Friday, November 30, 2007

Yipes! Stripes!

The stripes are coming! If you ignore the poor dye job and the blobs of white wax, you can see stripes! Since my poor dyeing technique and the unfortunate wax decision don't really have much to do with the outcome I was testing -- the striping effect -- I consider this a success!


However, I did have a moment of embarassment as I began knitting. I knitted and knitted and the stripes seemed to be coming out about twice as wide as I expected them to be. Hmm ... What could be causing this? I expected some variation, but twice as much? Surely my math wasn't that bad ... Oh, yes, it was.


I put the pegs 15 inches apart thinking that if a row of knitting used 30 inches of yarn, you would wrap it twice for one row of knitting. Does anyone see the fallacy here? The yarn goes TO the peg -- 15 inches -- and BACK from the peg -- another 15 inches -- for a grand total of 30 inches for each wrap. So, each row of knitting would be only one trip around the peg, not two. Oh, well. The proportions will still be the same.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Self-Striping Socks cont.

I'm ready to start knitting the supposedly self-striping socks. Kate helped me pick some colors yesterday and I dyed the hanks.


The dying process was a little more troublesome than I expected. I think I need to work out a better way to dye the hanks separately while keeping them together. I ended up putting each hank in an old clean spagetti sauce jar and adding dye to the jars. Unfortunately, since I put the yarn in first, it was difficult to stir the dye to blend it and the colors didn't turn out as uniform as they should have. I then put all three jars in a pan in the oven at 200 degrees for an hour. After the yarn cooled, I rinsed it twice in water and synthropol and hung it up to air dry.


There was a significant white space between each hank (about 4 inches) and I dripped a good bit of candle wax at the middle of the white space to prevent the colors from bleeding over. Bleeding over wasn't really much of a problem though, and I ended up with white space and a lot of candle wax that is proving to be difficult to remove. Again, I think I'll have to think up something else next time.


On the positive side, the untangling of the skeins turned out to be fairly easy -- with patience. I laid each skein out in what I hoped was the same position as it had been on the warping board and began to wind it into a ball. With a few snags, much fewer than I had feared, I was able to wind it into a ball and then use my ball winder to make a center pull ball.






Now I'm ready to knit. I hope it makes reasonable stripes. Stay tuned for further developments!

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

UFO to FO!

I've got another finished object! Kate's enthusiasm for the yarn I made with the shades of red roving inspired me to actually complete her scarf right away. I used the Branching Out lace pattern from Knitty. It's blocking on the living room floor right now.













I've also been busy this morning attempting to make self-striping sock yarn. I used Scout's idea on Knitty Gritty for making a warping board suited to this purpose .., and incorporated ideas from other sources ... and my own. I'm using an inexpensive peg board from the hardware store that has holes spaced 1" apart.

I knitted a 10 row swatch in the round using sock yarn and #2 double points, then I pulled it apart and measured it (not counting the cast-on -- which was not considered a row). Dividing by 10 indicated that each row of knitting consumed 30.8 " of yarn.

I knew I wasn't going to be able to be exact and that 15" is a lot easier to wind than 30", so I rounded down and placed my pegs 15" apart. Winding around the pegs twice would equal 1 row of knitting (approximately).

To have more than one stripe color, though, I needed more than one set of pegs. I set a second and third set of pegs on the peg board in the arrangement below:









I decided how I wanted the stripes arranged and then wound on the yarn (2 rounds for each row of knitting). My pattern was to have 8 rows of color #1, followed by 2 rows of color #2, then 5 rows of color #3, and 2 rows color #2 again -- and repeat. I wanted to use Fibonnacci numbers for all of my rows.


Next, I'll choose colors and do the actual dying. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I think I'll drip some wax on the yarn at the place where it changes colors to keep it from bleeding. I tied the skein for each color in three places, but I can see that it will probably be a challenge to rewind the yarn into a skein without too many tangles. Also, as I was winding the skeins, the dowels I used for pegs tended to bend inward, making the distance between the pegs even shorter. I tried to wind loosely, but it may not look exactly right.

Saturday, November 3, 2007

Dyeing and Bleeding

I decided to ply the shades of red roving from Violet against a red silk thread that I had and it turned out pretty nice. In fact, it received the highest compliment imaginable -- my fourteen-year-old wants me to make her something out of it! She really likes it.

The only problem I had with it was when I set the twist, the yarn bled ... a lot. That's pretty common with red dyes, but I think the color is less vibrant than it was before and that's disappointing.

I'm making progress on the stash chest. I've almost got all the paper scraped off and I already sanded one wall.