Time flies when you're busy

I can't believe it's been a whole week since I wrote something. I've been doing a lot of different things and the week got away from me. First of all, happy birthday to my mom, a little belatedly (2/19). Happy anniversary to me for 18 years of doing something right (2/10).

I've been dyeing wool and spinning and also knitting away on a sock from the Socks That Rock (Blue Moon Fiber Arts) sock club. That's been fun and interesting. The yarn is different from the sock yarn I've been buying a lot of lately (Claudia Hand Painted and Sundara, mostly). It's different (not necessarily better or worse, just different); it's firm and springy and I'm enjoying knitting with it. I decided to follow the pattern as closely as I can, suppressing my usual instinct to mod it up. And then, after doing about 2 inches on it, I lost the pattern! I always keep my patterns in plastic sleeves with the yarn, but somehow I mislaid this one. So I had to wait until I could get another copy. Fortunately I met a woman at my LYS who is also in the club, who shared her copy with me until I get my replacement from STR/BMFA.



The pattern is actually kind of meh. I think the heel is pointy and awkward. But I'm enjoying working with the yarn, and I'm getting the experience of being in a club, which I've never done before, so I'm going with it.



I spun the "Looks like teen vomit" roving, which actually came out kind of well after being spun. I spun the sea blue/green as well. Here they are together:



I finished plying them together and they came out terrific!



Not to mention a ton of it - 482 yards of 3 ply, hand dyed and handspun merino wool.

Happy Valentine's Day!

I gave Adam "Rock Band" for the XBox 360 and he bought us tickets to the opera for tomorrow night ("Otello"). We also went to dinner at a local restaurant that we've driven by on the way home every night since we moved here, which was a Mob scene, in the Jersey sense of the word, but good food nevertheless. I also gave Adam chocolate "Mii"s (avatars for the Wii), one for him and one for me.

Other than the fact that I had to go to the gyn, it was a lovely day. I'm looking forward to seeing Otello tomorrow night.

Fibrous tissue

1.6oz mix of superfine merino, baby camel, and silk bought at averbforkeepingwarm.etsy.com:



I spun this up last night. It was hard to spin because of the different types of fibers mixed together, so I let it slub because I didn't have the giveadamn in me to stop and deslub every time it got a little thick. I thought, hey, this is artistic. I plied it with some of the brown. It was, well, okay plied with the brown, nice even, but I realized later I wished I'd plied it with the pink instead. It's a great pity that you can't unply. I have several things I wish I could unply and redo in another combination.

It was late last night when I finished it so I didn't take a picture of the yarn but I'll add something in tonight most likely.

Also unphotographed but out of the pot and nearly dry is the overdyed blue-teal roving. The blue isn't dark enough by half, but it's nice enough. I'm learning learning learning. Photo added:

Adam lost his car key

So I have combed the house and have not found it. I have great faith in my ability to find things, usually, but I cannot find it. My only conclusion is: that key is not in this house. I hate lost keys in particular. When I was about twelve, our family lost a house key and we all combed the house and yard and cars and everywhere for months and never found it. My dad offered a reward to anybody who found it, $50. I really wanted to find that key, but I never did. It was never found.

Anyway. I'm dyeing some more wool. I dyed it once already, a teal green color, and now am overdyeing it a cobalt blue. I am excited to see how it comes out. The teal only got to most of the wool, leaving some undyed places, so I'm hopeful that the cobalt will get to those spots, and maybe leave some undyed green showing through.

I spun half of the pink I dyed and am tempted just to skein (and then knit) the single as is; it's somewhere between fingering and laceweight as a single, and it's tightly spun, so it'd stand up to knitting just fine. I also want to spin the vomitish mess I dyed last week, some of it at least to see how it comes out. I am sure it'll be ugly, but I want to see for sure.

I can't come up with anything I want to knit. The shawl I've been working on for years (which started as a cardigan but was too small to get around my fat belly once it was up to my armpits and therefore turned into a shawl) is about square now and I am thoroughly sick of it. My plan was to keep knitting on it until I ran out of yarn, but I have two and a half more skeins left and I don't think I can stand to do it anymore. It's pretty, and I feel sure I will never wear it because I have looked at it way too much to see anything but godamisickofthisproject.

I have a dozen or more skeins of lovely sock yarn, including the first installment of the Socks that Rock ("STR") yarn club, and no interest in knitting socks right now. I did a pair of gloves and don't want to make any more. I was thinking about using sock yarn to make a big quilt of squares of aran designs, perhaps the Great American Aran Afghan that Knitter's magazine published from their contest; but I looked through the book and lost my excitement for the project.

This happens to me from time to time so I'm not terribly concerned about it. I just would LIKE to be knitting, yet have nothing I especially WANT to knit.

"Looks like teen vomit"

I have my first real failure, and what a spectacular disgusting mess it is!



Failures are great for helping to figure out what to do differently next time.

I mixed up dye and eye-droppered it onto the roving in random spots. I used all the green but only a little of the brown, then I dumped the rest of the brown into the hot water bath to dye the whole quantity.

I used too highly concentrated dye for the eye dropper step. Too much of it "stuck" where it hit and it didn't spread out. I thought the dye would spread out through the fiber more than it did. Good to know for future reference when I don't want it to spread out.

I didn't use enough of the brown to get a dark enough ecru for the entire batch; I only used about a half teaspoon for 287 g. For saturated color they suggest a teaspoon per 100 g; I was guessing at what would be a faint tint, but it wasn't enough. For the eye droppered bits, I guess I used about a quarter of the brown I mixed, so that left only 3/8 tsp for the whole batch. I probably should have used twice that.

The green color isn't nearly blue enough, compared to what I was going for. I didn't test it on a coffee filter, just kind of guessed based on what I saw in the cup after it was mixed.

I still think it might spin up really neat, but it probably won't. More on that as it develops. :)

* * * * *
Onto other news...

I finally got my hair cut. It had been two years since the last visit to a professional haircutter. I just got a trim, but it was way overdue!

Today I am meeting the last of the Princeton applicants I agreed to interview. Then I have to write reports on them and send those in. I'll be glad when it's done. It wasn't a hard thing to do, just required scheduling and taking time to do it, and it's a task I'd like to have off my plate.

This evening we have a Superbowl party to go to AND I'm sort of on call for work in case anything should go awry in the application I manage, so Adam's bringing his laptop to the party for me to use if I should get a call. I SOOOOO hope that doesn't happen.

Sofas and tables and chairs, oh my.

We have this sofa, which was a gift to Adam from a friend who was getting rid of it. But it's now a gnarly, dirty, ten- or twelve-year-old second-hand sofa and it needs replacing. Adam likes it so much that he decided he wanted to get another one just like it. Amazingly, Crate & Barrel STILL carries this model. The one we have is ecru but I put my foot down against that color again so he got loden. It is now on order, but this is what it will look like:



I bought a new table & chairs, as a return gift. This table:

(picture deleted)

but not the chairs in the above picture; instead, these chairs (in the honey color):

(picture deleted)

I decided it was a lot of money to spend all in one swell foop so I am splitting the cost of the sofa with Adam instead. Besides there is a new camera I have had my eye on for a really long time and I decided to buy that instead.

Better today

I was pretty bummed out last night about getting back the design I submitted to IK. Even though I'd long known that it wasn't selected, there was something real about getting it back in the mail. The knitted swatches were a little matted, and I imagined the pages of my submission in a big pile under dozens of others, ignored and smushed. When Adam got home he wormed it out of me - he's so excited about the new job he just got an offer for that I didn't want to say anything. Anyway eventually I cried about it and realized it was bothering me a lot more than I'd thought.

Tonight when I came home I felt more energized again to work on various fiber projects. I dyed about 287 grams of roving with specks of green and brown. I used an eyedropper to drop it at random places in the roving. I dropped all the green and a little of the brown and then put the rest of the brown in the water so it would be an off-white color. The drops seem to have spread out in the wool once it was in the water, which was my expectation - I have no idea how it will come out, but I was aiming at something I saw online. It's cooling in the pot now. I also put the knitted bag in the washer to felt, the one I made from the first yarn I spun that I subsequently dyed blackberry-colored. It's washing away now and felting nicely. And I also sat down to continue spinning the brown roving that I dyed to match the bonus roving I got a couple weeks ago, some of which I plied in with the pinks. There's a lot more of the brown, and I am not sure what I want to ply it with, but I am almost done spinning it and I'll put it aside until I find whatever I think it'll go with. I'm now spinning finely enough that I might be able to do a 2-ply fingering weight yarn.

And finally, I picked back up the lace shawl project that I got to maybe 5" x 5" x 8" triangle and then frogged. It was pretty, and going well, but I dropped some stitches and I couldn't get it picked back up because it's too hard to figure out what goes where with this kind of lace. I finally got it back about to that same point: