Birthday knitting and dye question

This year I am giving myself a birthday gift. A Pie Are Square shawl from Knitting Around by Elizabeth Zimmermann. And since I am Always Cold, I am doing it in Moss Heather Alpaca Cloud from Knitpicks. And for that extra luxury and warmth, I am double stranding it. Even though my birthday is only weeks away, I will be knitting it for a long time and in my favorite color. Just the joy of that soft yarn running through my hands for some time to come is a great gift indeed. I feel so spoiled.

In addition, since there are always multiple projects going on here, we have some Steeler socks for a little extra support for the Black and Gold. I am woefully low in Steeler footwear, but alas, these are for fiberguy. Two mosaics with some strange bits between in a handspun sockweight superwash Merino from the Black Lamb. Very thick. My own Steeler socks come next and I am spinning the gold right now.

My current socks are green and just noodling around with a travelling rib. We dyed this last spring.

And last, for all you dyers out there, a conundrum. I have this color, which I don’t like.

It is DK weight, cabled wool yarn. I would love to hear from anyone, or everyone, about how to overdye this. I mean, what color to use. I know I can go navy, or black. But any other colors you suggest could really help me. I have a couple of pounds of it for a sweater and I just don’t think I can live through the experience in a color I hate, even with a yarn I love. I favor greens but this has a serious teal going on. Anyone ever overdye this color before? As it is winter and I dye outside, I really don’t want to be out there freezing doing dye sampling, so I am trying to save some steps and ask for help. For once.

Is Pattern just a Tool?

Is pattern just a tool, a delivery system tool? A tool to deliver color.

For me, it is the colors in Fair Isle sweaters that ring my bell. When I first noticed them, just like many, it was the eye-opening Starmore. I knew I was in trouble as I crossed the threshold [more ways than one] at the Tomato Factory in Lambertville, NJ. While selecting different colors for a pattern and I got the first three easy. Then I was up to 6 with no problem. But when I was up to my 19th color, I was a little flummoxed. Or do I mean entranced? The blends, oh, those blends….

So here I am, stuck in the back yard on my carder. I am fighting those raindrops over the last few days and I am trying to finish the orange blend. For the last set, I am hoping I have enough left over for an Alpaca Legs mix. I have some light cadmium red that would go great. Looks like matching socks to me.


Something about this mix is just taking forever to spin. It is so light. I spin and spin and spin and only have 3 bobbins. Plying takes a long time too. I get a huge bobbin of 3 ply sport – fingering weight yarn. All excited I weight several batches. How can all that yarn weigh just 5 oz? The merino is very light and spongy but tightly plied. Now I will have to pull out my yardage counter and see just how big this is.


Gee, the merino has been fun, even if it is a sinkhole of time. Gotta be just me, I think. Logy with the heat and humidity? Playing with 4-way blends reminds me of the nights when I used to sit down with some Jamieson & Smith heathers and try to figure the percentage by taking apart a 3 in piece of yarn. All could be lost with a quick pass of a cat’s tail. I was mesmerized by the colors and just wanted to get a blend that was similar. I hoped for the relative percentage and base colors. I didn’t chart them all, but I do have about 20 of them. Sometimes, in carding the leftover superwash, I unwittingly match a color on my color card that I have admired. I would have to dig in the garage to come up with my list of all of them now, but I do have a couple that I use regularly. Do you all have a favorite Shetland color blend? I mean can you pick one, just one on the charts?

Mind you, all this work, this hair-brained scheme, was due to my love of the yarn. So when I try to make a blend like it now, it is as an homage more than an exact copy. Kind of like listening to a song you used to listen to in your youth. A remembrance, a quote to a past joy. I love making my own blends too. You are looking at one now.

Which brings us right back to pattern as a delivery tool for color. Pattern soothes our eyes and brain. Fine pattern, like the dots on your TV can deliver data, images, movement. But on sweater scale, is pattern a delivery system for the joyful Shetland colors. Wasn’t your enchantment of Fair Isle sweaters due to the soft and gentle blending of a bazillion shades so close you have to really search for the transition? Would you like the sweaters as much if they were bright primary colors? Or rich and complex blends of two, three, four, five, maybe more colors.

So many places for your eyes to rest.

Get some colors at Elemental Affects.

Return of the Giant Rolags

Fiber preparation, more so than spinning, is frequently done in a vacuum. Since we work by ourselves, odd habits can develop unchecked that you don’t even recognize until you do them in a group setting and get those curious looks from your fellow workers.

See how the firm cardboard tube helps me to clean almost all the fiber from the drum?

Case in point: When drawing off your batts, do you a) lay them flat and pull into strips, b) lay them flat and pull across to make rolags, c) make giant rolags ro d)Batts? I only use prepared fiber.

Be honest here, I am counting.

The next question is DOES IT MATTER? Does the final yarn differ with the three methods and is one somehow wrong. Remember that any prep coming from a carder is essentially woolen, not worsted. Are there differing degrees of woolen-ness?

I am of the giant rolag camp, but I have never seen anyone else do this. How crazy am I, or is it lazy? My yarn is nice and even and I like it so I will probably continue with this method. I do think that fiber might have something to do with your choice, particularly fiber length. But I am not sure why I think that, perhaps it is just an instinct.

I am using superwash merino for this, incredibly clean and easy to card even on my Mark V. The fiber is already prepared so I am just color blending for this batch. Vote below and tell me what you think.

Color is also a strange thing. I got several pounds of a rather ugly 50/50 mix of navy and medium orange. The bag just sat there taunting me. I couldn’t picture what to blend it with to make this nasty mix nice. Sample time. I pulled out my trusty box of mixables and tried a few. I mixed it with pale yellow & green (fiberguy’s choice), red and Steeler yellow (my choice). The final ratio was 1 hot red, 2 Steeler Yellow, 8 of the nasty 50/50 mix. Now I have bucketloads of this wonderful orange heather. Yummy.

Of course, that worked so well that I am wondering what other crappy mix of colors did I buy and what can I mix them with. No good blend goes unpunished.

Knitting for Therapy

That’s *FOR* therapy, not *AS* therapy. Know anyone with arthritis in the feet? Or just unusually cold feet. As knitters we can help that. As spinners we can really help.

This all started as a discussion with Judith McKenzie about Angora and its properties. She mentioned that it was used by hospitals in blankets for therapy. I investigated this and found she was correct, of course. But beside angora, what can we use for socks that will help? After some experiments, this is what I tried:

For non-spinners, try Knit Picks Andean Silk twist. With 55% Super Fine Alpaca, 23% Silk, 22% Merino Wool, it is warm and reflects heat a great deal. At $1.99/ball it's a great bargain (3balls minimum per pair). You must knit in some structure to hold them up for all that slinky goodness. I added ribbing starting mid-foot up to leave room for swollen tootsies. Knit on #3’s and using my standard 52 stitches (think deck of cards), afterthought heel with white woolly nylon. At the moment, this is so soft and warm that it is in the running for one of the top 3 socks I have ever made.


For spinners, try blends. I used alpaca leg wool mixed with a crappy but crimpy and felty brown unknown wool. Alpaca for softness and felty wool to hold slippery ends in a bit. My foot area is made from 2 plys of recycled cashmere (each two ply), 1 ply woolly nylon, 1 ply crappy brown. That makes it cling and reflect heat. It gives me a chance to use recycled cashmere leftovers in a machine washable sock. The alpaca legs just fuzz right out when washed – yummy and soft.

During the stormy times when joints move poorly, I try to stick to simple patterns for ease and distraction. At the end of the day, I have a new hat. (original pattern photo - Magknits Fake Isle).


So that got me thinking about favorite socks. What is YOUR favorite pair of socks ever? They can be handknit, handspun or store bought. Now, the hard part; tell me WHY it is your favorite. I think I would have to say my fav is a pair that has sat in my drawer for at least nine years. I loved them so much, I let them take up space just so I can remake them someday. They were combed grey Jacob and multicolor Kid Mohair spun into a 3-ply sport. Sadly, they shrunk more than I planned and blew out the heel/leg. I will honor their existence by remaking them.

Hot sauce is good for arthritis too. Fiery foods booty (and today's pretty apple).

Blendalong tangent & What's Wrong with My Sock?

Damn it all to hell. I did a swatch like a good girl. I cast on and my ribbing seemed to make a tiny little circle. I searched the web extensively. Artyarns Supermerino – lovely soft yarn. Socks. Simple equation, right? One of my favorites was Grumperina’s Paula socks. She cast on 44 stitches on size 3. I used a 3 also, but went up to 56 stitches to account for fiberguy’s freakishly large instep. I even planned to pick up as many stitches as I could around the afterthought heel for more room, right? I get about 4 inches down the leg and think this is really loose fabric for a sock. Everyone else’s Supermerino seems thicker. Iris Schrier was doing Modular knitting on Knitty Gritty today and she used it. It looked thick on her size 8 needles. Mine looked thin on my 3’s. And Hell’s Bells, it was too small. Way too small. What could I be doing that is so far off? Even in Knitty, the Thuja socks call for 44 stitches on size 6 needles. Her gauge is 5.5 stitches/inch 9 rows/inch in stockinette stitch; mine was 6 stitches/inch, 8 rows/in in stockinette. And though mine was tighter, it still felt so loose that I could put my finger through it. I weighed the skein and it was correct. What the heck am I doing WRONG???


To fix it, I ripped back to above the heel and laddered to make 2x2 ribbing for the stretch. I will increase a few for the instep and take away later. I tried not to growl at the cat.

I had more success yesterday. My mosaic sock is done and I start sock two tomorrow. Notice the arch ribbing to increase fit? I used a new sock blocker that fiberguy is making for me and it gave me a lovely round toe. It wasn’t finished yet, so I had to put a plastic bag over it to block the sock – no one is anxious here…



And the ply blend samples are done and I am just trying to get a better photo of them. The colors are very hard for me to capture and I may ask you all for help with this bit later. A few interesting things have come out of the ply blends so far. Please note in the samples below that one forms little diamond shapes and the other forms a more straight grid. I have seen this phenomenon before while weaving, but now I see what causes it. If I used a 4-ply of different colors, a barber pole yarn, I got diamonds. If I used two 2-ply strands, I got straight lines. Check out the threads coming off the samples to see this. Isn’t that interesting?



The two 2-ply samples were all a bit thicker, not wider, but puffier.

Lastly, I will show you my ply box that my good friend Harvey made me years ago. It was based on a design in Spin•Off and I use it all the time. While sampling for the ply blends, at one time I had 16 bobbins going. This was not necessary, as I saw later. In the next set, which I started today, I'm down to a normal set of bobbins and the ply box goes back to sleep.

Handspun vs. Store-bought and yarn love

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I love yarn, all yarn. I had occasion to do some serious stash digging today and made it down to the 1999 layer of fleece. I put a treasured shetland away and today, just because it had aged so nicely, it came to the forefront and gets to be spun. On the way down, I did make it through bins and bins of lovely handspun yarn. I was surprised and delighted that there was only one small ball in that stack of bins that was unknown to me. I remembered all the rest of the homespun. I am not sure I could say that on store bought yarn. It told me that, though I can't tell you what I had for lunch yesterday, I have an unusual memory for handspun yarns in my stash.

I love to spin. I spin without a project in mind regularly. I spin for the joy of feeling those fibers run through my fingers. I make fat yarn, skinny lace yarn, boucle, all types of yarn. This week I continue spinning the black superwash merino in a sock yarn. That means, to me, that I am spinning it with quite a bit of twist to get a yarn that will wear well. It is in a fingering or light dk weight in a 3 ply. Since it is more black yarns like I posted here several times this month, I will spare you another photo.

But back to yarn. Handspun always gets storage preference in the stash. It lives in the best places. I store skeins and not balls usually. It is well washed and labeled. There are mountains of it. While I have several piles of purchased yarn around the living room and kitchen, I find, upon digging in the stash, that this is due to storage issues, more than yarn love.

I have some new alpaca wool mix that is for a very special sweater. But I have this tiny box of alpaca merino handspun mix that is a treasured ball just to pat and enjoy. The difference is that the sweater's yarn is out because I am hoping it comes up soon on the cast-on list. The alpaca mix handspun ball is out just for the sheer joy of having made it and just to look at it. Organized joyful clutter? With the purchased alpaca mix, it is in my colors - orange and green with a black accent. The handspun is clearly not - shades of pink. But still, it is very soft and fuzzy and nice. Hmmm. And I will love the finished sweater in the purchased yarn.

Perhaps that is it. I will like the product of the purchased yarn. I delight in the joy of the handspun ball. It doesn't even have any friends yet, but it will. I won't start thinking about a project for this yarn for several years, most likely. I have to enjoy it now.

On a completely different topic, I have a special sock project done. My big brother has always been very special in my life. He always looked out for me AND included me. How do you show someone how much you care? I can't answer that, but I can say that I made socks that had good feelings in every stitch. I just love how these socks fit and feel. And don't you just love the cables? You have seen them before here, they might be my favorite sock right now.

Yarn: Cascade Ecological wool + white woolly nylon

Needles: size 6 dp

Pattern: Handknit Holidays' Log Cabin Socks by Anne Woodbury (you can find several kal's for this). Pattern as written except for longer ribbing.

Noodling around with superwash

Boy, I just love superwash merino. I forgot how soft it can be. I have been digging into my new stash of it, and picking out a handful of this and a handful of that. It is all from The Black Lamb and you will be hearing Laurie's name a lot around here. Her stuff is great.
I haven't been carding it, just finger fluffing. I have carded the black and yellow, but I am still spinning. This stuff just goes on forever.

Now the leftovers are interesting too. You know when you are plying how you have just a tad left on the bobbin and perhaps a couple of yards left on another bobbin? Or on the carders, how you didn't really clean them fully and pile on another color? The little bits of mixed colors were very fetching and I had to get them on needles right away. So I am trying my version of a sideways sock - made up as I go along - striped periodically with the black. Inspiration comes from Magknits Bakerloo obviously, but I just looked at the photos and was off and running. I wish it were daylight so I could show these colors better, it is just so interesting. I switched to straight needles and it is just growing so fast. My preference is for tall socks and I could plan color changes if I wished. But I think I will just let this one go and see where the colors take me.


And today's question - how many blogs do you read on a regular basis? I would be embarrassed to show my full blogroll, as it is quite long. How about yours?

Gates of delirium

Yes, folks, I am back! Fever is a bad, bad thing. I did manage to knit and spin a bit finally, but I am weak and shaky still. The sock yarn is all drying now and will show up another day, but this is some silk, Rambo and yak down. The mousing mitts were for my DH but they ended up being a little loose. We plan to overdye them a nice rich wine color. So what you see below just got all ripped out and is being reknit. I want them perfect before dyeing. I want some serious blooming of the yak in the dyepot.


And I am off and running on some socks. I like the Ram's Horn, but the side gussets were just not wide enough for the big guy's freakishly large instep. Fitting socks on him has been a difficult task at the best of times. These socks are made of Romney and are made to stand a lot of wear, so knit quite tightly. I love them but I ripped out too and have restarted. Notice the subtle color change in the orange? It just makes them more lively in person.


So is it your instep that sits opposite of the heel? And when making an afterthought or peasant heel on a sock, should I pick up more than half or less than half if his instep is large? Oh, I just never get this right. Unless his socks are ribbed, he just can't pull them over his large heel/instep/ankle area. I am happy to take all suggestions. The area measures larger than his full calf, with slim ankles. How the hell do you fit this?

I added 1x1 gussets that I increased in this area and hope that works. This sock is in its third incarnation.

Moral: Knitting with a fever is a bad idea and will lead to much ripping. Drink soup, watch old movies and don't pick up those needles.

Must Have Tools

What fiber processing tool would be the last one you give up? You know, if disaster occurred and people were beating down your door begging for fiber tools and you were sharing, that sort of thing.

I could live without my ball winder as I could use a pvc pipe as a Nøstepinde. I could live without my carder, if need be, as I could hand card with dog brushes. I could live without my spinning wheels, if I had to, because I could make a spindle out of almost anything. We all have different physical limitations and strengths and some decisions would be based on that, of course.

The tool I must have, must keep above all others surprises even me, but it is my Babe's Electric Skein Winder. I just love this thing. It works just as well as you could ever want. And you can stomp down on the pedal and really make that sucker fly. Or not, if you want a soft and gentle winding. I know, you are thinking, 'PVC, who wants a big white thing in their fiber studio?', aren't you? Well, I do!

I love tools that work well. And clean up well. This may not be an issue for some, but have you ever wound off skeins of Angora? The haze can get everywhere. Wipes up with a wet paper towel. Or commercial mohair? I once wound 6 lbs of mohair that had been in 2 oz balls. Think about that for a minute - a mountain of fluff. It had all been in a musty basement and was stinky, but a severe bargain. How long would you have been winding it into skeins by hand? It took about 45 minutes by hand and would have been faster if I could have tied knots between balls any faster. Blazing speed.

You look at this simple tool and think that it will be too flimsy for use, but I beat mine to death and it works well. From spinning wheel, bobbins, yarn balls, or cones, it really flies. My biggest criticism is that it is just a hair larger, skein-wise, than my adjustable LeClerc winder that lives near my ball winder. That tool gets used less and less these days.

What is your must save tool?