12.31.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:05 pm by wendy
In no order, no precedence, hopefully a better completion rate than last year’s…
- This is the year of the weaving!
In February, I’ll take Margaret’s weaving class for harness looms, but I will finally comb out that lovely Karakul lamb fleece I got from Robin Snyder, spin it, naturally dye it and weave a rug on a navajo loom, using Working with the Wool and Designing with the Wool as a guide. Yes, this resolution is very familiar…
- Get to a San Diego Derby Dolls bout. What say you local knitters? Get some floor space, bring some chairs and knitting, and see what it’s all about? I’ve never been, but I’m curious.
- Drinks at the Top of the Hyatt (kick@ss view of the San Diego skyline and bay) with Nick.
- This will be the year I customise ZenCart, so I can see and my customers can see what I’ve got in at a glance, and hopefully, easier to update and maintain than my current tables based pages, and people can find things more easily, choose their own shipping methods and costs.
- Start running and climbing again.
- Have dinner with my grandmother and mother and Nick here at the house, trying new recipes or just enjoying old favorites, at least once a month.
- Finally gather, create and post web pages for all our wonderful local San Diego fiber resources, as I have a notebook bulging with wads of scribbled notes.
- Gather up all UFOs, and either rip ‘em or finish ‘em. Any UFOs from this year which are still UFOs next year, should be ripped and the yarn given to someone else who will actually use it.
- Do not lose any more Spanish! Learn French.
- (another one from another year [for 2005]) Write more cards and letters, I have a huge stash of stationary to bust.
- Always remember how blessed I am. How loved I am, how much I love my beautiful family, and how lucky we are we all found each other.
¡Féliz año nuevo a todos!
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12.29.06
Posted in Uncategorized, entertainment, stupefied at 2:33 am by wendy
I’m so dependent on bloglines now, it seems that if you don’t have an rss feed, I won’t remember to read you (I don’t use my own sidebar! horrors!) even if I always love what you have to say. Once upon a time, this comment might have been addressed to Terri. But now she has a real blog! Yay for not having a fake blog any more! ;p
Anyway, there are definitely blogs I check as soon as I see they’ve updated, Heidi’s, Lauren’s, Nancy’s, Amys, Lori’s, Crissy’s, Melissa’s, Cari and the Amazing Thumper’s, LoriO’s, Cecilia’s, Jen/La’s, Jessica’s, Susan’s (who unfortunately has been lost from blogland lately to real work and pampered chefdom, Ande’s, the aforementioned Terri’s, Hilari’s, Mary-Kay’s, Minou’s, Brooke’s, Stephanie’s, Allison’s, Eunny’s, Kirsten’s, Felicia’s, Andrea’s (beautiful photos, beautiful hardwon Ben), Monica’s, June’s, Iris’s, Vera’s, Paula’s, Mandy’s, and MJ’s.
And then there are the ones I see and skip until they are the dregs of boredom and realise…oh yeah! That’s why I added this!
For example, the “five hour erection” of BLDBLOG and Mimi Smartypants with her guard llamas of the underpants drawer (defends against underpants gnomes!) Why do I forget how interesting I find these blogs?
And the sadistic perverseness of Girls Are Pretty!
Updated to add: And why do I forget Cara at January One?
I love all her header images and the random surprise, they’re always new to me. And such great works, not just knitting.
What’s the point of this post? I don’t know!
I’m gathering up UFOs for a goals post, skeining up yarns, and savoring every second with the Pomona/Angelina.
BTW, I guess our dog beach post was somehow marked “private” before. I don’t know how that happened, and if that means you all couldn’t see it before, or just couldn’t comment, but in case you couldn’t see it–check out Tahoe’s impossible floppiness in the frisbee catch pic. It’s a crazy pic that Nick took.
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12.25.06
Posted in Tutorials, socks, stupefied at 12:02 am by wendy
Wait, wrong holiday?
The “benefit” of sharing our house with wee four legged savages is the occasional surreal treat of stepping on an eyeball in the fog of a groggy morn. It was startling realistic at 0530 in the morning peeking from between my toes.
I believe it came from one of the many mangled stuffed toys around here. If I find the poor thing, I’ll make it an eyepatch.
No, probably not.
On a cute, not creepy note:
A wee short row toe, which became quite shortly thereafter
A ridiculous pair of baby socks in one of my tidepool colorways, with a ruffle like a sea anenome.
They look very goofy and very Dr. Suessish-shaped, because of the ribbing pulling it in at the arch and ankles–I wanted them to be unkickoffable. The sole of the foot looks like a peanut because of this, with the short row toe and the short row heel and the ribbing in between.
I used some store bought baby socks as a sizing guide, the feet measure 4 inches long, with a circumference of 3.5 inches, although the ribbing flexes them out to wider.
I used 22 grams of sportweight yarn (Louet Gems Opal, 1,024 yds/lb). About 50 yards of yarn if my math is right…so definitely something to eat up the leftovers…
So, it’s not so much a pattern as a recipe, if you’d like it here’s the pdf. The short row toe hoopla takes up most of the space, but don’t let that turn you off a short row toe. Seriously: favorite.sock.method.ever.
I also made the short row toe thing a pdf so it would be printable without all the other crud of my blog on it. It is here.
BTW–this post was composed and posted using a plug-in I was twigged to by KnitSteph. The editor is awesome and I can set my categories from here. Freaking cool. Go Mozilla!
Merry Christmas & Happy Monday!
powered by performancing firefox
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12.20.06
Posted in entertainment at 12:24 am by wendy
(that’s supposed to be a karate sound, not a redneck mating call)
I have more merino/tencel on the s17, this time in an icey blue colorway but not terribly interesting, so I’m skipping Wheel Wednesday.
This youtube video made me laugh though, so I thought I’d share.
It reminds me of the movie-comedy-classic schtick of an opponent doing incredibly complicated martial arts setup, and the hero, of course, taking him out with one absurdly simple-ain’t-got-no-time-for-this blow, like a kick to the groin or a bullet.
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12.19.06
Posted in Tutorial Tuesday, spinning at 2:09 am by wendy
How to turn this:
into this:
I’ve wanted to do a tailspun yarn for a long time.
I have so many little packets of mohair locks, a whole bunch of yearling Lincoln locks, in so many pretty colors, just waiting to be tailspun yarn (or a a light airy and soft bouclé) but I was intimidated, and now of course, I can’t think why.
Tailspun yarn is a yarn that has whole locks of wool hanging off a core, like a big ol’ eyelash yarn.
A lock of wool has a butt end and a tip, the butt being the cut end or skin side of the lock, and the tip being the sproingy curly tapered bit.
You can do tailspinning using just the locks themselves, by just drafting them a bit, then catching the next butt end up and letting the twist run up to it, then another butt end, always keeping the twist one butt end behind and leaving the locks hanging out…but I used the corespinning method.
Corespinning is just using one yarn as a core and wrapping another yarn around it.
By holding the second yarn at an angle (angle depends on desired effect) to wrap around the core yarn you can get a beehive/coil yarn look, and by holding a fiber at an angle (roughly 90 degrees) and using the grabbing action of the core yarn being spun as resistance to draft back on, you get a really fluffy soft looking yarn with a strong solid core.
Tailspinning creates a really unique looking yarn, maybe not terribly practical for knitting (you can keep the curls to the front of the work by purling on the right side) but I really dig it, and it looks really cool in weaving too.
It is pretty labor intensive though–you have to flick open the lock ends and treadle rather slowly. In the 25 minutes I was messing around with it and trying to film a tutorial, I only ended up with 6 yards (1.5 oz).
For a similar effect with less work for knitting, look at the cuffs Brooke made at SOAR.
You can use an overspun single or a plied yarn, the important thing is to execute the tailspinning by spinning the wheel/spindle in the opposite direction of the last direction that the core yarn was last spun (so if you are using a plied yarn, odds are you’ll tailspin clockwise, if you’re using an overspun single, odds are you’ll be spinning counterclockwise).
So, you hold the core yarn right out in front of you, as you might with any other drafting or plying, but in another hand you lay the butt end of the lock on top of the core as you treadle and the twist travels along the core and grabs the lock (use a flicker, or slicker brush from a pet store, or a regular hair/tick/flea comb to open the butt end of the lock into a fanning of fiber and it makes it grab incredibly easily) and you move onto the next lock. You can slide the locks up together along the core to pack them densely or you can space them loosely, with separations of wrapped soft fluff.
The more tension, the tighter you tug or wrap the locks, the less soft the resulting yarn will be.
I don’t have pictures in progress of the spinning because I made video, but it is taking forever to upload. I will embed them and you’ll have a choice between Pomona-packed and Pomona free Quicktime video that you can download to your video ipod (Hi Mary-Kay!) if you want to see it in action.
Tailspinning quicktime video:
I’ve removed it from being embedded, I guess it’s so huge it just doesn’t want to load.
Over a year later, I found a way to upload it to youtube (it was too big before) sou you can now find the not so great tutorial video right here.
If I can do it, you can do it. ;p
The hardest thing might be letting go of expectations of exactly how it should look and just enjoy the serendipity of the way the locks wrap the yarn.
Diane Varney (does anyone know if this is the same Diane Varney?) describes this as Curly Locks in her Spinning Designer Yarns. She says that an advantage is that you can use a perfectly hideous commercial yarn, as you’ll be covering it up, but I don’t have any hideous yarn in my stash anymore.
I don’t think.
I did have a beautiully dyed yarn from Siri, with colors that seemed meant to be mated with the locks I’d dyed way back when. Just in case the core peeked through after all, and plus I like having all parts be pretty, even if they aren’t to be seen. Kind of like wearing pretty panties.
This is my view when I started writing this post:
Everyone on the couch!Pomona/Angelina was in a silly mood earlier; she kept stealing wads of locks and I kept having to go retrieve them before they were too thoroughly killed and subdued. But could I be mad?Not with the silly girl with such a face, no.
Wait, are you sure you’re not mad at me?
A quick note about the locks–they’re from a yearling Lincoln fleece I bought from Lorraine Powell of Powell Sheep Co (
PO Box 183 - Ramona, CA 92065 760/789-1758, she’s also an Ashford Dealer). in Ramona.
It’s a great fleece, well skirted and relatively clean, with great luster and actually quite soft.
Updated: I meant to say something about spinning this on a wheel.
My orifice for my Victoria was way to small for this, and my s17 has hooks which would snag it.
I used the Jumbo head on my Lendrum and still had to feed the yarn manually onto the bobbin.
If you have a Country Spinner, this type of yarn would probably be no problem for doing a big ol’ skein on a wheel…but otherwise, this might actually be most easily done on a spindle…
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12.18.06
Posted in Fiber Friday, Shop Updates, Victoria, Wheel Wednesday, dogs, shameless marketing monday, spinning, travel at 1:13 am by wendy
Keeping the catchup short and sweet (scroll down for dog stuff and whatnot):
Wheel Wound Wednesday!
The plastic cup on the footman that goes over the bearing on the wheel has flanges of a sort so it can pop over the bearing and then be held tight by a ring. The
instructions talk about removing the cup from the bearing with a twisting motion, so I was holding it with the sides of my thumb and index finger instead of my fingertips and it pinched a bit of skin out.It didn’t hurt, but it surprised me, as I was talking to someone at the time. I hate bleeding in public.I go to the spinning group straight from work, so my hands and nails are generally a mess from being washed a zillion times. So, um, sorry about all the hangnailies, hope it doesn’t offend anyone’s delicate sensibilities. I keep my nails really short, because, well just trust me, it’s better that way.
Fiber Friday
Remember the 80s merino/tencel 50/50 blend I showed on the wheel a while back?
I finally got around to taking a picture of the two ply made from it:
This spins up like buttah, so it’s easy to make a low twist soft and silky single but I think next time I spin this up, I’ll spin with more twist to I can have a plied yarn with a more extreme angle of twist and more bounce. It’s 172 yards and 2.5 oz, and 10 wpi. Hmmm…a Rosechapeau from Hilari?
I finished spinning the 80s merino singles to make a 3 ply worsted weight, and have plied up four skeins:
There are differences among the skeins, in colors, in singles spun and the plying, although they are less dramatic in person.Two of the skeins have an embarrassing “tag” sticking out, a little section of single which plied back on itself and then went into the plied yarn, like a little quarter inch two ply arm wavin’ howdy.
This comes from me not paying enough attention and letting slack get into a ply and letting the twist run along past it. I didn’t use my ghetto homemade plying card and I really should have.
The Victoria’s lazy kate is not tensioned, so the bobbins spin a little more freely and it makes it easier for that to happen. After the first time I saw that (when skeining up the first bobbin) I stuck a sports bra on the middle post of the lazy kate, and it provided resistance so the lazy kate was tensioned. (Why a sports bra? It was on the floor next to the spinning chair. I’m a slob.) The next bobbin after that, I had cleaned the house and thus the sports bra was nowhere around the spinning chair. I lifted a paper towel from a nearby table and wedged that around the middle post. That worked just fine. Then, one of the dogs must have stolen the napkin to shred as it was nowhere to be found with the fourth skein. No biggie, I thought…nope. Upon skeining, I found another little tag. Dangit.
Hypothetically: you could cut the little tag, but then the ply could work loose and form a loop, or worse an end waving out there like a frayed little piece o’ spinner’s shame. You could knit it just as is, and hide it to the back of the work and hope it doesn’t flex to the front, but really…you should cut the yarn on either side, treating it like a knot in the yarn.
Ugh, I hate ends.
So, here’s the skein breakdown (not interesting to anyone but me, but since I’m always losing these scraps of paper I write stuff down on…) 168 yards/2.4 oz, 176 yards/2.5 oz, 190 yards/2.7 oz, and 230 yards/3.2 oz. So that’s 10.8 oz and 764 yards at 9-11 wraps per inch.
I have two bobbins left, one with .6 oz, and another with 1.9 oz. So, plenty of yarn for another skein, but I have to attempt winding .6 or so of the second bobbin into a separate ball for makin’ the 3ply. Sigh. Dork.
So…I thought I had 14 oz of this stuff…I wonder where the other .7 went? I guess I pulled out more disorganised portions than I realised. I’ll probably find a little bit of it somewhere…oh wait, I remember where the .7 is. A sample two ply I made way back when. Never mind me…talking/thinking/typing aloud.
Anyway, even if I do manage to use all of that leftover 2.5 oz and end up with another 176 yards, that leaves me at 940 yards…cutting it a bit fine, even for a worsted gauge st st V-neck sweater of snug fit for me, I think. Anyway, that’s counting yardage before it’s made. It may end up a manly matching hat, mittens and scarf set. Ooh la la.
I guess the fiber key to this section of the post was 80s merino, straight up and the mixed half and half of tencel. Huh.
So let’s make that the marketing monday blurbo and get that over with eh? Yeah. You can click here to look at prices if you’d like to buy some to spin yourself (please note the new put up amounts including 5 oz! –1 oz to play with for sampling, 4 oz to do a little project with–) but they are undyed. In the new year, after we get back from the month long hiatus, I’ll have dyed fibers for sale.
Have you ever seen how big ten pounds of Kona Superwash is?
My gigantic, unscoured, sportweight superwash lover…So much for “short and sweet” catch up, oy.
Random: so I was just leaving a comment on Elabeth’s blog and I made a cheesy pun. Then I thought, “whorling dervish?” That would be a cute business name! Maybe better than this foreign language name that makes so many people go “leebahlahbah whatnow?”! So google turned up no whorling dervish, and no server responded at whorlingdervish.com…but my host, dreamhost (a host I’ve been very happy with and a good recc from MJ lo so long ago, and they give free hosting to charities, how cool is that?) says it’s taken. Bummer.
My downstairs neighbor asked me if I know how to crochet or knit and if I could teach her and I nearly snorted my brains right out the back of my head. I believe I said something like, “I’m not much of a hooker, but I rock the knitting house.”
Fershizzle, I’m all up on the knizzle.
Anyway, I’m going to try and get together with her sometime this week to spread the knitting virus.
Pomona/Angelina is doing awesome, and proving that her Mommy is a good one and she’s made a lot of progress with her. She’s been coming out for snuggles and hanging out in the living room of her own free will and snoozing on the couch.
Fast asleep:
So freakin’ cute. I love this beautiful girl, but I’m really glad she has a great home and that her mommy has let her visit us.
The boys are doing well at the kennel. When I do a turnout shift, I let them out on the slab together after the shift (they go out with a bigger group together during the shift too) and we play a little. A bunch of dogs got adopted this weekend (Nick and my favorite among them) but not Snuggle and Kilt. Snuggle has an adoption lined up, but he’s had that twice before and they just seem to evaporate. He and Kilt are both so normal, so easy, it’s a bit funny that they’ve been so long at the group. It’s partly a testament to how fantastic all our dogs are, really. Compared to the all breeds rescue work we used to do, there’s a rare few that Nick and I wouldn’t want to have in our home.I had a
dye workshop on Saturday. It was very small since most everyone is caught up in holiday madness, but it went very well, and the students went home with some beautiful handpainted fiber and yarn and some new skills, knowledge, and confidence. The next date is the third Saturday in February, which hopefully will be warm and sunny, because this kitchen is a bit small and while that is sort of the point (you don’t have to have a big honkin’ separate studio! although boy wouldn’t that be awesome) people still need space to paint and work comfortably.
The other night I had the television on and It’s a Wonderful Life started. I’ve never seen it before so I watched it (and marveled at the marketing, the commercials seemed very much geared toward women with catastrophic brain injuries [seriously, the desperate lameness of the yoplait commercial “dating a masseuse -shh!–good” makes me want to punch something. Same with diamond commercials.]) and really liked it…but I turned it off when he started being mean to his family. So I guess I still haven’t seen it. I’ll put it in my Netflix queue.
And WHOA. A few days ago I looked at the prices for going to and from D.F. (Mexico City) from/to San Diego and was irked to find them over a thousand dollars for the both of us, after taxes etc. So when I looked last night and could snag the roundtrip tix all told for $800, I did, although I was worried that this was the start of a drop and they’d go lower and I’d be “d’oh!”ed. I told Nick about this and he said, “Yeah, and now we won’t look at the prices anymore.” We both don’t have much of a stomach for fluctuating values.
But I did look.
And ¡jolín! Wow, I’m glad I bought those tickets, as the price has jumped right back up. The industry is a mystery. Is it exchange rate? Demand? Some sort of ridiculously complicated algorithm?
I am so excited abut this trip. I’m going to teach a beginning spinning class at our local library on the sixth, then -boom!- off on the seventh for 29 days of aventura pura…pues lo que espero. I wish I wasn’t going to miss TNNA, I wish I wasn’t going to miss a month in the “industry’s high season,” but…it’s Mexico. A country I love–I’ve been to more states in Mexico than I have here in the U.S.of A. And Guatemala and Belize. Whee!
If you were a cold sleeper going to a place with lows of 40-50ºF, do you think you’d try to get away with one of those polar fleece sleeping bags (like from L.L. Bean), or go with a real sleeping bag?
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12.12.06
Posted in Tutorial Tuesday, Tutorials, knitting, socks at 12:08 am by wendy
So, one thing I’ve learned lately is doing a short row heel, without holes. It started of course with Wendy’s knitty.com toes tutorial. But I guess I just didn’t get it, I kept making a holey toe. After ripping and reknitting and ripping and reknitting, I figured it out and thought I’d share it. Because I know I’m not alone in this.
But of course, Google shows me a slew of results that looks like they might have helped me out. But nobody did it the way I did it, right? Hermmm….Nope. She does. Well, sort of. Not exactly. But her pictures are excellent and her method works for her.
But I took pictures, and wrote down directions, and made the world’s cruddiest tutorial video (dog interrupted) so dang it! I wanna do it. But the bottom line is: pick up and knit the wraps from the purl direction, from the front of the stitch, from right to left, however you’d like to phrase it, and purl the wraps that same way…you won’t get holes, and while my sides don’t look exactly the same on both sides, they look close enough and no holes, so I’m happy.
Here’s the long version though:
Step 1:
With waste yarn and a crochet hook, chain several more stitches than half the total number you’ll be using in a round for your sock.
Meaning, say I want to knit a sock that’s 42 stitches around. So I chain 21 stitches (half of 42 for those math wizards out there. Also, it’s easier if this “half of total” number is divisible by three, you’ll see why in bit) plus three, four, five more stitches, for no more reason than insurance that I have all the little back loops I want and then some to choose from.
What do I mean by back loops? These are back loops:
The same view without my awful Photoshop interference:
The other side, the smooth side looks like this:
(If all this is buggin’ your eyes out, you can always cast on stitches with a contrast yarn, knit a row, then change to the yarn you really want to use, knit across and go to
step 3, where you’ll purl across that row and then begin
step 4.)
Step 2:
Pick up and knit those back loops, picking up and knitting half as many as the total stitches in the sock round as thou heart desires. (For our example, 21.)(Pick up and knit just means you insert your needle into a back loop, wrapped your yarn around the needle in a knitwise [clockwise, left to right] direction, then moved on and repeated the process with the next back loops in just the same way.)
Okely-dokely?So, after you’ve picked up and knit through the back loops, you’ll see something like this:
When you turn it around, it’ll look something like this:
Step 3:
At this point, pick up a second double point needle and purl across that row of picked up stitches. And thusly, the short row madness begins.
Step 4:
For this example, we have 21 stitches.
So, this next step, on the knit side, is to knit across 20 stitches. (If you are using a different number, say, 36, than make this number less one, as in 35)
Bring your yarn between the needles to the front, as if you were going to purl the next stitch.
Slip the next stitch purlwise. (from the front, from the purl direction, from right to left, however you prefer to phrase it.)
Turn your work, slip the just slipped stitch (so with all this slipping, the stitch is never twisted, the orientation/directions of the legs of the stitch does not change) from left to right needle, and move the yarn so the yarn is now held in front of the work. You have now wrapped the stitch and are ready to purl 19 stitches across the row, or rather, stopping with just one stitch left on the left hand needle.
Step 5:
Having purled across the row to the stitch before the last slipped and wrapped stitch, bring yarn from the front of the work to the back, as if you were going to knit the next stitch. Instead, slip it purlwise. Turn the work, and slip the just slipped stitch back to the right needle and bring the yarn from the front to the back, wrapping the slipped stitch.
Knit across to one stitch before the last slipped & wrapped stitch (18 sts for our example) and repeat the yarn movement, slipping and wrapping as outlined in Step 4.
Repeat steps 4 & 5, each time wrapping the stitch before the last wrapped stitch, (wrapping is the word to concisely describe that moving the yarn, slipping & yarn moving process) and you will notice a lovely wedge forming, with the wraps around the base of the slipped stitches on the needle:
Repeat these steps 4&5 until two-thirds of the original stitch number have been slipped and wrapped, that is to say, one third on each side. For this example, that means 7 slipped and wrapped stitches on each side, with 7 perfectly normal, perfectly innocent looking stitches in the middle. If your number is 36, it will mean 12 slipped and wrapped stitches on each side and 12 in the middle.
You will have the same number of slipped and wrapped stitches on the right and left of your sexy stockinette toe wedge and be ready to knit on the right side.
YOU WILL. I COMMAND THIS FOR THE SAKE OF THIS TUTORIAL. There are pictures below these steps of working double wrapped stitches, but for the sake of seeing direction clarification, you might find them helpful.)
Knit across to slipped and wrapped stitch. With yarn held in back, insert needle tip from purl direction, first through the stitch on needle then (still from purl direction) into the wrap laying down around the base of that stitch. Knit these two together as one stitch. Bring yarn to front, slip the next stitch purlwise, and turn the work (the just slipped stitch now has two wraps). Bring yarn to front and slip the just slipped stitch from the left to right needle.
Purl across the work. The first wrapped stitch you come to, insert your needle tip from the purl direction into the stitch on the needle, then down into the wrap, again from the purl direction, just like Step 6 but this time your yarn is held in front. Purl the wrap and the slipped stitch together as one.
Bring yarn to back of work, slip next stitch, and turn work.
Slip just slipped stitch to right needle and bring the yarn to the back in preparation for knitting across the row to next wrapped (now double wrapped) stitch.
Knit across row to double wrapped slipped stitch.
To avoid holes, here’s how I pick up the double wrapped slipped stitches:
I pick up that slipped stitch which is on the needle, and then I insert my right needle tip from the purl direction into the wraps laying around its base and spear them with the left hand needle to knit them all three together through the front:
After knitting the two wraps and slipped stitch together through the front, or from the purl direction, bring the yarn to the front of the work, slip the next stitch, turn the work.
Step 9:
(on purl side) Bring the yarn to the front, slip the just slipped stitch, and purl across to the double wrapped stitch. Insert needle tip from right to left/from purl direction/through front of all three stitches and purl all three together.
This picture has a single wrap being lifted to be purled with the slipped stitch, instead of two wraps, but it is essentially the same ol’ thang:
Bring yarn to rear of work, slip next stitch, turn work.
Repeat steps 8 & 9 until all stitches have been worked.
Now you should have a really cool toe cup in your hands, with half of your total desired sock stitches on a needle, and the other half held at bay by your provisional cast on.
Unzip the the crochet cast on or otherwise undo your temporary cast on to get to those active loops, knitting across them, and placing a marker to indicate the beginning/end of the round, joining them to their long lost brethren on the other needle(s).
If you have a tendency toward hole-iness in these matters, you may wish to m1 or increase by knitting in the front and back of a stitch or otherwise create a stitch at each side between the two halves and knit the extra stitch together with another stitch from the toe halves.
From there on you’re on you’re own.
You can go wild with stockinette stitch and then when you are two inches shy (this number depends on the gauge you are knitting at, measure the depth of your own toe cap and plug that number in where the “two inches” was) of the length you want the foot of your sock to be and just repeat the short row toe process for your heel.
Then you can do stockinette stitch up to where you’d like to start the ribbing. Dead easy mindless knitting sock, and there should be no running out of yarn if you make sure you don’t use more than half of what you have available.
I hope this helps someone save some time, somewhere. If you’ve spotted mistakes, give me a shout so I can fix it/them, por favor.
Also, if anyone can reccommend a text editor for blogging–I love almost everything about Wordpress except for this crappy text editor. Rich text editor keeps deleting my spaces and paragraph breaks, and it seems like every time I fix something, something else will pop up that I didn’t even put in. And when I go to fix that, previous formatting gets lost. I use the rich text editor and tweak it in the html screen, and between the two…I’m seriously ******.
I just wasted a ton of time deleting strong tags. And I dread to hit the update button because I know it’s just going to get worse. The formatting of this entry is ridiculous and barely readable. I’m sorry. And why are strong tags in a post affecting my sidebar?
I give up on this for tonight. Maybe I’ll rewrite it in blogger and repost it. This has just become a farce, as I’ve spent more time trying to fix the formatting and having it get worse every time than I did in writing the post, and I have to get up at 5.30am to work, so that’s it. Ya basta.
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12.11.06
Posted in dogs, shameless marketing monday at 12:44 am by wendy
Earthues is a line of natural dye supplies and natural dye extracts of excellent quality, and I’m very excited to have some in stock to sell. Earthues is based in Seattle and was founded by Michelle Wipplinger, a master dyer who has traveled the world learning and teaching in the natural dye field.
I’m really having fun with the first part of the shop’s order, which includes COLORS kits.
The COLORS kit is made up of 11 Earthues natural dye extracts, 3 indigo agents, 2 fixatives (mordants) and scour, enough fun stuff for dyeing up about 60 pounds of fibers. I have three in the shop available for purchase at $150 with free shipping.
I’ve been playing with one of my own and mordanted protein fibers–superwash sock yarn, wool/silk yarn, mohair/silk yarn, cultivated silk yarn, finn wool fiber and superwash wool fiber and dyed with cochineal and logwood purple extract, a lovely purple violet variegation.
I’ve done silk, wool, wilk/wool blend, linen and superwash yarns in indigo dips and plan to overdye for some variegated green and blues, my favorites. Cochineal, with a very strong indigo dip:
$150 might seem like a hell of a lot of money to spend on dyeing, but pound for pound it’s about as good a deal as acid dyes/fiber reactive dyes.A half ounce of acid dyes/fiber reactive dye dyes two pounds to a medium depth of shade, and a half ounce goes for about $4.50-$8.00 (depends on whether you’re going for
Dharma’s store brand or name brand Lanaset/Sabraset/Procion MX) so that’s $135-240 to dye the same amount with acid dyes, not including the peripherals like gloves, masks, ph strips, soda ash & an acid like vinegar or citric acid. And shipping. The peripherals and instructions are included in the kit, so I think it’s actually a pretty good way to break into natural dyeing, and not as expensive as one might think. Nor as difficult. The extracts are excellent, very concentrated and easy to use. The instructions are fairly simple, whether you’re an experienced dyer or not. I will put up tutorials soon to demonstrate the processes, I promise and results.
Anyway, here’s the fun stuff the kit contains (all ingredients are extracts, in powdered or liquid form):
- cochineal extract (dactylopus coccus) ½ounce
- quebracho red (aspidosperma quebracho, Quebrachea lorentzwii) 2 ounces
- logwood grey (haematoxylon campechianum) 2 ounces
- fustic (chlorophora tinctoria) 2 ounces
- chestnut (costanea sativa) 1 ounce
- indigo (indigofera tinctoria) 2 ounces
- madder extract (rubia cordifolia/tinctorium) blend 1 ounces
- logwood purple (haematoxylon campechianum) 2 ounces
- osage orange (maclura pomifera) 2 ounces
- pomegranate (punica granatum) 2 ounces
- cutch (acacia catechu) 2 ounces
- iron (ferous sulfate) 2 ounes
- soda ash (sodium carbonate) 2 ounces
- scour, washing agent for cellulose 2 ounces
- aluminum sulfate (mordant for protein fibers) 16 ounces
- aluminum acetate (mordant for cellulose fibers) 8 ounces
- reducing agent for indigo (thiourea dioxide) 2 ounces
- Instruction book
- mask and gloves
- Ph strips
I think that’s about it, all packed in a box that seems too small to fit it all.
Quite clever packaging, really.Pomonabunny has returned! (and we are trying to remember to call her Angelina, her “new” name)
Man alive, I almost forgot how beautiful she is. But now she’s all snuggled up in our bed and it’s like she never left.I’ll try not to be such a damp, pathetic snivelly mess when her mommy comes back for her, this time.
The boys have been settled back into the GAC kennel. I called, worried, and was told that they were doing just fine, and Snuggle was “really hyper.” Yep, that’s our boy.
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12.10.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:27 am by wendy
Hie thee on over to Pixie Sticks and congratulate them on a very hard earned adorable FO!
Go to her main page and scroll down to see how full to busting a momma can get, oh my.
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