March 22, 2009

Hand dying and a New Knitter

Ah, finally! Getting out the pictures of our foray in dying yarn. Kate and I had a blast in her kitchen, but realized that outside might be better option in the future :) It's a pretty messy project and we did our best to keep her house from turning rainbow colors. I think there might be a yellow spot on the floor or a blue spot on the counter... Here we go:
We do look a little like Mad Scientists... or Michael Jackson.



Then the yarn went in and we felt more like mad scientists! The yellow orange is kettle dyeing - basically put yarn in hot water, pour on the dye and let it soak in for about an hour. The jars w/ forks sticking out are, uh, some other kind of dyeing where you put different colors in the different jars and let the yarn soak up the colors. We didn't put the jars over heat, though we should have. I think it would have set the dye more evenly and helped it wick up the yarn. Instead we pushed the white bits down into the colors to force some of the dye on, those sections just aren't as bright.


And check out the newest knitter to the Brandon family!

Mikaela said that if I were knitting the entire time we were in CA that she might be bored and wishing for something to do. I had nothing to do in forcing her, she asked me to teach her :) She's got an awfully wide Lamb's Pride worsted scarf going there. I told her to cast on a few too many stitches, but it will be really nice for next winter. I only hope that she finishes it and feels the sense of accomplishment, I don't believe she'll be the obsessed knit blogging type that I am, but I love that she asked to learn a bit about it.
She tried to hide the evidence here, but you can see a bit of yarn stuck to the couch :)

And just for fun, we got to feed the birds! Drew and I skied at Stevens Pass yesterday and the Camp Robber birds were out in force trying to steal lunches... so we fed them some of ours.

March 14, 2009

I'm not dead yet!

I feel happy! And I have been knitting.

I went for a visit to San Jose to visit family and of course couldn't resist buying some yarn no matter how much I told myself I wasn't going to. It wasn't a huge purchase, fortunately. Just some yarn I'm hoping my friend will love enough to want to trade it for some of her yarn and this.

It made this totally wild scarf and I LOVED knitting it! I only really like the rainbow ladder yarn in the detail, so I left it with Grandma because she really liked it.

I guess it has been quite a while since I posted last, but not for lack of knitting. See?



I shipped off the gloves to Michael this morning. I also sent a hat to a friend, but it's part of the secret knittah project, so no pics for a while.
The gold thing is going to become a beach cover up for the recycled art show at work.
The hat beginning is the remake of the chemo hat that didn't work out the first time.
In other news Kate & I did some dying a few weeks ago and I taught my sister in law to knit, but I will put pictures of that up next time. Might get a bit much if I did it all right now!