Conversation

Jennifer: How about "YO" for a name of your future yarn business?

Me: Not a bad name at all! I should collect a list of names. Names for the yarn store, not names in general. People: "What is the name of your yarn store?" Me: "Stupid Poopy Booger Head".

Jennifer: How about Sit & Spin?

Me: [choke!] You made me inhale my water and spill it down my sweater.

Jennifer: To strangers Carey would say, "I'm the owner of the Sit & Spin store."

Me: We might attract the WRONG sort of clientele, though. Sleazy people dressed in dominatrix outfits enter the store, look around at all the yarn and fiber and wheels and say, "Well THIS isn't what I had in mind at ALL."

Jennifer: Future converts into the wonderful world of fibers & knitting.

Me: "Wow, this is WAY better than S&M!" they will say as I show them some knit stitches.

Jennifer: Just tell them to think of all the money they could save if they would just knit their own sex stuff.

Me: You know, I think they have pattern books for that. Frighteningly enough.

Jennifer: You're probably right. Very scary!

Me: You know this conversation is totally going into the blog, right?

Jennifer: Sweet!

Fashion Queen

Okay, so I've been a bad blogupdater this week - but it's just because I've been spinning more blugly, so there's nothing new to show off.

Anyway, it just occurred to me how odd it is that I have no patience for FASHION, but I'm obsessed with KNITTING, which is essentially an act of clothing or accessory design/creation. How can I immerse myself in the world of fiber arts if I have no concept of Fashion? Most knitwear pattern designers have some sense of their own style; even if it's not a mainstream or conventionally "acceptable" look, there is usually an identifiable visual idea that they've taken to.

On the way to the office, I was thinking about how I dress, the things I prefer to buy and wear and, looking down at my three-years-out-of-style cardigan and my zip-up Keds sneakers, I realized I DO have a distinctive style. And that style is "Mr. Rogers."

Comparison

After taking 327,482 pictures with my new camera, I finally learned how to FOCUS, I think, and managed to get a moderately accurate representation of two Blugly swatches. The swatch on the left side shows the Blugly that had more undyed gray in it, and the one on the right shows the full-force Blugly. Gray-Blugly is a little bit darker than it appears below, and has a lot of soft yellow splashes in it. It also has the saturated colors of Full-Force-Blugly, just mixed in with lighter colors.
I'm going to attempt to put up a poll so we can decide what to do. The sweater I am going to make is Mr. Greenjeans (click on the words to link to it) and I have an idea, in general, about how I'll use my Bluglies. (That sounds wrong, somehow.) Anyway, look at the sweater and then refer to my poll questions.

Anyway, that's all I did this weekend; knit swatches, played video games, tried to clean but turns out cleaning is REALLY boring and I don't like it, so I'm just not going to do that anymore.

To distract from my lack of accomplishments, HEY LOOK, A KITTY:

Dyeing Options

One observant commenter asked me, "Dumb question, but if you want the whole sweater to be one color can you dye it after it's made?" Well, Maxim, I'm glad you asked that (because I had nothing else to talk about, really). The answer is: YES, you could, and that is how many solid-color garments are dyed, commercially.

Allow me to use some inadequate photography to illustrate dyeing options. In the background of this photo, you have a garment-dyed orange t-shirt, which gives you one very even, very solid color. In the top row, you'll see a ball of yarn which has been dyed hideous neon orange AFTER the yarn has been spun - again, giving you a very even, solid color.

In the second row, you'll see two commercially prepared balls of HEATHERED yarn; which means they were dyed as fiber (before spinning) with slight, purposeful variations in color and then machine-spun, so that the variations are distributed with precision throughout the plied yarn.

In the bottom row, we have a skein of handspun Blugly, and a ball of handspun something-I-bought-somewhere which you can't see very well because I do not know how to work the godforsaken flash on my new camera. The handspun Blugly has been dyed before spinning, with many painfully clashing colors to give it lots of variation and nuance in the final plied yarn. The handspun washed-out-flash yarn next to it was dyed in three colors, spun into three different singles, and then plied together. (So that the final yarn has one ply of yellow, one ply of pale orange, and one ply of reddish orange.) The advantage of handspun yarn is that it's more artistic and unique than something you could buy from a mill, and that you can produce design ideas of your own when you can't find what you're looking for at the yarn shop. So that's really what I'm going for.

The issue I'm having with the Blugly is that I BROKE ALL THE RULES BECAUSE I AM A DANGEROUS REBEL and did not dye ALL of the fiber ALL at the same time. I dyed two separate batches of yarn 2 weekends ago, and they are identical to each other. Following my careful notes, I dyed three more separate batches of yarn this past Saturday, and they are identical to each other. However, the 3 piles of fiber from this Saturday are NOT identical to the 2 piles from last Saturday. The most recent group has a lot more undyed gray in it. I'll update more on this tomorrow, but I've just spun a single of the newer stuff, and it looks, in my own words, "neato." So, I don't think it will be a problem if I artfully combine the two (as they do match) - but I'll photograph some swatches and see what you guys think before I start making the sweater.

1400 Yards

We did the math, and figured out that I need approximately 1400 yards for the Mr. Greenjeans sweater, at my gauge. (That's rounding up, for safety.) Last night I plied a second hank of Blugly. THIS TIME, I remembered to count the wraps while I was winding the yarn from the bobbin to the niddy noddy, and discovered that one full bobbin of Navajo-plied Blugly yields just over 112 yards. So, 11 more to go.

That, my friends, is a whole lotta Blugly.

I was thinking about this daunting task I've set for myself, but then I realized I can spin a bobbin full of yarn in one evening. That's no big deal. (I'm sure advanced spinners are way faster than this - I am not advanced, and I am way slow.) I usually spin at least two on Saturdays. And I'm not the type of person to take the advice I've read in every spinning book or column on the internet and actually WAIT to make the sweater until all the Blugly is spun. Oh no. There will be no waiting.

Also, I'll be accepting advice regarding color as soon as I spin some of the second dye-batch of the Blugly. You'll see that although it has the exact same colors as the first batch, it has a LOT more gray in it. This is not a tragedy because it's really pretty. I want to use both, so I was thinking of doing the button band and the cuffs of the sleeves in the less-gray Blugly, and the body of the sweater in the more-gray Blugly. But first I have to spin it and take pictures of it, and maybe knit a swatch with both colors together. Then we can decide.

More of the Same

I did a lot of work on my dyeing and spinning this weekend, with very little to show for it, because it's just More Blugly. It's gonna be like that for a while. Dug is encouraging me to mention that despite purchasing gloves and not dyeing my hands this time, I did manage to dye my nose blue. Which, okay, fine, I did, but it came off so there's no need to keep going into fits of laughter all weekend long over it.

In other news, I explained to my mom (well, I call it "explaining"; she'd call it "bitching") that she'd better learn to knit - and fast - because I can't spin and knit at the same time and I'm going to need help using up all this yarn I'll be making. And whaddya know if she didn't take me seriously:
THIS is the beginning of a beautiful seed-stitch scarf, out of the Muppet Entrails 1 yarn. I don't know how my mom learned to purl, let alone do a seed stitch in the few days she was practicing on her own. It looks really cute, doesn't it? Good job, Mom!

Speaking of new knitters! My friend Joe (of Windy-and-Joe) is also taking up the needles. Alas, he has learned the hard way that knitting and cats don't necessarily mix. Joe, repeat after me: "No-no-kit-tee, I don't want you to EAT that. Nooooo-NO." It becomes a sort of meditation mantra after a while. It's the knitter's version of "ohm".

Come to think of it, they should include cat tactics in knitting instructions. Row 1: Knit, Purl, No-no-swat, Knit to last stitch, no-no-swat, LET GO OF THE YARN YOU LITTLE #$#%#, turn work.

Blugupdate

To tell the truth, spinning the Blugly wool has been a pain in the pooper. It's kind of snargled and tangly, and doesn't draft as easily as the Muppet Entrails 1 & 2 did. It's possible that I felted it a bit in the dying process, so we'll see how the next batch goes. (We dyed two portions of the roving last weekend, so I have a second batch all ready to spin tomorrow night. Report to follow.) Fortunately, even if the whole bag of wool sucks, I love it too much to abandon.

See? Oh, and you'll notice that this yarn is not blurry.
That is because Dug got me a NEW CAMERA for Valentine's Day, because he is brilliant and handsome and wonderful. Now if only he could make me be able to knit a gauge swatch with any tiny degree of correctness.

The sweater I'm designing Blugly for calls for a gauge of 18 stitches = 4 inches on size 8 needles. It just so happens that Lovely Jennifer gave me some size 8 needles she didn't like. Excellent! I knit a swatch and MY gauge was approximately 18 stitches = 237 inches. And I'm a really tight knitter. So I don't know what's going on. I had a similar problem using a DK weight yarn trying to knit a hat - the gauge was all over the place. I hope this isn't a nightmare in the making.

Luckily, a happy accident has occurred. I looked at the pattern after swatching with a couple of other sizes, and it says to use size 8 and then size 7 needles for the ribbing. I was thinking it said size 6 for the ribbing, so I had ordered that size from Knitpicks this morning. And THANK GOODNESS, because it looks like size 6 needles will be just the right size for the whole darn sweater.

I'm kind of happy about that because even though knitting on smaller needles means the project will take longer, the Blugly yarn is closer to DK than worsted and when I was swatching it looked a lot better on the smaller sizes. Plus, I've been knitting socks on tiny needles for so long that using the smaller ones feels more comfortable. Not to mention, people will be really impressed with me when they see me knitting a huge buffalo-sized sweater (assuming my gauge stays stupid) on small needles.

In other news, I have finished ONE of the Tofutsies socks and have almost started the second one. True to form, I cast on 16 stitches, knit two rows, realized I'd utterly botched it, ripped it out, cast on 16 stitches, knit halfway up the toe and realized on the first sock I'd cast on 20 stitches and used an entirely different increase pattern. So the toes did not match at all. I'll be starting on Take 3 shortly.

Navajo Plying: Why I'll Never Knit Again

On Sunday, I taught myself how to Navajo ply. There are a lot of problems with Navajo plying, the main one being that I will never knit or do anything else or leave my house EVER AGAIN, because I will be Navajo plying. I am fully addicted to it.

Navajo plying is a technique used to create a 3-ply yarn from one single (rather than having 3 separate bobbins with 3 singles), by simply making a giant crochet chain and giving it twist. The advantage, if you have a somewhat variegated yarn, is that you can use this technique to keep the colors together.

Here is an image of the last of my Muppet Entrails I yarn (above), which I 2-plied, and the first of Jennifer's Muppet Entrails II yarn (below), which I Navajo plied.
As you can see, on the 2 ply, there are different colors being twisted together, but with the Navajo ply, the colors are all kept together. (I'm not explaining that very well, but that's why there's a picture.)

I love the MEII in the Navajo ply. LOVE IT. Jennifer is very lucky that I am a GOOD GIRL and and am going to spin up ALL of her MEII yarn and get it to her very quickly. I am NOT going to become distracted by my Blugly wool and do this:

I am going to Navajo the heck out of this Blugly, people. I mean, once I start spinning it. Which I won't do, until Jennifer's yarn is done. Ahem.

Blugly

Yesterday we (my mom and I) began dyeing the wool for my Epic Sweater. We're just going to do this in stages because there's so much of it, which I know is a mortal sin, but we took careful notes so that we can repeat our steps when we continue next Saturday.

Here's a dyeing-with-koolaid tutorial for you. First, soak the wool in the sink with hot water and a few glugs of white vinegar for about 30 minutes. Yes, I measure liquid in "glugs", which is how many glug sounds it makes as it sloshes out of the bottle. I actually wrote down that I used exactly three for my soaking.
Then, we made up some colors mixing koolaid and food coloring. I had this vision that I wanted a nice, vibrant blue toned down with a kind of purposefully ugly non-color, shown below. The ugly color is dead-on, but the blue isn't as dark as I imagined. I decided the more neon color we got from the Berry Blue koolaid would work great, though. I figured the light gray color of the wool would help mute the color and make it richer. Next, we drained the wool and carefully squished the water out of it. You have to be very gentle with it, or it will felt. Felting is a fine activity, but not for my pretty wool that I want to spin.

Then we laid the wool out on a long strip of plastic wrap and began applying the dye in stripes, for a variegated effect. TIP: Wear gloves. My fingers are still green around the nails. I think this would be a pretty hot look if I were trying to seduce Frankenstein or a zombie, but not, perhaps, my husband.

Once the dye is worked in to the fiber - again, WITHOUT agitating the fiber so much that it felts, it gets rolled up in the plastic wrap and placed in microwaveable dish. Cook it for two minutes, let it rest for two minutes, repeat - until the water that comes out of the plastic wrap is clear. I cooked it for 8 minutes total, flipping the blazing hot mess over once after 4 minutes to keep the dye absorption even.

Once done, take it out of the plastic wrap and soak it again (without agitating it) in hot water with a little soap for a few minutes, then give it a rinse bath (keeping the water the same temperature), squish the water out of it and hang it over the shower rod to dry.

Here is how my wool looks this morning, all dry:

It's going to look so freakin' cool once I've spun it! I have some other fiber I must spin first, but it's going to take a lot of willpower not to play with this instead. I love this color. I shall call it Blugly, and it shall become my Epic Blugly Sweater.

Oddly enough, I haven't settled on a sweater pattern. I think I'll first see what gauge the spun, washed yarn turns out to be. I'm going to navajo ply it, which I taught myself how to do yesterday (more on that later) so it should work out to be in the DK/light worsted range. I'm thinking about doing something like the Mr.Greenjeans sweater from the Fall 2007 issue of knitty.com. But any other suggestions will be welcome! (Keeping in mind that only the last sweater out of 4 I've done was wearable, and I suspect my mom is just being nice about it.)