Movie Review and Craft Update

I kind of what to see the movie New Moon, and sadly I only want to see it because the first one was so bad.  I found another blogger on wordpress who reviewed the movie and even though I have not seen the movie yet, it sounds like what I would expect(only I plan on seeing more humor in it).  I keep seeing the image at the end of the blog and it always makes me giggle.

 

Now an update on the crafts. Ha, craft update on the craft blog.  My mother-in-law asked for practical items for Christmas. So I am working on making her a washcloth, washcloth, washcloth, and washcloth for Christmas.

For my personal knitting I have cast on two socks. One is a “mystery sock” from a group on ravelry.

Tonight comes the  final clue(I think) that will wrap up the foot and toe.  It is made with mosaic knitting, which I find very interesting.

My other sock is the Herringbone Rib Sock from a magazine I have.

I love the colors in this sock!  It is going slower though, due to wanting to keep up with the “mystery sock”, putting up with school/work, and Christmas knitting.  I do have more knit than this of the cuff.  Once I hit 5 inches I plan on starting the heel flap.

School Block and a Slight Craft Block

If you are a friend on facebook, or have seen a couple of my past posts, you may have noticed that I am having trouble finding motivation towards my school work.  Well, I decided, after attempting to work then getting my self into an emotional mess over my lack of motivation and the fear of ruining my GPA and having to leave grad school, that I am going to continue to not do school work until Monday when I am stuck at school and have nothing from home to distract me.  Since I had that emotional brake down this morning I have even found the lack of motivation in my crafting(horrible I know!) I don’t want to spin any of my beautiful fiber or work on my Wanida sock.  So, since the weather is starting to cool down, I plan on making a hat.  But I have so many hat patterns I want to knit!

1-MacDuff

2-Frivol

3-Cap Karma Hat

4-Noodle Cozy

5-Swirly Hat

6-The Amanda Hat

7-Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks Hat

8-Corrugated Rib Hat

9-Bloody Stupid Johnson

10-Weasley Twins Ski Cap

11- Nottingham

Thanks to Haley I do have a way to settle my dilemma. Random.org.  Very helpful when I have a list of things to do and don’t want to make a decision.  Random number was 1! So I shall cast on MacDuff tonight.  I actually have a yarn that I want to use for this one.  It is Country from Caron. I don’t know if it is a “heavy worsted weight yarn like the patter asks or not.  I think I will go down to a size 7 needle just in case(and I don’t think I own a set of 8 dpns).  Hope this works.  I need help getting out of my slump.

Later: This yarn is lovely, but I think it will be too thin for this hat.  I wonder if I have something that would be just as nice, but thicker. Meow

Dying Day

I had a lot of hair dye left over from my hair dying experience.   While rinsing my hair, both when it was getting done and when I just washed it recently it turned the water a brilliant shade of blue and the first thing that came to my mind was “That would make an awesome dye color on yarn!”  So I did a small amount of research and discovered that semi-permanent hair dye has similar properties as henna, which is used as skin art, hair dye, and dying yarn.  I fired up my dying pot and set to work today to see what would happen.

First I heated water with 15 table spoons of vinegar and allowed my blank sock yarn to soak for 30 minutes.  When that time past I used the smallest spoon on my measuring spoons to get a glob of dye (manic panic is in a gelish form). I then randomly placed the spoon into the yarn allowing areas to soak more dye than others.  I also did a random flick action to get the remaining dye off the spoon.

I let this set for 30 minutes.  My final result was this:

Well that is a bit dull for me, so I emptied the pot of bright blue water(what I was kind of hoping for with the dying process) and filled it back up with clean water and placed my now light blue yarn into the pot.  I dug out my emraled green dye and used an old turkey bastor to insurt dye deep into and on top of the yarn.

Timer set for 45 minutes for this one, though with 20 minutes remaining I decided to lightly squish the yarn with my wooden spoon to move any unabsorbed dye to a new location.

Well to my surprise all of the blue dye bled out of the yarn.  So what I resulted with was a green and white yarn.  There were some large areas of white(too much for me) So I added some more splotches of green dye to the yarn and squished it so it would disperse through. The wet final version of the yarn is this:

Not at all what I was going for today, but I learned a valuable lesson: semi-permanent dyes do not work on yarn.  At least not in they way that I have learned to dye yarn.  At least the Green and White are my school colors :-p

Fun pic to keep me from school

Just to kill a few moment from doing school work.  I love this picture.  I find it adorable.

Letting my Nerdness show.

As I wrote in my last post I dyed my hair blue.  Why?  *shrugs* Why not?  I need a change, hopefully one that will help me get more active in my life and do something productive.  I don’t know if that productivity has kicked in yet, but hey, I am finally updating my blog about it.  Here is a cummy pic of the hair from my camera phone, so not that great.

Okay….Don’t know why wordpress wants to put it in sideways, but I really don’t care.  There is the picture.  Yay! Blue Hair!  I wonder if I can use some of the left over dye to dye a blank hank of sock yarn I still have…hmmm.

In another nerdy move I bought a Decepticon magnet for my car.  So if you see a Decepticon Honda Fit in your neighborhood it is probably me.

Productive Saturday

Wow, with a title like that I feel like I should have posted Saturday or even Sunday, I must have ran out of steam.

My Saturday was filled with more simple experiments and finished objects (or half finished objects).

First I found one of my older CD spindles that had a very small amount of single wound onto it. I had more of this single wound on a knitting needle to save for the plying process because it had gotten to heavy for the spindle.  Well I was curious to find out if I could use the ply on the fly technique for already made singles, rather than doing a regular Navajo ply which I find to be very fidgety and not very constant in plying. Started with something like this:

And ended with this:

Lovely, lovely ply.  So this procedure is much nicer than attempting to do a traditional Navajo ply, and this spindle is now ready to do the ply on the fly with the rest of the unused fiber (like 4.5 ounces).

While I was experimenting on that, I like to switch stuff around sometimes so I don’t get board to fast, I was working to complete my Sam Socks:

I also completed my first half of Cross Roads:

This one is a bit snug on my foot.  So on the next sock I want to continue the pattern before starting the toe.  Later on I will rip back on this sock to make it a little longer and more of a comfortable fit.

I also managed to order for four upcoming birthdays and one past birthday.  I am debating on weither or not to add links to what I bought.  I know some read my blogs(when they show up) and others don’t.  Maybe I can mark the links with their names so they can stay away.  I will think on it.

So that was my busy Saturday, followed by a very blah Sunday.  Today I plan on getting my hair dyed some fun color by a friend.  I will hopefully put a pic here when I get it finished.

New Beginnings and New Adventures

As the title states, this is a new beginning.  A new blog and a chance to try again in the blogging world.  I want to write about the interesting things that happen or I think about.  Mostly I want to write about my crafts and the new things I learn.  So here goes.

Two saturdays ago I went on a fiber buy, purchasing BFL from four different sellers.

First to arrive was colorway Love Letters

Since this was the first to arrive it is also the first to be spun.  I am going to do my best to wait to finish this one before I begin spinning any of the others.

Second to come was Beelzebub.

Today Sunrise

Now, all that I am waiting on is Countess

So excited!  All of these fibers are beautiful!

My adventures with these fibers starts with Love Letters.  Almost immediately I started spinning it on my ashford spindle.  Right away I was not liking how it was spinning up.  The colors were mixing in a nasty way when I was hoping to get some nice striping of colors.  That’s when I hit my first bit of experimenting.  First I attempted to just pull the fiber out color by color.  Well, some of the fiber strands had more than one color dyed onto it.  So not what I wanted.  The best result that I finally settled on was to tare off the pattern of colors I wanted. Then I tore small strands off along the sides of that piece, keeping the patter colors only in small amounts. Those pieces are pre drafted into almost a pencil roving. This way I keep long lengths of color and it is easy to draft!

Experiment two this weekend was learning how to “ply on the fly” and Navajo ply on my drop spindle.  I attempted the ply on the fly with a sample of merino/silk that the Love Letters seller sent me.  All I can say is that I will probably not be spinning any other way any time soon.  I love the way it twists the yarn and the lovely effects it has.  Here is an image of the merino/silk sample still on my spindle.

Since I loved this so much I wanted to Navajo ply my current Love Letter singles so that I could continue this method with that fiber.  So, thanks to YouTube, I also found a video for Navajo plying on my spindle.  I wound the singles off of the spindle and attempted to ply.  Navajo plying is not as fun as plying on the fly even though it gives you the same result in almost the same way.  I had difficulties keeping pieces evenly spun.  But I did get it all plied. Now I am working to get the fiber completed with the ply on the fly technique.

As romantic as the color way name is, I think I am going to name the yarn “Zombies!”  Why, because it reminds me of a zombie.  The green and black with peach reminds me of rotting flesh and the pink reminds me of brains.  So… Zombies!

Now to work on my Wandia sock some.  I want to try to have it done by the end of the month for my KAL.