Happy New Year!

Yesterday was a lovely day, despite needing to do some boring tasks.  On my way through the mail, I discovered that Franklin of the Panopticon had sent me a campaign tour host badge for the photo that Yam, Lynn and I took of Dolores on the streets of Hong Kong.  He had also sent one for Yam, so I arranged to meet up with her at Cheer Wool, a Hong Kong LYS that is having a little sale. Here is the photo that we submitted to receive the badge.

While I was waiting for Yam at Cheer Wool, I ran into Siow Chin, who was buying Silk Garden for mittens, and we were discussing overdyeing yarn.  I told her that I had photos of a source for acid dyes in Hong Kong (apart from Yarn Workshop) and that the photos were taken for a blog post, but that I had never gotten around to posting about them.

Shui Shing Hong is a classic old school Hong Kong shop in a side street in Sheung Wan (contact details, including a map from Sheung Wan MTR, are in the link).

 

I discovered this place through the power of Google, and it sells food chemicals (including citric acid and large bottles of vinegar). They sell a wide variety of food colours in industrial quantities.   The fellows inside the shop seemed to be quite dubious about the use of the food colouring on wool, but are happy to decant smaller amounts of the powered dyes for sale. The dyes are in large, very dusty bottles, and the prices vary wildly from colour to colour.  The prices for all colours are way cheaper than the best prices that you can obtain for conventional acid dyes, and they are dispensed in little plastic bags.

  

I used these dyes to dye the yarn for my Koolaas hat, and go through their citric acid a lot!

In the afternoon, I had to go to the Transport Department to renew the car’s registration, and faced a huge queue (over an hour long).  Luckily, I had come prepared with my Juno Regina, which still has a while to go before it can be worn. I love how knitting makes waiting bearable!

Tonight we will have a quiet night in with a leg of lamb and red wine, and more Juno Regina.  Today I need to load up more stock to the store, and get everything ready for the January Sale on cones of yarn. For all my readers out there, I have a coupon avialble for use at the store.  Simply email coupon@yarnworkshop.com, and you will receive a 10% off  coupon (valid for retail sales only) that is valid until then end of January.  Happy New Year!

My sister’s Christmas knitting

I am fortunate to be part of a family of knitters. We have just returned from our quick Christmas trip to Australia (sun, beach, stone fruits, delightful), and while I was there I took these shots of some lace knitting completed by my extremely talented big sister. She has long been my chief knitting enabler, with a keen eye for on-line sock yarn purchases, and is always available as my technical expert. The baby blanket is knitted using the Estonian Lullaby baby blanket from Fiber Trends and Yarn Workshop Frankston (under 4 skeins). It will be given to a baby due early in the new year.  As well as being a better knitter than me, my sister is also way more organised! 

The scarf below is knitted from Heng Yuan Xiang lace weight yarn that I gave her for her birthday, and uses under 100 grams.  The pattern is Estonian Garden scarf from Fiber Trends  (notice a trend with her pattern choices)?

My sister has already given the scarf to her cousin in law.  I don’t think that I can speak for all Australian knitters, but in my family we do not have a tradition of giving hand-knitted goods at Christmas.  This is probably due to the summer heat, making knitters reluctant to have an intense pre-christmas knitting burst.   The lucky cousin will be returning to the French winter in the very near future.  Here is another (slightly blurry) shot to show the detail. I think that it is gorgeous.

To facilitate further knitting adventures,  my sister received a set of Knit Picks Options needles for Christmas. Some times it is very handy for her to have a sister that runs an online yarn shop.

Baby knitting

Yet another Estonian Lullaby baby blanket - this time to be sent to the UK for a friend’s baby (who is one quarter Estonian). Nothing much exciting to report, (you can see  my earlier post on this pattern for further details) – I’ll have more details later this week of my sister’s version of this pattern (using Yarn Workshop Frankston).

After realising that baby blankets take a long time (especially in fingering weight!) I devised this hat, which is ideal for using up left over sock yarn.  This hat was knitted using left over Footscray.  Another baby hat should be generated over this week for a little girl recently born in Conneticut, and will try and write up the pattern when I am in Australia over Christmas. It will be called the Barker hat, in honour of the most useful baby book author I encountered when the girls were in those early days.

Below you can see them put togther on one of older daughter’s dolls (in her new bedroom). 

Many thanks to all of you who wished me good luck with the move.  We needed every bit of it… To date, we still have only one curtain hanging in the master bedroom (one hanging track is not properly affixed); no paintings hung anywhere (the plaster is cracking and it needs to be fixed before the paintings can be hung); and NO OVEN! The last circumstance is driving me batty.  Two weeks without an oven in the holiday season is some kind of special torture for me. There is an oven in place in the kitchen, apparently it is brand new, but it seems to be completely without a thermostat.  It has only one temperature: thermonuclear.  I discovered this when I managed to burn a curry in 35 minutes after setting it to gas mark 2 (300° F).  Further tests with gas mark 1 revealed the same result. The contractor had promised that it would be fixed by last Friday, and has been dodging our calls since then.  If we were planning to spend Christmas here, I would be truly panicking.  Luckily, we will be having a traditional Australian beach Christmas.

During the two weeks since the move, things have been insane here – lots of orders for Yarn Workshop, my birthday, older daughter’s birthday (luckily I had outsourced the baking of the birthday cake for older daughter), and mass layoffs at my husband’s employer.  Fortunately, he is employed for the time being, but we will see what the new year holds.  If I don’t post again before Christmas, Merry Christmas to you all.