I posted last week about the samples I made in preparation for dyeing the February Cardinal roving based on Ellen’s picture. I also dyed the fiber, but I didn’t get it done in time for it to finish drying for pictures. We fixed that little problem this morning, so without further ado, here are the results of my little experiment.

I dyed four different colorways, three that were aimed at actually reproducing the colors in the picture, and one that was just riffing off of the new colors on my sample cards.

The first two that I dyed didn’t come out quite as I had hoped, but (as usual) I love the way that they did come out. Both rovings use the same set of colors, but one is balanced more toward the light end of the spectrum,

and the other has more dark.

Put together, though, they’re hard to tell apart.

This pair shows the problem with dyeing high-contrast colors right next to one another. Without some kind of gel thickener, the colors tend to bleed into one another. The dark dye also tends to take over the light regions, evening out the (purposefully uneven) dye application. It produces beautiful results, but it’s not really the representation of a dark forest with a brilliant flash of red that I was going for.

The next roving is my favorite of the bunch. It’s just a combination of very pale colors, all toned down with a tiny touch of gray. There’s a blue, and a green, and a brown that give the hint of color, and the three combine to make a very softly variegated fiber that stops just short of being pastel.

I absolutely love it, especially in the shiny blue-faced leicester roving.

The last roving came the closest to what I wanted. That’s especially good, because I made 8 oz of this one (and only 4 oz for each of the others). This time, I left out the red, and focused on the deep-dark greens.

I tried to leave some pale spots, but again the dark colors bled in and mostly filled the space I’d left undyed. There are some spots that echo the trees in the foreground, but most of this roving is based in the shady greens in the background of the photo.

Instead of putting red into this fiber directly, I kept a small piece aside and dyed it separately, to be added in at will during the spinning. This makes a bright, pure red for maximum contrast with the green, and without the problem of the two colors bleeding into brown.

I think it would also be fun to spin this way, adding in a cardinal here and there on a whim, whenever it seems like there’s a little too much solid. It wouldn’t take much to have a forest full of them, peeking out from between the branches.

In all, I think this was a pretty successful experiment. One roving came close to what I had envisioned, and the others took me in directions I wouldn’t have expected to make fiber that I really like. It added a few more colors to my sample cards and made a few more pieces for the shop. And best of all, it was fun to do. I definitely think we’ll be trying this again soon.

You may remember that I posted a week or two ago about how spring was here.

Well, since then, winter’s been doing its best to convince me that I am wrong. I don’t believe it for a minute…the buds on the trees, the birds singing in the morning, and the sun being up when I’m walking home from work are telling me otherwise, but for now winter has been making a show of being here to stay.

Everyone in lab has been kind of keeping an eye on the end of the 10-day forecast, hoping to get a first glimpse of the temperatures rising into springtime. (Actually, they already have risen. We’ve been above freezing almost constantly for a month now. In these parts, that counts as springtime. Yes, I still love it here.)

This week, it looked like we’d be in the upper 30’s and low 40’s every day.  And then this is what the world looks like this morning:

Looks like we actually got the 4-5 inches of snow that they predicted last night. I may have a strange sense of humor, but really it just makes me laugh. It will all be gone again in a few days anyway, and for now, I’m really enjoying my (hopefully?) last snow of the year.

This snow is the wet, heavy kind that comes when the temperature is really too high for it to have any business snowing in the first place (read: spring). It’s a New England snow, really. It’s not the powdery, fluffy stuff that we usually get here in Wisconsin. I absolutely love the way it sticks to everything, turning all the trees into white shadows of themselves.

I think it’s one of the prettiest snowfalls we’ve had all year.

It looks like spring isn’t coming today, so I think I’m going to go out and enjoy my last little bit of winter on my way to work instead.

I don’t suppose anyone around here needs to be told that I don’t believe in ripping out to fix a problem when a little creative surgery will do just as well. It probably also won’t surprise you that this is especially true when I have two sleeves knit from the shoulder down on size 3’s to fix. I spent some time this weekend snipping and grafting to rework the shoulders on the almost-done sweater.

I’m not entirely sure what went wrong with the shoulder shaping, except that I knit a fitted sleevecap, and then ended up with a sweater that really wanted a drop sleeve. Something about the deep v-neck opening makes the sweater lie lower on my shoulders than I’d expected, making a drop sleeve is much more appropriate. I also made the sleeve cap shaping end too abruptly, which looked fine on the needles but left me with a distinctly bulgy shoulder once things were finished.

See that extra wedge of knitting?

It makes an ugly little triangle shape when the sweater is actually worn.

And you can see that tucking that extra little bulge to the inside really helps things to lie flat again.

The solution, then, is to remove that little bulge altogether. I started out by marking the row of knit stitches that went straight across the shoulder, where I wanted the seam to end up. Then, I snipped a stitch.

And I unraveled the row.

Then, I put the sleeve stitches back on the needle, and pulled out the shoulder shaping, all the way back to the picked up stitches.

And I grafted it shut again.

For comparison, here’s a picture of the sweater with one shoulder fixed and the other untouched. Bet you can’t guess which is which.

Looks a lot better, doesn’t it?

About a week ago, Ellen took a picture of a cardinal. And then, she asked me if I could dye spinning fiber that looks like it.

My dyeing skill is definitely not to that level, but I love a challenge, and what’s a challenge but the opportunity to try something you’re probably not ready for? (If you want to see a master of matching photo to fiber, check out Ruth’s blog over at Impulse of Delight. I want every yarn that she dyes.)

There are two main challenges in this project. The first, is contrast. It’s easy to make yarns with subtle variegation. You layer on a bunch of colors, and you gently smoosh (yes, that’s a technical term) the dye together to mix and blend it as much as you like. For contrast, it’s a different story. Dye goes onto fiber as solutions, not really any thicker than water. It’s easy to let two colors bleed into one another, but it is hard to keep them separate. You can buy gels and thickeners to help out, but I’ve never used them and don’t want to add another layer of complexity to the process right now.

So, contrast. Hard. That photo even has two kinds of contrast; there is the contrast between very dark and very light, and the contrast between grey/greens and bright red.  This is fiber for spinning, so there’s also the additional blending (i.e. loss of contrast) that you’ll get at the wheel from spinning multi-colored fibers together.

Contrast is challenge #1 in terms of difficulty, but it falls second in the process, at the stage where the dye goes onto the fiber and then again when the fiber gets spun at the wheel.

The first challenge is simply choosing which colors to use in the first place. I had the right greens right off, but the right grays just simply didn’t exist in my sample card collection. The gray in the photo is not a simple color; it’s a subtle mix of gray and blue in some regions, and gray and pink in others. Just diluting black wasn’t going to cut it, so I spent yesterday afternoon playing with all the different ways to add a hint of color to a pale, pale gray.

Predictably, I like the blue-grays and the green-grays the best, but I also got a pretty good range of pink-gray and even a couple of yellow-grays (though those are almost more like a pale mustardy brown, if you ask me.)

I usually prefer to use deep, saturated colors with a lot of intensity, but I am finding myself utterly charmed by these pale, pale colors. In their finest moments, the samples remind me a little bit of Blue Moon’s Spirit series, which I have always loved and will someday find an excuse to use. I never knit in white, but I love, love, love all those barely-there shades of color.

Even before Ellen asked her question about the cardinal, Branden and I had been discussing how to add a “suggestions” box to the website so that people can suggest color combinations and/or photos for me to play with when I’m dyeing. I don’t want to do custom orders (at least not as a general thing), because I don’t have and I just don’t want to have very precise control over my dyeing process. For me, a lot of the fun is in the magic of just seeing what happens, and I think that would get lost if I was focused on trying to match someone else’s vision. Or even my own vision, I suppose. I go to the dye studio with deliberately fuzzy expectations, and I’d like to keep it that way.

So the idea of custom “orders” is out, but I really enjoy working with combinations of color that I wouldn’t have put together on my own. I have a fairly limited personal palette, truth be told, and it’s really fun to step outside of it and dye something that I would never think to wear but that represents another person’s taste in my mind. I’ve dyed for friends four or five times, and I really enjoy the process of figuring out which colors will work for them, and putting them together in ways that surprise (and usually delight) me. Basically, I want the push outside of my box that custom dyeing would give, but without the pressure for me to get it perfect, or for the suggester to order if they don’t love what I come up with. Dyeing is always a gamble, and I never want someone feeling obligated to pay for something that doesn’t match their vision.

And that’s where the suggestion box comes in. People can suggest colors, combinations, general ideas (winter ocean, bali sunset…), or whatever else comes to mind, and I’ll put it on my list of ideas to play with someday. I might get to it immediately, I might get to it in a year. I might make a mess of it, or it might come out brilliantly. When the fiber/yarn is dyed, I’ll post it, and people can buy if they like it. If it’s not what they had in mind, it can find a home with someone else.  I’ll get to play, and the shop gets filled with things that someone is likely to enjoy, and anyone who cares to read along will get to watch the journey.

The cardinal picture has been a really interesting pilot study for this idea. I’ve been thinking about it all week, plotting and planning ways to get the colors I want to work in the ways that I want them to work. It’s been a lot of fun so far, and it’s certainly opened up a whole new range of colors for me to explore, even if the final fiber isn’t what I hope it will be.

Thanks to Ellen for suggesting this current exploration, and for the rest of you, keep your eye out for a new suggestions form, once we figure out how on earth to make one that will do what I want. Surely there are some colors out there that you’d like to explore?

Well, almost a sweater. Look at this:

That would be a sweater that now has two cuffs and two attached sleeves!

(Never mind that I don’t really like the sleeve cap shaping and am probably going to snip some stitches and rework it, or that the neck opening hasn’t been picked up and knit yet…at least it looks like a sweater today!)

This unlikely burst of almost-finishing was brought on by a very strict rule that there would be no winding of silk and tencel until the sweater was put together. Amazing how one little rule can completely change the game, isn’t it? With that one little decision, our underdog has pulled out ahead after all.

And now, I think I am off to wind some very soft yarn before heading out to spinning guild for the rest of the evening. We wouldn’t want too much discipline, now would we?

Well, it’s the end of February and that means that it’s time for the Warm Hats not Hot Heads sendoff. I have to admit that we jumped the gun a little and sent my hat on Friday, because today’s schedule was all up in the air and we wanted to send it out on time. So it is off and running, wending its way through the postal system to deliver its message and to find a new home (maybe) with Rep. Hannabusa in Hawaii. I don’t imagine they have much use for wool hats there, but not being used to the cold must make meetings in Washington D.C. all the harder to bear.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, there is a bit of a ruckus going on in Madison about the latest budget amendments being pushed through by our new governor. All the surrounding political discourse has given me plenty of opportunities to reflect on just why WHNHH is so important.

I’m pleased to say that the protests have (so far) remained peaceful, but tension is high and tempers are growing palpably shorter by the day. I was snapped at in the grocery store just yesterday by a disgruntled protester annoyed at having been closed out of the Capitol building, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. It certainly didn’t further his cause in my mind, even though I was predisposed to agree with him.

I have been disappointed by the level of “discussion” that filters out to me from the crowds that surround the capitol building every day. There have been lots of jabs about Gov. Walker’s (lack of) college education, many statements designed to impugn his character and minimize him as a person, but not a lot of intelligent discourse about the right way to do things. I don’t know about you, but a large group of people chanting about how I’m so dumb I never made it through college would be unlikely to change my mind about much of anything, much less inspire me to engage in open public discussion about contentious issues.

And so, I knit, and think of the ideals embodied in the WHNHH campaign. I hope that they find their way out into the world, not only to our politicians and our public figures, but into our own lives and attitudes as well.

My knitted hat is on its way to Hawaii, but my (metaphorical) hat is off to Ellen and to Allison for beginning what looks to be a truly central part of this ongoing political debate.

It started as a fairly innocent swatching project. Mundane, even. I had some yarn for Branden’s scarf, and I wanted to figure out what to do with it. We’d bought three colors, and I wanted them to work together in interesting ways (not just stripes). I’d been through lots of stitch dictionaries, and hadn’t seen what I wanted, but Branden has always been fond of geometric patterns, so I thought that a mosaic might do quite nicely.

Thing is, I’d never knit a mosaic before, and had no idea if they were nicely reversible (they’re not). So, I needed to swatch.

As you can see, I didn’t get very far before realizing that it wasn’t what I was looking for. So I started playing aimlessly, just fiddling around to see where the yarn took me.

I’ve always loved linen stitch, so I tried a little bit of that.

I liked two-color linen stitch even better. That morning, we’d put a sample on the loom for my latest project (the Tosh yarn…it’s beautiful!).

I’m not sure how well you can see the pattern in that photo, but it’s coming out great. In terms of this story, it is only relevant because it meant that I had weaving on the brain.

And so, I started thinking. Linen stitch looks like plain weave, the foundation for many, many woven patterns.

And then I started wondering what a knitted twill would look like. (Your jeans are made of a twill fabric…all those diagonal lines are characteristic of a twill pattern.)

And so I played some more.

Interesting, but a little sloppy and not quite what I was looking for. Seemed like it needed a little more contrast.

And so, a twill was born.

Now, this might not seem like much if you’re not a weaver. It’s a pretty pattern, sure, but it might be a little hard to see why this is exciting beyond that. Twill is to plain weave what purl is to knit. Those two patterns are the basis for a huge majority of woven fabrics. Put together in the right ways, they can do amazing things.

And so I have begun to swatch. I’m not sure exactly where this will lead, and for now I am just focusing on learning the basic grammar of this technique. A simple twill.

A simple twill that changes direction every few rows to create a herringbone.

And now, something just a tiny bit more complicated, but still using only the basic twill structure.

The possibilities are endless, and I am very intrigued. I have a thousand ideas for ways to play with these basic patterns, and when I run out, there’s always this:

I have a sneaky suspicion that there will be a lot more of this on the blog in the months to come. I’ve never seen anyone else knit this way, and I am fascinated by all the things a knitter could do with this simple, simple idea. I bought a notebook. I’m swatching as fast as my fingers will let me. This could be very, very cool.

Look what came in the mail today:

(Picture a kind of sing-song rhythm to that line. Yes, I’m excited.)

Suddenly the swatching project has some stiff competition.

I also just put 30 brand new Hanes t-shirts in the washer for printing this weekend.

I don’t think the poor sweater has a chance.

Well, I had hoped that I’d broken back into regular blogging with that last little burst of posts, but it appears that it is not to be. Life and work have conspired against me this week, and here it is, already week since I’ve posted.

I am getting the feeling that this will be a random sort of post. That’s just how things feel at the moment…random. Fortunately, knitting continues despite the hectic, and I’m almost to the cuff on my second sweater sleeve! There are no pictures, but I’m hoping to have a finished sweater to show very soon. I’m not sure why this one has dragged on for so long; it isn’t a particularly fine yarn, and it’s not a complicated pattern. It just keeps getting put aside and forgotten, somehow. But it’s almost there!

I am actually in very grave danger of being distracted from it again, but I’m trying to stay on track. I have this wonderful little swatching project that I’ll tell you all about when I have pictures, and it’s threatening to turn into an obsession that eats up all my knitting time.

Unfortunately, it has already taken over the place of the project that inspired it. I began swatching when I was trying to pick a pattern for Branden’s scarf, and now suddenly the swatches have taken on a life of their own and run away with another yarn. Maybe I’ll get to the scarf once the sweater is finished?

In other distracting news, I got notification that my Blue Moon tencel shipped today! Very excited to cast on for the next Namaste. Sometimes there are just too many projects to choose from…

We’ve almost finished posting the painted top on Etsy. Turns out there are a couple more photos to take this weekend, but I should be able to get most of it posted tonight or tomorrow – most of the listings are now just down to writing descriptions and coming up with names, so it’s getting there!

I guess that pretty much sums it all up…feels chaotic, but it’s getting somewhere. Lots of things are up in the air and partially unfinished at the moment, but I think it will all come together somehow in the end. There is so much more to say, lots of things to catch up on, but that will have to wait for another day. Hope you’re having a happy Tuesday!

(Edited to add: the first spinning fiber is up now.)

We’ve been busy, busy behind the scenes setting up shop on Etsy. It takes more steps than you’d think to get everything sorted and ready to go. Branden has pioneered most of the shop setup for me, so I have only to show up and write the descriptions, but there has been a lot going on. Luckily, some of that also involves dyeing. Yarns are officially posted now, and we’ll soon be adding this weekend’s rovings to the mix.

I decided to play with semisolids this week. One of the things that I love the most about dyeing is watching all the endless variations that you can get from just a single color.

Chestnut brown, for example, becomes a beautiful shade of mahogany-bordering-on-rose. This is just one dye, with 4 different dilutions to really show off its variety.

The green is a bit more complex; I mixed teal and pumpkin to get my colors, and then painted them on in varying strengths across the roving. Do you see all that depth?

I was really surprised how much the yellow came out in this one. Most of the dye was a 1:1 mixture in different dilutions, but I also threw in a little 3:1 (pumpkin to teal), and it really pops out at you.

This one is quite possibly my favorite of the day, simply because it surprised me so much. I love the intensity of the pumpkin orange. Orange is not a color that I normally gravitate toward, but when I love it, I really love it.

This time I love it.

Of course, teal (and green) will always have a special place in my heart. These are my base colors, the ones that I live by. Accents are wonderful, but when I want a color that I know will work for me, these are where I turn.

This color walks the line between blue and green, and it’s impossible to tell where exactly it falls. It was almost impossible to photograph, and only gets close to the actual color after some serious playing around with color levels in software. (The photo above is the same roving that was in the first picture and looked absolutely, undeniably blue. Go figure.)

Fortunately, Branden is a very patient man who doesn’t mind poking around with the camera for literally hours to get just the right color of yarn in a photo. Nor does he (apparently, at least) get sick of his wife, who is very, very picky about getting the color perfect, and then wants it posed prettily to boot.

We didn’t get around to taking photos before the sun went down, so all of these are “formal” shots taken in our little lightbox setup. I usually prefer to use “artsier” photos for the blog, but I’m afraid this week we’re going for documentarian. But the color is right, gosh darn it.*

There hasn’t been much knitting while we’ve been busy bustling around behind the scenes, but I’m hoping to get some in tonight, perhaps while I listen to an edition of On Point, which Branden called to tell me about tonight. They apparently mention Ellen’s Warm Hats not Heads campaign at about 15 minutes in, so it’s bound to be good. Off to listen and knit!

*At least until you go looking at it with a different monitor – then it goes all wonky again. The perfectionist in me cringes at the thought.