected, my new spindle doesn't seem suited for skeins any longer than the ones I made on my last spindle. Oh well.

55 yards of bulky 2-ply, with the last of my Corriedale. Yay!

This weekend I made it out to The Yarn Tree in Brooklyn. A woman there talked to me about my spindle, and showed me some possible fibers. I bought some fiber, as well as my second spindle, Jane:

It's a Schact 3" Hi-Lo Drop Spindle and way prettier than my first spindle, Tom. Here are both, side by side:




We weighed Tom in the store, since I know nothing about it, and found out it weights 1.5 oz. Jane is 2.2...That's all well and good for being able to spin bulkier yarn but since my main concern was making longer skeins. Oh well. I couldn't wait to try out the new spindle, so I dyed the rest of Corriedale with lots of blues and greens, and a little orange. The weight difference while spinning is way more noticeable than I expected - it really takes more effort to get Jane going! But when I was done spinning the first half of the roving, I still only had 56 yards.



The colors are still not as deep as they could be, but I'm still super excited to see how the two ply turns out!

I plyed my first skein of the purple merino from Kendig Cottage.

I joined two smaller hanks of the single ply, from back when my skeins were much much more uneven and a significant amount shorter, then I plyed that with my latest attempt, which I had tried to make thinner than usual. It came out to 63 yards, in a heavier weight than I expected - worsted weight maybe?

I can't believe how soft this hank is! I'm seriously in shock over it. Merino is amazing. I'm a little nervous to get more of it - I want to stick with dyeing roving, and I've never dyed Merino, only Corriedale. Then again, I can't keep getting the same exact fibers from Kendig Cottage from now on...I did some price comparisons last night and it's definitely not the cheapest place around. I'll have to look into this more in the near future.

After falling so hard for my first complete two-ply, I wanted to do more plying. Well, I wanted to run out and buy a new, heavier spindle, more roving for dyeing, and maybe even a spinning wheel, but for now plying more yarn had to suffice. Introducing, Valentine:

42 yards of bulky two ply, handdyed and handspun with Corriedale roving.

I also spun up my new longest skein ever, 65 yards with my purple merino. I tried to make this yarn a lighter weight, and was mostly successful. I could have spun for longer but was too excited for plying. Besides, I can ply this purple yarn with the 30 and 37 yard skeins already spun from that roving. Yay! This weekend I hope to get to the yarn tree to scope out better spindles.

So I spun up all of the Manhattan roving and wasn't so impressed. The colors are really washed out - I could definitely do better. The hank was still so pretty though, and so so soft. I wanted to actually try plying it. There were only about 54 yards of yarn, and ending up with 27 yards if I spun it to itself seemed depressing, so I put two white hanks I made a while ago together to make one hank that could be plied with the Manhattan one. White was too boring, so I dyed it Ice Blue, and plied my little heart out.

Yay! My first finished hank that doesn't suck. The plying isn't great, but I think the spindle is partially to blame. When I made that 54 yard hank initially, it was the most I'd ever made at once on my little crappy sprindle. Plying was kind of a nightmare - there was twice as much yarn, plus I'm just not that good at plying in the first place. It was miserable by the time I was halfway through...I'm definitely going to need a better spindle, both for plying and for making longer skeins.
Still, I'm thrilled with this finished hank. 56 yards (I don't know how that happened - maybe because the Manhattan yarn was a bit overspun and maybe curled up on itself in places?), bulky and super soft. It makes a good necklace. I don't know what I'll do with it (besides showing it off to everyone I know) - can I make a hat with that little yardage, if the yarn is so bulky? I doubt it. Oh well!

Last week, I turned off the lights in my room to watch the movie Manhattan with a friend. My room lets out onto a little terrace, so I have a huge double-door window. Looking out, I noticed that at night, the city isn't the colors I expect - a black, or dark blue sky, with dark brown/black buildings. The sky was a deep pinkish mauveish purpley color, and the buildings were a pretty chocolate brown. With the lights on in certain windows glowing yellow, and random white lights coming from the tops of tall buildings and buildings in the distance, I thought it made for a very beautiful palette. I worked it out on the paint program on my computer and came up with this:

Then this weekend I went home and raided Pathmark for a ton of new packages of kool-aid.

28 packets, with many duplicates of blues and grape since I could see myself using those a lot. I'm only sad I totally forgot to get some orange. And I wish they had more greens.

So yesterday I had a free afternoon (since I'm on break from teaching and classes till 4:30 this afternoon) and decided to try to dye some roving in these colors. It was a big challenge - those colors, minus the yellow, are decidedly NOT bright, and kool-aid is decidedly...neon. I played around, trying to figure out the difference between the grape I had in the fridge since last time I dyed roving, and the mauve color I was trying to reproduce. They really looked the same in the little cups I had them in. It's also hard to tell how dark or how bright a color will come out - my grape stock looks like a bright, deep purple, and has since I first made it and it had much more grape in it, but poured on the roving it comes out a very light, gray purple. I also was too excited to wait to try Ice Blue, and made some light blue to add to the set. I'm pretty satisfied with the brown I came up with - it's a warm brown, but NOT bright. Here's what I had, dried and ready to be spun, this morning:

In hindsight, the colors could have been a lot brighter. They're looking very pastel as I'm spinning them up. I've been working on the technique of spinning that's not spinning from the fold, since it makes the different colors stand out from each other more. I don't love this technique; the other was much easier for me. I don't know if practice will solve that. Pre-drafting helps a lot, though. And is actually super fun.

I hope to finish spinning this roving in the next few days. I'm really getting to the end of my white roving supply. Perhaps an order to webs is in order? I'm trying to hold off on more purchases for now, since I might not have time for this stuff with classes and student teaching starting this week. I'm nervous about being so busy again - I've gotten quite used to going to the gym in the morning and doing absolutely nothing else all day. On Thursday I actually have to be somewhere at 7:45. 7:45! I hope that's not going to be a daily sort of thing (my schedule has yet to be worked out).

Ooh, and with my knitting. I have to put the IK Ballet Wrap Cardigan on hold. Something about working on it hurts my arms - I think it's the needles. I'm going to see about borrowing needles from someone, or maybe just buying new 10 1/2s. I don't know what needles would hurt less though...and maybe it's just that the needles are so big? If that's the case, it doesn't bode well for me working next on Teva Durham's Lace Leaf Pullover.

Here is the second batch of roving, before going into the oven:

The colors didn't run, which was great. Unfortunately, my color selection kind of sucked. The pinks and oranges took over in a gross way when I spun them up.



The color is kind of an orange-y peach. I'm not a big fan. This hank is my biggest yet, though - 46 yards. I don't see how I could go any bigger on this spindle, unless I made a lighter weight yarn, which I don't want to do - I had a bit more roving to spin, maybe 5-10 yards worth, but just couldn't deal with it anymore. The spindle was spinning horribly! I'm happier with my spinning, though; it just keeps getting more even.

I think I'm going to hold off on spinning/dyeing the white roving until I get a better choice of kool-aid colors. I'm left right now with reds and orange, and I don't want any more colors like this one. I also want to figure out how to make the yarn have longer spaces of one color. Right now it's looking like a candy cane. I think I can dye appropriately, but I don't want to try with these colors. I also want to work on making some thicker single plyed yarn.

Bored with spinning my white roving, I decided to try to dye my roving, according to the instructions found here. I used kool-aid instead of real dyes, and no vinegar or anything like that.

First, I soaked the roving and made up 4 colors of kool-aid. I only had reds, orange, and grape left, so my color palette was limited.

Next, I poured the colors randomly onto the soaked roving, and put the pan in the oven until the water was almost boiling.



I made the mistake of putting the roving PLUS water into the pan before this began, which meant all the colors ran together a bit. Here's what it looked like after the oven:



I let the roving sit in the pan for a while, then transferred it back to the sink to rinse it out.



The roving dried Very Very fast - it came out of the oven at around 11, and was mostly fine for spinning by 6 or 7. I spun it all up and am now extremely addicted to the process - this stuff was super fun to spin! Here are some shots:



I initially thought the color was like Fruit Roll-Ups, but now, in the daylight, it seems like something else. It's more of a brick, orange red. Like that lipstick you can't wear because it's so trampy. I'm still so proud of the results - it's 39 yards, 5 more than my last attempt, and I think I could have gone on longer. I'm getting way better at spinning evenly, slightly better at not making everything overspun, and much better at winding the yarn around the spindle efficiently so I'll be able to hold more on there and have longer skeins. I made a new batch this morning, not making that mistake with the water, so the colors didn't seem to run. Later I'll be able to spin it! eee!