Spoiled for Choice

I'd been trying to pick out something to knit for Bell's Long Lacy Summer KAL, dithering through book after book, and finally I heard my great-grama's voice in my head, saying, "You're spoiled for choice, young lady!"

So I just picked something. It's not as though I can't pick something else later, sheesh.

This is Nr. 5 from page 42 of the Christine Duchrow book I bought at the fiber festival this summer.

Everything's Better with Purple?I overdyed some yarn with a union dye, and in order to use up the contact dye, yes, Mom, that is the t-shirt you gave me for my birthday. I needed something light-colored and cotton, and it was "Tag, you're it!" on the t-shirt.

If You Don't Like the Weather Here

"If you don't like the weather here, wait five minutes."

I think people say this everywhere. They certainly say it here in Michigan, and yes! It's true.

Last week, steamily hot and rainy. In Grand Rapids they recorded something called a "record high low temperature" of 74 degrees, which made my brain do a loop-the-loop for a second there. They meant to say 74 was the warmest overnight low recorded on that date. I find "high low" just confusing!

This week, a jump back to late spring/early summer weather, with highs in the low 60's (a whole 18 C yesterday) and overnight lows in the high 40's (around 8 C).

Knitting

As if I didn't have enough partly-done projects whimpering for my attention, I cast on another. At least this one is almost finished -- I'm grafting the edge in the photo.

This is a no-pattern wristwarmer knitted using some of the tussah silk yarn I dyed with Easter egg coloring back in 2007. (In those photos, this is the skein on the bottom of each photo.)

These (when, if, I knit a second one) will go by the computer for those chilly winter mornings when I've just built up the fire in the soapstone stove. Between the half-circle Pi shawl and wristwarmers I expect to be warm except for my cold nose.

Birdwatching

Summer is a great birdwatching season. This morning I saw two brown thrashers checking out the rose tangle where they nested last year, and got to hear and watch the male singing right outside my window.

I've been trying to get a good photo of hummingbirds, but that's hard! They move so fast, and I have two layers of glass and one of window screen between the camera and the feeder. I have at least two different female hummingbirds chasing each other away from the nectar.

Gardening

Much easier to get pictures of things that don't move around, like plants.The slender green stems on the left are volunteer four o'clock seedlings, and the more robust reddish shoot on the right is coming up from one of the four o'clock roots I replanted.
I'm finally hardening off my tomato seedlings, and hope to put them in the ground today if it ever warms up. I have a Black Krim, a couple of Siberians, a Roma, and two Yellow Pear tomato plants in there.

Afterwards I'll have to sit out there with a stick to beat off the chipmunks and groundhogs. Chipmunks usually just dig newly-planted plants up, you know, to see what you buried there, in case it was something tasty. Groundhogs, also known as woodchucks, will eat the whole plant, or just bite it off to see if it might be tasty.

Hell hath no fury like a gardener who finds her carefully nurtured and tenderly planted seedling gnawed to stubs!

PS: Holy cats! I use Bloglines to keep up with my blogroll, and I just logged in to find 937 unread posts! Dating back to early June. Looks like Bloglines burped, and I have some catching up to do.

Command Performance

So I'm reading the Tsarina's blog, and she mentions overdyeing Lion Brand Magic Stripes yarn.

I did not mean to dye any yarn today. "Dye yarn" was nowhere on any of my Hipster PDA cards. "Dogs need heartwormer" and "Place van ad" were: "Dye yarn" was not.

But somehow, when I went to the kitchen for lunch, I found myself with Paas Easter egg dye tabs and some Lion Brand sock yarn that I bought back when I first re-started knitting on needles.

Instead of nuking lunch, I was nuking bowls of bright pink and purple and green dye.

Boy. Does Lion Brand Magic Stripes ever suck up the dye. sluuuuurrrp, like a kid sucking in spaghetti. It was amazing. First it slurped up all the liquid. Then when I squeezed it, it kept all the dye. Just like that.

I commented on the Tsarina's blog, "Now look what you made me do!" and she replied, "Pictures or it didn't happen!"

Top: formerly "Purple Pattern". Bottom: formerly "Sea Blue Pattern".

Even brighter in person than on the screen.

[Edited to add: I didn't realize Lion Brand had discontinued Magic Stripes. Yarndex still shows the original colors of the two skeins above >here< in Shade Card 1.]

[PS: No, I didn't notice any earthquake early this morning. But maybe that's why Ajax was whiskering me in the face before my alarm went off.]

Zombie Blogger Reporting for Duty

I love spring snow followed by a sunny day.

We had rain and snow overnight, and the roads were pretty icy first thing this morning.

I drove the child to school and came back and reheated this:
Three colors of green Maypole wool and white, microwaved in the leftover blue Easter-egg dye I used on the child's hair last night.

I don't know if this yarn is still available, but we used to use it all the time for overshot weaving (cough) years ago. The label says "durably mothproofed hand washable Maypole 'Nehalem' 100% Virgin Wool Worsted Hand Weaving Yarn, 3 ply 2 oz. approx 280 yards, a product of Oregon Worsted Co., Portland, Oregon".

It's a little on the thin side for knitting, but it will felt. The bag underneath the bowl was knitted from green and brown thrums of a stuffer-weave warp I wove in high school, then felted in my front-loader washing machine. I think I ran it through about three hot-wash/cold-rinse cycles (with the regular laundry) until I was happy with it. All those ends, vanished.

And I want to say a word about the bowl the yarn is in.

Several years ago, when I was newly downsized from the full-time working world (er, the one that pays money, not the one that is 24/7 and involves things like cleaning vomit at 3am) and still half-expecting to get another full-time job any minute, I took some ceramics classes.

Basically, I paid money to play in clay. We had access to kilns and glazes and wheels, a good teacher who was a working potter, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself, although I did NOT get to the point of producing this bowl.

No, one night in my second round of classes, one of the real potters was talking to the instructor about six bowls she had made. These bowls. She was happy with the shape, but two of the glazes had reacted inside and turned black.

Before I could say anything, she dropped the whole stack in the metal "cracked" trash bin that we used for things that broke or sagged in the kiln, and walked away still talking to the instructor.

I was stunned. After a second, I unfroze and went after her, but she had left for the night. So I went back and took out the four that had not shattered, and I took them home.

They are excellent bowls, a good shape for soup or oatmeal or cereal. But they have this black pencil-lead color in some areas of the inside.

Most people are creative, even the ones who insist they aren't creative and who would deny they are artists. And many creative people are too darn hard on themselves. They look at their work, and all they see is the parts that turned black, not the nice shape.

Are you creative? Would you call yourself an artist? Or does that word make you uneasy?

If you sometimes admit, even secretly to yourself, that you're creative, are you pretty hard on yourself? Do you drop whole stacks of your own work in the "cracked" bin for minor flaws?

Driftin', Driftin' the Night Away

Snow photo: mulberry tree outlined with snow against the gray sky towards Lake Michigan, and some of the wind-sculpted drifts along the east side of the driveway.

After I posted yesterday evening's photos, it snowed for twelve hours more.

Although the storm was coming from the west, the wind at our house came out of the east the whole time.

Coming from the east, the wind rushes across a field, hits the tree-lined hill at the edge of our property, and swirls all around before it arranges the snow around our house.

It was very strange, because inside the house, we couldn't hear the wind. If I looked out the south window, I could see the snow going sideways in pulses, but sitting in my knitting spot it was quiet.

When I went outside and shovelled the driveway out (again! this is supposed to be spring, here, weather!) a drift had formed across the bottom again, but not as high as the one I broke up with my car yesterday.

We skipped the Easter egg hunt this year, even though it will be the last year our son is young enough to go.

Last year there was snow at Easter, and they moved the hunt inside the school.

It did not work out well: they had the kids jammed into a hallway with the eggs scattered on the floor. The kids in front scooped up bags of eggs. The ones in back got literally nothing. Not one egg. There was no limit, like "Each person scoop up five eggs and stop", then see if there were any more.

Between that bitter memory and the state of the roads, when our son said he didn't really want to go, we didn't push him.

We stayed home and dyed eggs.

Last year I used the leftover egg dye on tussah silk.

This year, my mother cleaned out her weaving stash and gave me some of the old Maypole wool from back in my weaving-lesson days. I took a couple of the dull tans or very light browns and nuked them in the microwave in the leftover dye mugs.

I pulled the cardboard core out of the center and stuffed a couple of the Maypole spools in there whole, since I can rewind them on my ballwinder afterwards.

That rich purple mop on the left started out as institutional beige. When I flaked out the top a little, I found the inside had taken up the leftover blue dye and gone a peculiar green color, like a healing bruise.

Just call this "biliverdin".

I Blame the Bloggers

And their nifty hand-dyes.

And Easter egg dye on sale for 36 cents after Easter.

And my "functional is better than decorative" upbringing, which looked at 8 inches of Easter-egg-dyed tussah silk knitted in brioche stitch and said, "What the heck you gonna do with that?"

I thought I'd dye enough more tussah silk to knit "that" long enough to call it a scarf.

After I had dripped dye onto it, I had dye left over, so I skeined off the two smallest balls and dyed one with the green/teal and the pink, which had taken the best the first time, and the other with the yellow, orange, blue, and purple, which had not taken very well.

The blue is still a wash. It came out almost completely when I rinsed the yarn, including out of the purple, leaving it bright pink. The silk doesn't take the yellow or the orange very much at all. I think the photo is brighter than the color in real life, but you can see that it lost a lot of intensity from wet applied color to rinsed and dried color.

But it was fun, it gives me some tussah silk to play with in other colors than honey-blond, and it was safe for my septic tank.

Skein Question

Q: Do I have to use my arm to wind skeins like your elbow skein? Because it hurts my shoulder when I do that.

A: No, you can use something stationary, like a chair back, or chair legs, or a warping board or warping mill. The important part is that the yarn crosses itself, makes an X, so it is a figure 8. It can be as long or short as you need, wound on anything handy, but as long as you get it to cross itself in the same place, the cross will keep the threads in order.

(Next time I wind a warp for my loom, I'll take pictures.)