Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Finally finished my six-year socks!  So relieved to have this project off my mind.  The color in the pictures didn't turn out true but they are more of a dark purple than blue in places.  The little cables up the ankle portion were fun to do (I love doing cables).  Now on to finish more already started projects.  I want to get the yellow bamboo scarf off my loom.  I have several other warps already to go on so I can't wait.  Probably not more than  a couple weeks if I were to do it daily.  I've got a hand-dyed warp called Autumn Leaves from Cotton Clouds, a yarn company I've bought from previously.  Beautiful fall colors of gold, red, green and black, with a black weft.  I haven't put it on the other loom because the loom sat in front of a window with direct sun in the morning.  I finally dug out some old curtains (way too long) but hung them up anyway temporarily.   With summer nearly here now I sure don't want to take a chance on any of my hand-dyed yarns and fibers to get sun damaged.  Still spinning on the rose-rust alpaca/merino, but that's something I can do just about any time to relax.  Off to a farm in north WA tomorrow with a friend to look at some raw sheep fleece.  I don't like the smell, but she sure does  :-\

Monday, April 5, 2010

Easter morning turned out to be beautiful, after several days of rain and intermittent snow flakes.  Cold but sunny.  I bet the Sunrise Service was something to see this year.  So many are cloudy and dark.  I finished spinning the blue / green yarn and finally got to ply something worthwhile on the new magical plying machine, aka the Babe Electric Spinner.  What a great job it did.  It went so fast.  It would have taken me several days and a sore back to finish that part.  Now I just need to transfer it from the spindle to the skein winder and off for washing and drying.  This morning I put four ounces of pygora in the dye pot.  The color is called Desert Rose.  Next, as that was cooling, I dyed four ounces of merino top a rich rust color.  If they both turn out to what I expect when dry, I will be carding them together for spinning.  Here's a pic of both on the drying rack.  I love both colors so I'm hopeful they will look really good together.  And I finally figured out why some of my dyeing jobs has darker spots in the fiber.  The dye pots I've been using get hotter around the outside edge than in the middle.  Not sure how I'm going to solve that problem.  My big roaster is used like a large double boiler with water in the bottom.  We'll see what happens with this batch.