Twists of Fate

No, not Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup. I’m thinking about why I buy fiber.

And, frankly, why I buy it in such excess.

What prompted all of this Deep Thinking today? My mother is in town for a week or so to help my sister out when Papa heads back to work. She is, however, coming over to MY place Thursday-Friday and spending the night. We’ll be cleaning and maybe putting some shelves together, but that’s not actually a given.

I’m…sort of dreading it, actually. Y’all know how there are just some folks in the world who don’t understand The Stash. Nevermind that she just bought herself a ring with diamonds and blue topaz in it on a whim. In her words, “…the jewelry store was closing! !nd it was 75% off!”

Maybe if I replace “jewelry store” with “yarn store” or “fleece sale” it might work. Eh, on second thought, probably not. To her, the jewelry is functional. She wears it every day and sees it on her hand whenever she looks down.

Me? I look at these cardboard boxes that have most of my yarn and fiber still stored in them, and I imagine. I think about how awesome it would be to work with that Romney roving I sent to the processor last year. Or ponder whether leaving that Merino fleece from Australia in the warm summer sun might help with getting the grease melted enough to make it worth working on. Or thinking about how neat it would be to dye roving this year before spinning it, and wondering where the box of dyes went off to. Or thinking about how awesome it’ll be to get all my knitting books and binders with patterns in them actually unpacked and on a shelf, so I can “kit up” projects with the yarns I have. Or…well, you get my drift.

Isn’t it interesting how differently we all think? My connections to the physical world are usually my last priority. Maybe it’s because I’m in pain all the time with a variety of conditions that I noted and promptly ignored. I can’t really change them, and pain management is about the best I can do, so yes, noted, will to my best to incorporate things to help, and moving on now. Maybe it’s because I find the world a pretty harsh place, though less so than it was when I was growing up in a pretty awful household. Maybe….

Whatever the reason, I always retreat to my head and my thoughts, daydreams and the amazing, exciting wonder of possibilities. Give me some raw fiber and I can spin you a tale of about a dozen things I’d make it into, if given the chance. And if I do a lot more of that in my head than I do in the real world? What’s so wrong with that? My time, especially lately, is pretty limited when it comes to pursuing my chosen hobbies. If I end up buying (way) more than I can use, and if I can afford to do so, what the hell is the problem?

*sigh* I needed to get that out, I think, before Thursday, so I can be rational and adult about it rather than reverting to my childhood years and feeling guilty for asking for a little extra something when we really didn’t have the money for the basics, let alone the extras. Food for thought, I suppose. A sour meal, to be sure, but food for thought.

In the meantime, I’m going to go fondle some yarn or fiber and daydream. Because it’s my day, and my choice about how I use my time. Dammit.

I just have to mention how very much I love the yarns I purchased from A Piece of Vermont. The colors are marvelous, in very generous skeins, and while I am the slowest knitter on the planet, I keep going past the basket where all the goodies from Jessie are living at the moment to pick them up and squoosh in my hands.

The colorway Fennel is possibly my favorite at the moment. It’s just such a happy green with flecks of purple…happiness! All of them are remarkable though, particularly Stream and…oh, geez. I really can’t tell you how awesome the rest of them are. Just know that if you’re lucky enough to score a skein from her, know you’re getting a treasure!

Plus? That Milo! All those pics make me :D.

I just got the estimates in on my reserved fleeces from the Romney fleece person I love buying from. The three raw fleeces came in at 30.5 lbs, which is about 25% more than I had anticipated based on last year’s weights. Yowsa.

While I would love to be able to spend the time processing these myself, it just ain’t going to happen based on my load at work right now (and at least through June, if not longer). I still have four fleeces from this seller from last year’s shearing that I haven’t had a chance to touch at all. So I’m sending them to Spinderella’s to be processed this year. I need to make a few decisions about what kind of yarn I want spun from these fleeces. With these weights, I think having at least half of each one spun up into yarn would be a good idea. I might ask that they spin all of the white one into yarn for me, because gods know I’m not going to get around to doing it anytime soon. But what weight/WPI yarn? These Romney fleeces are quite lustrous, and while quite soft for the breed, aren’t nearly as soft as, say, Merino. Then again what is, you know? What isn’t processed into yarn will be done as pin-drafted roving, I think, because I really do enjoy working with this seller’s fiber.

So, if you had approx 20lbs of Romney (this is approx weight after washing) fleece, what kind of yarn would you have it spun into? I think I would like some lace yarn, so I can tackle much of what’s included in Victorian Lace Today, and the white Romney should take dye very well if I go that route. I am not sure how well Romney works for socks, or sweaters. Suggestions anyone?

I know there’s some sort of mathmatical forumla that will tell me “If I use up X amount of stash in Y number of days, it will take me “ZZZZ or eleventybillion” years to use up what I currently have”. I’m too lazy to actually look this all up, but I do know that I need to move in May. And that I’d like to document the stash and get it up in a gallery. So in the event that I end up not having enough space to put all my stash out? I will know what I have and where I can find it.

This ambitious system implies that

• a) I will be able to pull all the stash together in one spot.

• b) I have enough room in one spot for all the stash.
• c) I have enough battery power in the camera to photograph all the stash.
• d) someone will be brave enough to come over and help me re-pack the stash.

I actually have the last point there covered - a work friend who doesn’t knit but loves organizing will help me next Sunday. I need to find some stickers and a marking pen, and make sure there are new batteries in the camera. I hope to label the bins with a number, document somewhere what is in each numbered bin, and photograph things as they’re “filed” away.

It’s a plan.

However, I picked up both new yarn and new fiber this weekend. I did mention I have poor impulse control, right? I made a journey to Sequim this past weekend with friends, and managed to squish three yarn stores and three..no, four bookstores into the intinerary in something like a 28 hour period. Yay go me.

Photograpic documentation of aforementioned impulse control to follow. Heh.

Of course, all this is really going to tell me is that I have a terminal case of SABLE, especially considering the rate at which I use up stash vs. the rate at which I am acquiring more. Me + math <> mixey things.

OK, so I am impatient and couldn’t wait for the skeins to dry before taking a picture.

Before:

After:

The after is still a bit damp, so it may lighten a bit at the end. Pretty much what I was looking for, so I guess I’ll just bend on over and change my name? :D

I did my first experiment in dyeing today! I used some Gaywool dyes that I got from Juniper Designs earlier this summer, but hadn’t had the guts to use yet. BTW, that vendor is marvelous. I got the dyes super fast in the mail, and she threw in a free sample of a lovely brown shade that I ended up using today, and which may have made the difference.

I’ll post before and after shots once the skeins are dry, but here’s the gist: I had some really lovely 50/50 alpaca/tencel blend yarn that wasn’t quite the shade I need for a project. I need a red/brick red or maroon/black set for the tri-colored Icelandic Triangle shawl from Folk Shawls, and the closest the loverly Cultured Purls had to maroon was a lovely, soft, beautiful berry color. I could’ve gotten the white, but I figured overdying the berry might work out a little better for me.

I’m done with my first skein of the really bright red yarn, and I (rightly, I think) figure that it’ll take a couple of days for the dyed skeins to dry. So I took a before shot of the skeins, and girded my loins for battle.

Now, Gaywool dyes are, as far as I can tell, the idiot proof dyes of the wool coloring world. They have all the mordants and, uh, crap in them to make the dye strike well. You just toss in a capful of the color to every 4oz of yarn into hot water, mix it up, and add the mix to a pot of boiling water. Enough to cover the yarn. And away you go!

And you know what? It really was just that simple. Since I’m aiming for a dark shade, and the lighting in the kitchen sucks, I didn’t take pics of the dyeing process. I actually read the directions first too, which was a big plus. I did remember that the skeins should probably be wet before dyeing, and since I can’t find the bottle of synthrapol I bought a while back, I just added a bit of dish detergent to the water I soaked the yarn in to get it nice and wet and ready. Which sounds kinda filthy, now that I re-read that, but we’ll let it go.

ANYWAY, I dutifully donned my mask and gloves, used some disposable things to mix the dye up, and? OK, here I have to admit that I just winged it. I had four 50g skeins, so I mixed a full cap of Tomato with a little over half a cap of Indigo, with a glomp or so of the brown. Tossed it in a clean, used Fage Greek Yogurt tub (btw, if you haven’t had that? DIVINE! Especially with honey!), which was 2/3 full of the hottest water from the tap (very hot, btw, and it’s scalded me on more than one occasion), and stirred with a plastic knife. Voila! A scary looking mix of…something.

Once the pot on the stove was boiling, I added the dyestuff, stirred it up and then gingerly lowered the sacrifical yarn in. According to the directions, 80% of the dye will strike in the first four minutes. D’oh! This is where some random kitchen implement came in handy. It’s a big…fork. A meat fork, or something, that the previous occupant left behind. It’s now dedicated to turning over limp, heavy, uncooperative skeins of yarn that are swishing around in boiling, stinky (from the yarn, not the dye), scary looking vats of dye.

I flipped, I turned, I lifted and let drain, and generally poked and prodded it for the first four minutes as directed. I do wonder if I felted the damn skeins, but since they always look completely pathetic and bedraggled when they’re wet, I can’t really tell here at the end. Anyway, I very gently swished them around every few minutes for 30 mintues total, then turned off the heat and wandered away to do some reading.

Something like three hours later, I remembered that I had been in the middle of a project, and went to check on everything. I’m fairly surprised, but pleased to say that the bath almost completely exhausted. I think I used a bit more dye than necessary (I was thinking 50g was more like 2.2oz, instead of the 1.7636981 ounces the google calculator tells me it is), so I’m not surprised the water had a faint rusty brown tinge to after removing the yarn.

The yarn itself? Holy cow if it dries to what I think it’ll be, I managed to get nearly the exact shade I was looking for. How ’bout that?! Spank my ass and call me Charlene if I really did get it right the first time.

Anyway, I’ll post in a couple of days once the skeins are dry with before and after pictures. I’m doing a bit of a Harlot and am attemping to resist the urge to turn the heat on until it’s absolutely necessary. Of course, she lives in Canada, and I’m in the fairly temperate, if soggy, Seattle, so my determination to make it until November seems pretty wussy in comparison.

So, it’ll be a couple of days until the skeins are ready for a photo shoot. I hope to have knit the shawl to the point where I *need* the skeins by then, but with the New Job (bwee!) starting on Tuesday, who the hell knows what’ll happen.

Stay tuned!

Damn insomnia. I’m so tired, and yet, when I curl up to sleepy? It doesn’t come. Foo.

Question for all you yarn addicts. Is there a sport weight (though I’ll take fingering weight) yarn that’s at least 50/50 wool/silk? I’d settle for dyeing my own colors, but I would like at least that ratio of fibers. I’d settle for wool/tencel, or a greater percentage of the silky stuff in the blend. My google-fu is offline, apparently, after five consecutive days of less than four hours of sleep.

I hate that. I need MacGyver to come work some mojo on me. Interpretation of how he manages that is up to you, dear reader. ;D

Alternatively, can I just say RDA is absolutely adorkable as Nicodemus Pratt in that very short lived series Legend? I ::heart:: him so!!!