Felted Merlot

Some of my friends have requested that I hold dyeing classes, and I have declined because my dyeing is such a random process, and I’m certainly not an expert.

I got in some merino laceweight for the business, and needed to wash and dye it for photos, and was also thinking that I would be participating in Secret of the Stole II.  After discussing it with the IT expert (my husband), we decided on nice pale blue yarn.  I started thinking that I was going to kettle dye the yarn.

 

You might notice that there is a lot of yarn – Secret of the Stole II requires 1500 yards, which I had measured off in one huge skein.  It didn’t all fit in the pot, so I pulled it out, looked at the very patchy blue and decided to overdye it with pink.

 

Funnily enough, overdyeing was still difficult with the too small pot, and there were still huge white patches everywhere. I took to jabbing at the yarn with the wooden spoon as it simmered in an attempt to get the dye to take more evenly.  I had completely forgotten that the laceweight yarn is not superwash.  I proceeded merrily, applying heat and pressure to the yarn. The white patches persisted.  Because I did not have a dedicated large dye pot,  I decided to overdye with food colouring and Kool-Aid.  Prior to using a food pot, I though I should rinse the yarn throroughly, and didn’t wait until the water was warm, and shocked the yarn from simmering temperature to cold water.

I then plunged the yarn into the re-simmering pot with the food colouring (yet another dramatic temperature change) – funnily enough, when I pulled it out I noticed it was quite a bit felted.

I still wasn’t happy with the dye job – where had my tasteful pale blue scarf gone? 1500 yards of slightly felted lace weight would need to be overdyed.  I purchased a mammoth pot.  I would love to buy these kind of supplies from thrift shops, but I haven’t seen a household thrift shop in Hong Kong (and I have looked!).  Instead I bought the cheapest biggest pot from a chinese homewares shop.  I decided to overdye with Jacquard fire engine red, and this time I took every precaution to prevent further felting. 

 

It was more than a little felted, and has taken two days of on and off ball rolling to get into balls. Now that it is done, I actually like the felted texture, and I really like the colour, although it is nothing like pale blue.

 

I’m only two weeks behind on the clues for the knitalong, so plan to do some lace knitting when we are off on holidays in Australia.  This is delusional thinking, because we have an insane amount to do while we are there – we have friends and family to see, and the weather will be hot and humid! 

Better photo of the hole

I don’t think that the comment below was facetious, so here’s the hole highlighted.

We have a hole

I always have a pair of plain stockingette socks on the go. I knit them everywhere I have to go, especially at the kids activities, and at knitting groups. If I attempt anything remotely tricky while at knitting group, I end up with the most spectacular mistakes.  When I attended my first Hong Kong stitch’n'bitch I managed to kitchener stitch the toe on the first of these socks at right angles to the toe.  That had to be frogged and re-done when I wasn’t busy discussing yarn and yarn buying options across Asia.

I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about these socks once I saw the knitted up fabric, and it slowed my progress on them. When Becca saw them last night she said “the colours look so much better now that they are finished” and she was right.

 

My lack of attention really shows near the heel gussets, where I seem to have left the most ginormous holes when picking up the heel stiches.  I used exactly the same pattern as I do for all my top-down plain stockingette socks, but I don’t know what went wrong this time and would love some ideas on how to avoid it in future. All advice will be greatfully accepted.

 

Photographing your own feet is no fun!  I took thse photos sitting on the windowsill of my bedroom, and I’m sure that the people in the building opposite (who can see right into the windowsill when the curtains are open) must have thought that I am publishing a foot fetish magazine.  I was straddling the tripod, while trying to look in the view finder to make sure that you could see any aspect of the socks! I feel that self-patterning yarn is cheating a little bit – it really does all the hard work for you, but after seeing Yarnstorm’s most excellent photos of her self patterning adventures, I decided that I would try and take some better photos than plain snap shots. I’m not ready yet to post on the yarnographers group (on Ravelry), but I am seeing an improvement in my shots.

Project Details

Pattern: “A Classic Sock Pattern” in Folk Socks by Nancy Bush in size Woman.  I modified the amount of ribbing, and also did a different toe to use kitchener stitch. 

Needles: 2.5 mm Addi Turbo circulars purchased for HKD $25 in Hong Kong (that’s US$3.20) using magic loop.

Yarn: Online Supersocke 100 Tropic – Color 931.  75% Superwash wool, 25% Nylon purchased from Yarns Galore. The colours are much more accurate in the blog photos than here. The yarn is softer than some other self-patterning yarns, but seems hardy.

In other news, the business is suffering from its success, and I’ve basically run out of yarn (which is a bit of a problem for an on-line yarn seller).  I’m desperately trying to order more, but have been stymied by Chinese New Year, and am likely to be out of sock yarn until mid March. I’m on a learning curve here….

I have received some lovely samples of 50% yak/ 50% wool yarn that I am knitting into Shedir for a very old friend’s mother who has been diagnosed with lung cancer.  I’ll be seeing her in early Feb, so want to get it done ASAP. 

The quiet skein winder

I’ve had a few skeins to wind off lately, which is good news, because I’ve been winding them off for paying customers! I had a little problem with the counter on the skein winder, which was fixed with excellent after sales service from Ball & Skein. So the counter was working perfectly, but like all manual counters, it was a bit noisy.

Over Saturday lunch we brainstormed the problem with some friends of ours, and they suggested an odometer, and further a bicycle odometer!  Electronic bicycle odometers work by measuring the number of rotations of a magnet past a reader.  Saturday night we went off to Mongkok to find a cluster of bicycle shops that are located in the aquarium district. The fish food shops need to be smelt to be believed.  I purchased the cheapest odometer in the shop, fitted it to the skein winder, and it works.  The reader is attached the main upright of the skein winder, and the magnet is attached to one of the arms.

There were a few technical issues in the implementation – the bicycle odometer does not measure rotations like the old counter. It measures the distance travelled by a notional wheel (you can specify the diameter).   I had to return to early high school maths, and figure out what size bicycle wheel (measured across the diameter) would have the same circumference as a single skein wound on the winder. Once I knew that, I could use the trip meter to figure out the length of any skein that I have wound off. 0.28kilometers is 280 metres etc.  It’s very accurate and perfectly quiet, and I think that the skein winder is now quite a bit quicker.

If I had looked around, I would have seen that on Ebay people are selling (generic) odometers with similar functionality for US $ 1. While I didn’t break the bank on the purchase, it wasn’t quite that cheap.

I don’t have any knitting news.  I’ve abandoned ship on the Christmas knitting projects (iTunes vouchers for all!); and have been plugging along on a Debbie Bliss pattern (its an ill formed unphotgraphable lump at present) and a very boring pair of socks. I’ve just been told that the Hong Kong knit bloggers are meeting on Saturday, so I am going to try to knit like the wind to get the vest finished for that.