Happy 2012!

January 8, 2012 at 7:51 pm (knitting, slippers)
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Happy New Year everyone! Welcome to 2012. According to the predictions, this is going to be a very interesting year indeed. It is most definitely going to be very interesting for me personally, and I will fill you in as the year goes along. How’s that for a little suspense (big grin)?

To begin with, I can’t believe that I haven’t posted since July! This is not because I don’t have anything to say, but rather because I’ve been so busy. Nevertheless, this little blog has had more views this year than ever. More than 1600 people from all over the world have dropped by to read my posts, which makes me very happy and honored. Apparently people are interested in some of my more technical posts about cleaning alpaca (always a popular topic!), blending wool and building yarn meters. I plan on expanding these types of articles this year, with the next one being about fulling – so stay tuned!

So what have I been up to in the past five months? My main projects have been knitting a fair isle hat and mittens for yet another one of the babies at work and a hoodie for a friend’s toddler. I wish I could say that these projects have been quick and easy, but they’ve taken longer than I thought, mostly due to my limited time for my craft life right now. Fortunately, one of my major goals for this year is to increase time for my creative side, so we’ll see how things go.

Here are some photos of the gloves and hat that I finally finished for Greyson, one of the babies born in our office about six months ago. These are based on the “Safe Return” mitten pattern from Interweave Knits 2011 Knitting Traditions collection. The blues are commercial yarn and the white and gray are my handspun alpaca.

Safe return mittens and hat

Safe return mittens and hat

safe return hat and mittens

Greyson wearing his hat and mittens

Another fun project that I’ve taken on in the past few months was teaching a friend how to spin! This is actually a very unexpected story. My friend Patricia belongs to a church where one of the pastors owns a flock of Romney sheep. Last year, her pastor had the idea of joining her two “flocks” by getting the church involved in learning to spin her wool. Now the funny thing is that Patricia had no idea that I spin and I had no idea that she was trying to find someone to teach her how to spin. One day we were engaged in our usual activity together – i.e. pulling blackberry in the local park, when we started talking about knitting and next thing you know she tells me this whole story about her pastor. Of course I invited her over to my house to use my carder and picker and over the course of a few weeks, spun up some of her wool. She then used this wool to make two pairs of wolf slippers, using my pattern, for two pastors in her church, which was a surprise for them. They turned out really cute!

Wolf slippers

Wolf slippers

Wolf slippers

Wolf slippers

A few weeks later, I came over to her house with my wheel and gave her a spinning lesson and left my wheel with her for a week. She picked it right up and will hopefully be getting a wheel of her own pretty soon. What a great end to last year and a wonderful new dimension to our friendship!

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How to dye fiber and blend roving for heathered yarns

July 20, 2011 at 5:23 am (dyeing, spinning)
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I love heathered yarns. These are the yarns I’m always drawn to at the yarn store due to their color depth and complex shades. Not surprisingly, when I dye and spin yarn, I often have a heathered effect in mind that I am aspiring toward in the finished product. Over the years I’ve learned or stumbled across several different methods of creating multi-shaded yarns, and I would like to share some of my knowledge. Therefore, in this post, I will explore several different ways to create roving for these types of yarns using a dye pot, different types of fiber and a carder.

Simply put, heathered yarns contain multiple individual colors instead of being one solid color. They can be composed of anywhere from two colors to many colors, but the colors are usually evenly distributed throughout and not in defined sections or stripes. Here are some examples of heathered yarns:

blue and purple yarn small

Mohair/shetland wool

cvm dyed small

Alpaca/CVM

yarn small

Cheviot wool

Let’s look at different ways of creating heathered yarns:

1) Using different fiber types

Different fibers take dye differently. For example, if you dye alpaca, wool and mohair the same color in the same dyepot, the resulting color can be quite different for each fiber.

Here is a photo of three fibers that came out of the same dyepot.  The wool is on the left, alpaca in middle and mohair on the right.

linas green
wool on left, alpaca in middle, mohair on right

In my experience, alpaca and mohair fibers tend to come out lighter than wool. Even though the photo above makes the mohair look darker than the wool, once you card it up and separate the fibers, it looks lighter. Mohair in particular also has a luster to it that makes it look very different from wool. Therefore, you can combine different fibers that are dyed the same color and often the result is a heathered yarn. Below is a photo from a hooded scarf that I spun and knit from shetland wool and mohair. They were dyed together, but you can see that the mohair is much lighter and lends the yarn a white sheen, making the yarn look heathered. For more information about the hooded scarf project and photos of the fiber preparation, you can go to: http://forestgnome.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/mounds-of-fiber/

scarf

2) Using a light and dark shade of the same color

Another way of creating heathered yarns is to combine a light and a dark shade of a color and blend them together. Last year I knit my mother a sweater out of a light brown suri alpaca and a medium brown/gray wool cvm fleece. I put them both in the same dyepot and here’s what emerged:

fiber small
cvm wool on top and suri alpaca on bottom

003 (2)
cvm wool on bottom and suri alpaca on top

In the first photo the cvm wool, which was brown/gray to begin with was dyed a dark green and the suri alpaca, which was a very light brown was dyed a bright vibrant green.  In the second photo the same fibers were dyed a dark yellow. When I combined the two, I got this:

cvm dyed small

These yarns have a real depth of color and you can see both the light vibrant colors and the dark colors in them.

Another simple way to achieve a similar effect is to combine a bright color with either a white or dark fiber. Two to three passes through the carder will distribute the white or black fleece throughout the batt evenly, but will still show the colors distinctly.

3) Combining several complementary colors together

A third way of creating heathered yarns is to dye several complementary colors separately and then combine them in a way that distributes them evenly throughout your batt. A few months ago I decided to spin yarn for a baby hoodie for a friend. I wanted it to be a peach color, but because the pattern is a very simple stockinette knit, I decided that a multi-colored heathered yarn would make it more interesting. Therefore I dyed up additional wool in yellow, rose and purple colors and blended it together.

Here is the fiber just out of the dye pot:

fiber small
cheviot wool dyed in peach, yellow, pink and purple

Here is what the carded batts of each color look like:

batts small
From left to right on top: yellow, purple and pink wool. The peach wool is on the bottom.

Since I wanted peach to be the dominant color and the other colors to be “splashes” in the main color, I carded the fibers to achieve an even distribution of the secondary colors within the batt. I carded the colors in layers, alternating a layer of the peach and another layer of the three colors in thirds:

carding1

The carder drum contains one layer of the secondary colors in which the colors are in strips: pink on the left, yellow in the middle and purple on the right.  The bottom tray contains a solid layer of peach that will go on top of the secondary colors.

The next layer contains all three secondary colors again but arranged in a different order: purple, pink and yellow.

carding2

The reason for this is to distribute the secondary colors evenly throughout the entire batt. I then repeated the whole process (layers of solid peach and alternating layers of the secondary colors in different positions each time) until I had a full batt. Here’s what it looked like after one pass through the carder:

batt1
batt after one pass through the carder

The colors are mixed together, but they are clearly in layers on top of each other.

Here’s what it looks like after three passes through the carder:

batt2

All the colors are mixed together evenly.

The number of times that the fiber is passed through the carder also directly affects the way the colors are distributed. If it is passed through the carder a single time, the colors will be much more distinct and in sections. The more times the batt is carded, the better the color distribution becomes. Here is an example of the same fiber combination carded one, two and three times:

011
From left to right: Batt is carded once, carded twice and carded three times.

I chose to card my batt three times to get good distribution. Here is what the yarn looks like when knitted. It is very close to the look I was going for – a peach background with splashes of bright colors.

back
knitted swatch

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On the edge

May 19, 2011 at 4:53 am (knitting)
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A few months ago, my husband directed me to a post on the Freakonomics blog about Ravelry. A very intelligent and articulate young lady named Sarah Johnson wrote an article titled: A Young Reader Asks: Is There an Elitist Oligarchy in the Underworld of Knitters?

Sarah’s basic premise is that the difficulty ratings for patterns on Ravelry are skewed. Ravelry users can rank patterns on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being the easiest to make and 10 being the most difficult. She noticed that out of nearly 43,000 rated knitting patterns, only 68 were rated a 9 or 10 and that the vast majority were between 1 and 4. So she was wondering is it that the vast majority of patterns are simple to make or is it that the only people ranking these patterns knitting geniuses for whom nothing is difficult?

I had never really thought about this question before and found it to be very interesting. I am one of those users who never ranks pattern difficulty. I guess I never really noticed that particular option. I am also what I would call an advanced knitter. I’ve been knitting since I was seven and have made some extremely complicated items so I’m pretty sure I would skew those rankings even more if I started rating patterns. Frankly, there aren’t many patterns that I would consider to be incredibly difficult. However, I just finished a baby dress that I think would fit into that category. It took me over a year to finish this project and I have to say that it was quite a challenge every step of the way.

A long time ago, I purchased a book called “Baby Knits from Dale of Norway”. I’m sure this book has been out of print for a long time. In fact, a quick search on Amazon revealed only two copies of this book, both selling for $90! This book has some of the most beautiful baby clothes. I love every single design in this book and have made many of them for the little ones in my life. However, I would have to say that almost every pattern is extremely difficult to make. The reasons are numerous: Very intricate color work, difficult shaping, steeks, complex finishing and pages of text directions. There are great photos of the outfits, but no photos of the details in the patterns to clarify directions.

Here are some photos of items from this book that I’ve made over the years:

February 2007 002

My cousin Mirra wearing the ladybug sweater.

ladybug hat

ladybug hat

duck sweater

duck sweater

In preparation for this post, I went to Ravelry to see what kinds of rankings the ladybug sweater received from the other users. Well, what do you know? Turns out that the vast majority of users have ranked this pattern as higher than a 4 and in fact 8 is the most common score by a long shot. So this is indeed a very difficult pattern as I thought. Glad I’m not totally wrong some of the time!

ravelry ratings

Which brings me to the present.  About a year ago, I started a dress from this book for my little cousin Nicole. She was just born and I decided to make the pattern for a 12-18 month old. I’m so glad I did! I’ve never knitted a dress before and naively thought I would try some different color yarns in the skirt, including a self-striping blue, yellow and green yarn I had lying around and green and yellow handspun yarns. The dress has a lacy skirt with a plaid top. The original has a white skirt with a white and purple top. My idea was that the skirt would be 1/3 green, 1/3 multi-color and 1/3 yellow with a green and yellow top.

The skirt for the dress is a lace pattern that requires counting, so it wasn’t exactly mindless knitting since I had to pay attention. This is the type of knitting that I have very little time for due to my full-time job and busy weekends. I knit the green portion and then switched to the self-striping yarn only to find out that I was just a few stitches off on my calculations, but unfortunately that meant that the yarn wasn’t striping properly. So out came the entire green section that I had to re-knit.

Take two – I reknit the green third, then painstakingly knit one third with the self-striping yarn. This was a real challenge because the colors had to match up perfectly on all the rows, but the lace pattern had variable stitches in each row due to yarn overs and extra stitches. Finally, I decided to try my yellow and green handspun for the final third. I got almost all the way through and decided that the green and yellow handspun colors didn’t work at all. So I ripped them out.

Take three – I went to the yarn store. This in itself is a shocking turn of events. I haven’t been to the yarn store in a couple years since I spin almost all my yarn now and I’m actively trying to reduce my stash to a manageable size.  But yes, I went to the yarn store and bought some lovely turquoise, green and yellow yarns to match the self-striping yarn. I completed the top of the skirt in the turquoise. Finally, I could move on to the plaid top, which I naively thought would be much easier!

The top – I managed to make it through the top even though it involved: steeks, complex color work including two color purling, shaping (at the same time as the steeks and color work) and somewhat confusing directions in parts. I actually didn’t have to rip out anything (surprisingly). However, just when I thought I was done, the finishing just about did me in.

The edging – the pattern called for very cute picot edging for the sleeves and neck. This involved picking up stitches around the neck and each sleeve, knitting the edging, folding it over and sewing it to the back. I picked up and knit the neck edging but when I folded it over, it really sagged and rolled over and looked very odd. Ugh.. I took it out and decided to do it all over again by picking up half the stitches. At this point, the neck edging looked good so I moved on to the sleeves. I finished edging one of the sleeves using the same method – picking up half the stitches and it looked fine.

And that’s when we went to our favorite Indian restaurant. We’ve been going to this place for ten years and the waiters treat us like family. I can always rely on their honest advice. Well, as soon as she saw the dress, one of the waitresses said to me “You realize that the sleeve openings are too small. If you have a small child, you will put shirts on under the dress so you need a lot of room so it’s not tight.” I saw that she was correct that the edging was pulling the sleeves in. Sigh.. so out went the sleeve edgings. I decided to do a fair isle style two color stripe rib edging. Here’s a photo of the edgings in progress with the picot edging on the right and the rib edging on the left. You can also see that the rib edging has a much larger opening than the picot edging.

nicole dress

Dress edgings

So, after all these challenges, I finally finished the dress and sent it off. It took a year to make it (with several other projects thrown in). I have to say this was one of the most difficult knits due to the fact that I re-knitted every part of it three times. But in the end, I think it turned out really cute! I hope Nicole gets to wear it a few times before she grows out of it.

dress

Nicole’s dress

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Madrona 2011

April 10, 2011 at 3:07 am (slippers, spinning)
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Happy spring everyone! It is indeed spring, even though it’s still raining non-stop. The temperatures are up in the 50s and everything is growing. I am getting excited to revitalize and weed my garden and plant. This year I decided to start seeds inside and purchased a lot of different veggie types. Last fall I saved some seeds from garden peas and pumpkin seeds from the farmer’s market pumpkins. So far the peas are growing wonderfully and so is everything else. I’m already putting the starts outside to harden them for planting.

Seed starts
Seed starts

For the past few months I’ve also been experimenting with whole grain bread. After trying a number of different flours, I’ve settled on white whole wheat flour. It seems a bit lighter than regular whole wheat flour, and appears to act as something intermediate between white flour and whole wheat flour. As a result, I’m still working out the proper amount of water to add to the bread. My attempts to make both lean and enriched breads are turning out pretty well though! Here’s a photo of a recent loaf that was devoured rather quickly :)

Whole wheat bread
Whole wheat bread

In the fabulous world of fiber, there’s a lot going on as usual. In February I attended the Madrona Fiber Arts Festival in Tacoma. In past years I’ve tended to cram in as many classes as possible and tried various combinations of staying overnight and driving to classes from home. Traditionally, driving in for a 9am class and taking classes all day has resulted in a very tired brain and no time for shopping or relaxing. This year, I went up with my friend Kristi, and we took Friday off work. We got there in the early afternoon and did some shopping and socializing at a relaxing pace. The next day I took two classes, just the right number in my opinion not to over-stuff the poor noggin.

The morning class was my first introduction to Jaycee Boggs. She is quite a spirited and funny lady with a good teaching style. She was very organized and methodical, which I always appreciate. We learned to make boucle yarn, with a wool core and mohair for the boucle. It was the first time I had ever tried the technique. Jaycee dyed the fiber herself in some nice colorways and I chose a light green. Here’s a photo of the yarn on my spinning wheel before I plied in the sewing thread to stabilize the yarn.

boucle yarnboucle yarn

Here is what it looks like after I plied and washed it. I think it turned out pretty well for a first attempt!

boucle1

And here is my cat helping me spin Smile

Cat with spinning wheel

Finally, I’m happy to say that I finished my first pair of bear slippers. This pair took a long time for several reasons: I was trying to design a good bear face and at the same time, I was trying to design a slipper for men’s sizes.  These slippers are size 10 1/2 – 11 and have two different face designs. After I saw the way the first slipper came out, I decided to re-design the face and make it more colorful and have more contrast between the browns. Next I’d like to work on a size 11-12 men’s.

This is a photo of the latest bear face design:

bear slipperbear slipper

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DOS and Rinsing Fiber After Dyeing

February 22, 2011 at 6:23 am (dyeing)
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I’ve been dyeing up a storm of fiber for the past several months for all the various baby projects I’ve been knitting.  This has set me thinking about a number of issues related to dyeing, including depth of shade (DOS) and the best way to rinse fiber after dyeing so that it does not bleed color (like my recent experience with the red Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece yarn that stained a white sweater I knit for my little cousin).  Since I’ve been pondering the issue, I thought I’d share some thoughts on the matter. I also invite you, dear readers, to give your input if you have additional ideas.

To give a little background, I use acid dyes to dye animal fibers including wool, alpaca, llama and mohair. The particular brand I use is called Mother MacKenzie’s Miracle Dyes, developed by Judith MacKenzie who is an amazing spinning teacher and source of information pertaining to everything yarn-related.  These are non-toxic dyes that require a small amount of weak acid (such as vinegar) to bind with the fiber. They are  fairly easy to obtain.  However, the reasons I chose to go with these dyes as opposed to a different brand (like Jacquard) are two fold:

a) There are only nine colors of dye available, which is nice because I don’t have space for 30 different jars of dye. Since I dye small amounts of fiber at a time, it is not practical for me to measure out tiny amounts of powder each time I want to dye something, and therefore I prefer to have a standard 1% jar of dissolved dye available for use for each color.

b) These dyes have a wonderful color map, which is a book of dyed samples of every permutation of available colors at a 2% depth of shade. This allows me to reference existing formulas instead of creating my own reference book from scratch. I like to keep notes and swatches of all my color samples, and I always write down the formula for all my trials so I can replicate the color in the future and add them to the book.

So, with all that, I would like to share a few observations that I’ve made over the past several years through trial and error.

1) Vinegar stinks. The majority of the acid dyes on the market call for vinegar as the acid to bind the color to the fiber. After using this method for a few months, I decided I do not like the way vinegar makes the fiber and yarn smell. After consulting friends and other resources, I settled on citric acid. This is a food additive that is easy to find, affordable and does not smell. It comes in powdered form. To use citric acid instead of vinegar, you can add 3% of the weight of the fiber you are dyeing. However, if you are dyeing a very small amount of fiber, you will need a tiny amount of citric acid, which can be difficult to measure out exactly.  To solve this problem, I create a 10% solution (i.e. 10 grams of citric acid to 100 mL of water). This is a shelf stable solution that will last for quite a while. You can then calculate 3% of the fiber weight and multiply by 10 to get necessary mL. For example, let’s say you are dyeing 50 grams of wool. You would need 1.5 g of citric acid. If you have a 10% solution, you can add 15 mL, which is easier to measure out.

2) DOS is not always what it seems. Depth of shade refers to how dark a color is when it is dyed. Usually, DOS ranges from 3% (of fiber weight) to less than .5%. A good, bright color is usually around the 2% range. Pastels are 0.5% or lower. Very light colors can be dyed in the range of 0.2%. When I first got my dyes and book, I dyed everything at 2%, because that is what the samples in the book showed and I wanted to make sure I was getting the same colors. Then I began to notice that some colors like yellow and magenta were never fully absorbed by the fiber at 2%. I would get a pot full of yellow water, no matter what I did. Since I do not like to waste dye, I realized that the fiber was not absorbing all of the color and therefore I did not need as much. I tried dyeing fiber at 1% and realized that the colors are just as bright most of the time, and I’m wasting less dye because more of it is getting absorbed.  Now I’m trying some at .5% and still finding that the colors are quite bright, much brighter than pastels.

3) Rinsing dyed fiber can be a pain. Once you’ve dyed your fiber and have your wonderful colors and your dyebath has cooled, you need to take out the fiber and rinse it – again and again and again. I find that colors that do not get fully absorbed like yellow and magenta have a tendency to run. I rinse my fiber in a small plastic tub that I put in my bathtub. For a while, I found the rinsing process to be very time consuming and water consuming and not always effective. I tried rinsing multiple times and adding citric acid to the water to stabilize the dye but often my rinse water was still yellow. So one day I was at my local yarn store, and saw a bottle of Synthrapol. The label reads: “Synthrapol is an industrial strength, neutral liquid detergent, used as a prewash, afterwash or wetting agent for paint and dye. Synthrapol has a unique characteristic of keeping loose dye particles in suspension, thus preventing backstaining.” I thought to myself – Eureka. This must be the solution to my problem. If this stuff can keep particles in suspension, then it should be able to extract extra dye from my fiber. The next time I did a dyepot, I rinsed the fiber in cold water as per directions and then filled my tub with hot water and put a drop of Synthrapol in with my fiber (it’s super concentrated so you only need a tiny amount). Then, as often happens, I ran out of time so I left the fiber overnight to soak. The next morning the tub was full of dark yellow water. It looked like most of the extra dye had come out. So I poured in clean hot water and added the fiber with some citric acid and the water looked almost clear. Now I always rinse first with Synthrapol and leave my fiber in there during the day or overnight and then follow with two or three quick rinses with hot water and citric acid. This has cut down my rinsing time and water considerably.

I am always looking for better ways of rinsing fiber, so if you have other suggestions, I would love to hear them. I hope some of this information is useful and happy dyeing!

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Baby daze

January 17, 2011 at 3:31 am (dyeing, knitting, spinning)
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Happy belated new year everyone! I’ve been meaning to write this post for the past two weeks, but of course life has interefered as usual :) Here’s wishing everyone a wonderful 2011 filled with creativity, completed projects and success in all our endeavors.

I would like to begin this year by thanking everyone who has been reading my blog. According to the stats I received from wordpress at the end of the year, there are so many more people reading this than I could have imagined. My blog got over 1,000 views last year – wow! Interestingly enough, many people find my blog by searching for certain topics. One of the most popular is how to clean alpaca fiber. Apparently, I’m not the only person who finds this difficult. A lot of people are also interested in yarn meters, fermented suint and fluorescent yarns. I hope they are finding my posts useful!

As to what I’ve been up to for the past several months, I think the title of this post says it all. I have been in an absolute frenzy knitting baby items for everyone who recently had a baby and I am totally swamped! I have never had four projects going at the same time before and I sincerely hope I won’t again because it’s mayhem. My relatives are one thing, but apparently everyone at my job has decided to go insane and have children at the same time! We now have four pregnant people out of 20 employees, so I’m knitting up a storm. 

Over the past month and a half, I’ve knitted two baby sweaters, one out of commercial yarn and one out of handspun.  The first one was out of Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece for my cousin’s baby who lives in Arizona.  Obviously, a wool sweater in Arizona is probably not the best idea (although I’ve done it before!), so I went with cotton. I used the hoodie pattern out of Debbie Bliss’s book “Special Knits” and put a small argyle border from another pattern in the book around the bottom and sleeves.  This was a pretty quick knit and I even managed to get it done right before I went to visit my cousin.  However, I did not foresee one problem. The sweater was white and the argyle patterns were brown and red. I totally did not imagine that red commercial yarn might not be color fast. So in went one perfectly white sweater to wash for blocking and out came a sweater with pink blotches all over it! I almost had a heart attack! Shame on you Brown Sheep for not going the extra step of using some acid to make the red colorfast.

Well, I had two days before my trip on December 31st to see my family, so I used that time to frantically try everything I could on the stains. The only thing that worked was the Clorox bleach pen in about five iterations. I rinsed the sweater in citric acid the best I could, two hours before my flight, and wrapped it up in towels so it wouldn’t stain again. I brought my blocking foam pads and blocked it there. Here’s a photo of the sweater drying on the blocking squares. I think it turned out ok in the end, but what a mess!

Hoodie for my cousin Aaron

Hoodie for my cousin Aaron

The second sweater was for a co-worker who is due in a couple weeks. I wanted to finish it by her baby shower, and I was only two weeks late! This sweater is also from Debbie Bliss’s “Special Knits”. I was looking at the argyle cardigan and decided to use the pattern shape but change the design into yellow and green stripes for a more fun sweater.  My friend does not yet know the gender of the baby, so I went with the safe yellow and green choice. About a week before our vacation to Maui in December, I came up with the final design idea, so I hectically threw some fiber together to dye. I chose 50% wool, 25% alpaca and 25% kid mohair for a nice soft and warm sweater. I was planning to spin it very thin to match the gauge in the pattern (25 st/4″). I dyed up some bright green and yellow. Here’s a photo of the green fiber - I thought it was very interesting the way each fiber took up the dye differently. The wool is on the left, alpaca in the middle and mohair on right.

Green fiber

Wool, alpaca and mohair dyed in green

After I dyed the fiber, I began spinning it very quickly, because I only had one week to finish it all! I created three colors – green, yellow and a heathered yellow green combination.  I only got through half of the heathered yarn before I ran out of time, so I had a limited amount. Therefore, I planned the stripes accordingly. I think the cardigan turned out very cute and quite soft. The alpaca and mohair added a fuzzy halo to the yarn, which adds interest.

Striped baby cardigan

Striped baby cardigan

I’m still working on another project for my cousin’s baby, who is almost a year old now. I really need to finish it up before she grows out of it and goes to college! It would be great to see them this year and meet her in person. I’ll post more photos once I get it done.

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Traffic Light Sweater FO

October 6, 2010 at 3:33 am (dyeing, knitting, spinning)
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My mother works for the New York City Department of Transportation. She is in the traffic light division, which means that for years she’s had to endure bad puns about being responsible for the horrible traffic in the city. When her 60th birthday was coming up, I couldn’t resist one more pun – a green, yellow and red sweater. This sweater is the reason that I haven’t posted for so long – I was trying to finish knitting it before my mom’s visit last week.

I started planning this sweater about two years ago. The summer 2007 issue of Interweave Knits had a sweater I really liked – the Notre Dame de Grace Pullover. I thought it would be perfect for my mom. The pattern sat around for a while until I was ready to start on the project. First I had to decide what type of fiber to spin it out of and then I had to figure out the color palette. The sweater was a surprise so I didn’t want to talk about it on the blog, but I have posted little bits about it anonymously.  My post in June of last year titled: CVM and other musings showed the fiber blend I was planning to use (CVM wool and suri alpaca mix) and the three color samples I made. Here is the photo of the samples:

Dyed CVM

Once the fiber choices and colors were set, I figured out the yarn yardage requirements and started swatching. The first hurdle was that I didn’t like the way the pattern stitch looked in when knitted. The yarn was fuzzy and the pattern stitch was hidden by the fuzziness and the colors I selected. So I decided to change the design. After a lot of sampling, I chose the “Shadow Box” pattern. This is an interesting six row repeat with two rows each of a main color and two other colors. It’s a stranded pattern with the main color being stranded on top of the other two colors creating rectangular boxes that pop out. My goal was to use color gradations that made the sweater gradually transition from green to yellow to red. I did this by changing the main and secondary colors of the shadow boxes from green/yellow to yellow/green to yellow/red to red/yellow, making a gradual progression.

One other important lesson learned from this project is to spin up and dye all the yarn for the project at one time. I did the dyeing in batches and although I used the same formula each time, I ran into problems with the yellow. The green and red were consistent each time, but the yellow was quite different. I didn’t have a lot of room for error due to the fact that I had a limited amount of CVM and wound up using all of it for the sweater. Therefore, I couldn’t redo the yellows and wound up with three different colors of yellow. The back, front and sleeves of the sweater are all different shades of orange/yellow and yellow/brown. I think it looks interesting, but it’s not as consistent as I wanted.

Well, without any more ado, here’s the sweater and the proud owner.

Mom in her traffic light sweater

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Cleaning alpaca fleece and other alpaca related musings

June 2, 2010 at 5:28 am (Uncategorized)
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I love alpacas. They are very cute and gentle creatures and I love visiting them on local farms. Alpaca fiber also happens to be one of my favorite fibers to work with. It’s incredibly soft and warm (three times warmer than wool), and mixes well with many types of wool. It’s good to keep in mind that there are two types of alpaca fiber available -huacaya and suri. Huacaya is the most commonly seen type of fiber which looks more like wool locks and has some crimp to it, whereas suri has much longer staple length and looks like hair (see photo below). Suri fiber makes up only about 10% of alpaca fiber overall, so it’s a fairly rare fiber to work with.

Huacaya and suri alpaca fiber

One of the main characteristics of alpaca fleece is that it has no lanolin and therefore can be worn by people allergic to wool.  However, the fiber has much less crimp than wool, which means that it has a lot less memory, in particular suri fiber which resembles mohair. Garments made with heavy alpaca yarn tend to not only be very warm, but also lose their shape and sag, which needs to be taken into consideration when making the garment.  One of the first projects that I ever made with handspun alpaca was a heavy sweater, and the yarn was underspun – a perfect recipe for sagging.  Fortunately, the pattern I chose called for a cropped sweater with very tightly finished hem, sleeves and neckline.  This has prevented the sweater from growing in size, although it is warm enough for the north pole.

Alpaca sweater

As a result of alpaca’s softness but relative lack of memory, it is an ideal fiber to blend with wool.  It can be blended with any type of wool that does not require too much twist, because you don’t want to overspin alpaca and make the yarn lose its softness. One of my favorite blends is romney and alpaca. Romney is a strong but not extremely soft wool, and combined with alpaca you get wonderfully soft and sturdy yarn that has a lot of memory. I have been using this blend to make my wolf and bear slippers for the past couple of years and it stands up well to wear. I have also blended alpaca with shetland wool and fine wools like cvm (see my earlier post about blending cvm with suri at http://forestgnome.wordpress.com/2009/06/28/cvm-and-other-musings/).

As much as I love alpaca, I have found the fleece to be quite difficult to clean. Although alpacas do not have lanolin and therefore don’t have thistles and a lot of other large gunk stuck to their fleece, they love to roll around in the dirt.  As a result, their fleece is absolutely permeated with small dirt particles that are practically impossible to remove while washing. I have had a number of fleeces that I have washed thoroughly with soap and rinsed several times until the water came out clean but they were still full of dirt particles that were difficult to remove during carding.

Last year I finally had a flash of insight about what to do with these fleeces. I thought that using my picker would open up the fiber enough to allow the dirt to fall out and then a secondary wash would remove any remaining dirt. Fortunately, I was correct in this assumption and I have slowly been going back over my alpaca stash of “clean” fleeces, picking them and re-washing them to get them really clean. Here is a photo of how much gunk can come out of a perfectly clean fleece after two passes through the carder:

Dirt in carder from alpaca fleece

Here is another photo of an already washed  fleece before and after picking and washing.

Alpaca fleece before picking on right and after picking on left

This is another reason I am grateful for my picker. I find that it is a huge timesaver and I don’t think I would ever be able to get these fleeces clean without it. And now, back to cleaning some alpaca for a new project. One of my friends and coworkers recently decided to go to gradschool in wildlife biology, so I’m going to make her a pair of my wolf slippers to take with her :)

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Garden gnome

May 3, 2010 at 3:30 am (Uncategorized)
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I can’t believe it’s been over a month since my last post. Time is flying. The past few weeks have been quite busy with a lot of extra time at work helping out with volunteer events during earth month and of course my usual volunteer events at Marymoor Park. Some weeks I felt like I haven’t been home at all. Things are slowing down a bit a now, but the field season at work has started in earnest and that means that I’m spending 2-3 days in the woods each week.  Hope the weather holds up!

Around the house, I’ve finally completed most work on the garden. I wound up making four beds, one of which is deep for root vegetables.  This took over a month of hard work with a shovel and an electric tiller. However, everything is growing so well that I’m about to start picking some lettuce leaves. Here’s a couple photos of the garden:

Lettuce, greens and peas

Onions, broccoli and radish sprouts

Note the copper tape around the garden beds. I’m trying to protect the lettuces from slugs which have been chowing down. Hope it works!

I’ve also been working on my bread on a regular basis. About a month ago I got starter from Ross of the fabulous House Bread. He’s been selling bread at the Redmond Farmer’s Market for the past couple years and I’ve been his devoted fan. Unfortunately, he will not be selling at our farmer’s market this year, which makes me glad I’ve decided to bake my own bread. I’ve been working on sour dough and the results have been yummy. I think I got it down pretty well now and I’m making enough dough for an entire week of bread – three loaves ready to bake anytime. It’s wonderful to have fresh bread any time you want.

sour dough

I also tried my hand at bagels – pretty mediocre first attempt, but now that I have a real stand mixer it should be a lot better next time (I was trying to mix the dough in the food processor which really didn’t work). However, they looked pretty good!

bagels

And now, on to knitting – ah yes, knitting. You might ask where I’m finding the time to knit on top of all the other stuff  have going on, and the answer is that I’m not. My friend had a baby shower last month and I finished up the baby hat I was making for her (see my post about Madrona). However, I forgot to take a photo of the finished hat. Hopefully she’ll send one with the baby wearing it in a few months. I also tried to make a pair of duck socks from the latest issue of Knitty – they are so cute! Unfortunately I made one and ran out of yarn only to find out that the color has been discontinued. That’s the way this month has been going. The socks are totally adorable though. Here’s a photo of the one I did manage to make.

duck sock

Finally, I’m happy to announce that my wolf slipper pattern and a spinning kit will be on sale at the Redmond Farmer’s Market in my friend Pam’s booth. She runs Heart of Dreams Alpacas and sells her beautiful felted scarves, hats and other items at the market each week. It will be interesting to see how it does.

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Springtime and FOs

March 17, 2010 at 4:43 am (knitting)
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Spring is definitely here and with it so is yardwork! The grass and dandelions are awakening after our brief and mild winter and all the tulips and daffodils are out and the cherries are blooming. It’s wonderful to be outside (unless you have spring allergies). Over the past month I’ve been cleaning up the shrub beds, planting bulbs and making some beds for a small garden in the back yard. We’ll see if it’s sunny enough for veggies in the spot I’ve chosen. All I can say is that digging is hard on my back! 

Another one of my latest hobbies has been baking bread, much to my surprise. Ever since we got back from Maui, I’ve been thinking about my brother-in-law’s wonderful homemade sour dough. However, I wanted to start someplace simple. Therefore, I found a really easy no-knead dough recipe using regular yeast and tried it out. You can see the recipe here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/081mrex.html?_r=1 

The first loaf I made turned out perfectly baked through and with a beautiful crust, much to my amazement. I made it with whole wheat flour and decided it was too heavy and tasted a bit bland. Here’s a photo of the result: 

Whole wheat crust

 

Whole wheat crumb

 

My next attempt was half white and half whole wheat, which had a much better consistency but was still bland. Upon consultation with the master bread baker, he suggested that I put the dough into the fridge for a couple days after the initial 12-18 hour rising. And it really worked! The bread is tasting much richer and not bland at all. My next challenge – actual sour dough starter. We’ll see how it goes! 

Aside from my bread kick, I wanted to post some photos of gloves that I finally finished for my friend Sarah at the beginning of the winter.  These are the gloves that I made with Icelandic Lopi that she brought me back from her trip to Iceland and with some Icelandic roving another friend sent me from the east coast (see my post It’s Raining Icelandic Sheep). I used the Kilm Gloves pattern from the Winter 2007 Interweave Knits. The light and dark green colors are the Lopi mixed with alpaca dyed to match and the pink/yellow variegated yarn is 2-ply Icelandic roving from Massachusetts, which was soft enough to use without alpaca. I think they turned out pretty well! 

Kilm gloves

 

Icelandic Kilm gloves

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