Emma's Yarn

100% Punta wool, hand-dyed and hand-spun by yours truly. I am really digging the drop spindle these days.

Thick and thin single, 236 yards. This yarn is for Emma, who saw me spinning it at our knitting group and insisted in her very charming way that I let her buy it.

Color Fest's My Name, Color Is My Game.

(ALL PHOTOS TAKEN THIS EVENING.  STUPID CAMERA!)

Finished kettle-dyed lace weight.  I am really pleased with how these skeins turned out.  The gradations in color are fabulous.

Cooling kettle-dyed yarn.  I have used every single piece of vintage enamelware that I own in this little venture of mine.

My indoor clothesline.  It's too cold to hang stuff outside overnight.  It would freeze, and it's not worth the worry.  The house smells like wet wool a lot, so we burn incense like a pack of potheads.  

The dye corner.  The stains on the counter are in improvement, trust me.  My blog is aptly named.

This is how I'm keeping track of colorways.  A quick photo documents the colors I've used.  Easy peasy.

Mission Accomplished!

I know it doesn't look like much, but this folding table effectively tripled my workspace.  All that cleaning/re-organizing yesterday really paid off.  Another thing that pays off is having a handy husband.  Dude just saved me $75 by building me a yarn skeiner.  ( I re-skein everything I dye.)

I have plans for dyeing self-striping sock yarns this fall when I move back home.  This is going to reqire a huge skeiner (and the space for it, hence the wait until fall/moving) to make skeins that are long enough for the lengthy color repeats needed to form stripes.  I'm pretty excited about the prospect, and even more excited about moving.  A double whammy of goodness!

Quick -N- Dirty Post

This is what I've been up to:

This is the roving that I've been dyeing.  The temptation to sit and spin this up has been tremendous!  

Here's some of the yarn, all fingering weight.  There's 100% merino, merino/silk blend, and superwash/nylon blend.  Each yarn takes the dye differently, so there has totally been a learning curve involved.

I took these photos this evening, whilst fending off five cats.  That was a trick, let me tell you. Here's Jack trying to weasel his way onto all that lovely wool. 

I can't allow kitty contamination, so I quickly bagged it all up again.  Not such great photos, but you get the general idea.

No Fingers For You!

Fingerless gloves in Noro Big Kureyon.  So much fun to knit, and so easy, too.  I modified a pattern for mittens that I had used before, (see a couple of posts down) and that was that. Simple.  I had so much fun making these, that I made another pair yesterday.  Behold:

More mitts!  These babies are thick and comfy and perfect for bedtime reading in my arctic bedroom.  (No joke, I can see my breath in there at night.)  These are made from Lion Brand Landscapes Yarn, #273 Spring Desert.  I think my sister bought me this yarn, so that makes it some of the first yarn ever in my stash.  I just needed to wait for the right project to come along.

What I did last week

I managed to get 415 yards on approx. 4 oz of handpainted roving from here.

Mittens from my own thick/thin handspun.  Extremely warm and lots of fun to knit.

Earflap hat, made from Noro Yoroi.  I don't know the colorway, because I lost the label.  It doesn't matter anyway, because they don' t make Yoroi anymore.  I love this hat!  Super warm and the ear flaps are different colors, which I totally dig.  I modified the pattern from the Kitty Hat in Stitch N Bitch.  Easy peasy and a very quick knit.

Doods...I need a camera that isn't 5 years old.  I dream of digital SLRs.