All Things Bright and Beautiful…more spirals.

I finished doing the spirals for my June spiral swap yesterday. It’s finicky working with small pieces of fabric – about 11″ x 14″. I used tweezers to grab the middle of the fabric so I could turn it and then held the fabric with elastic bands instead of doing it in the bowl like last time. The result was a tighter spiral. I also for the most part used a few 10ml syringes to apply the dye. I had better control but it took forever to keep filling them up and using them. All done though and here are the results:

Spirals.

More spirals

Final yellow and golden yellow spiral.

And then from my garden:

Just to prove that I did indeed get some berries from the garden this year. A mad fight with the chipmunks to see who gets the ripe ones first.

Karen

Colour Wheels Mounted

I spent a good chunk of yesterday mounting some colour wheels I had done from a colour study last year onto paper. Most of the girls in my group use card stock but I have to admit that I just use paper. One of the girls in the forum had created a really neat file for mounting these wheels and I started off using her form for the first wheel but basically I’m a lazy writer and wanted to type in my information so I ended up creating a new document in Word, which turned out easier than I expected. The original form was pdf and I don’t have adobe so had to create a new doc file using Word.

Susan’s idea was to attach iron-on adhesive to each square and then iron the colour wheel onto the paper/cardstock. Wonderful idea and it works brilliantly. I started off using some “steam a seam 2″ but ended up with “heat and bond” for no other reason than the “steam a seam 2″ cost major bucks. I’d bought some of this at the fabric store with a 50% off coupon but even then it still cost over $6 a metre (Needless to say it sells for $4 in the States without the 50% off.). The heat and bond was still expensive but at 50% off was the same price for 3 yards and it was wider. I’m sure it’s less expensive in the states as well. Needless to say I found the “heat and bond” after the clerk had already cut the more expensive stuff.

Anyhow they both worked well but I have to admit that if you’re into applique the “steam a seam 2″ is fantastic stuff. It’s tacky on both sides so that you can stick your fabric to it and if you don’t like where you’ve positioned your piece then you can lift it off and reposition, wonderful stuff but expensive.

Here are some photos I took of the colour wheels, unfortunately they didn’t turn out all that great I don’t know why. I tried to adjust the lighting but they still turned out on the dark side, my lack of camera expertise I guess.

Colour wheel assortment I did using fuchsia, cobalt and golden yellow. The dark, medium and light value colour wheels are on the top and the three colour wheels on the bottom are dark, medium and light as well but with black, brown and grey additives.

Dark colour wheel closeup.

Light colour wheel closeup.

Light colour wheel with grey additive using old form.

I was hoping to get all of my colour wheels done yesterday, big joke as I managed to mount 18 out of the 55 wheels that I have. Could be a long process.

Karen

More Amish Diamond Squares

I finally got around to finishing some of the Amish Diamond squares for the block swap I’m participating in for the month of July.

The colours used are Jaquard ultra violet, Dharma ivory (at more then the recommended strength), Prochem’s boysenberry and the green is one I made myself mixing lemon yellow and one of the blues I have, can’t remember which. The black is Kona black.

Amish Diamond squares.

I had participated in this swap last October but there weren’t that many people so our group decided to repeat the swap. Hopefully with these additional squares I’ll be able to make a small quilt. If I don’t have enough then I’ll just raid my stash and make some more. I might just do that to colour balance what squares I end up with.

Karen

18-step Colour Wheels

I’ve been busy doing stuff like gardening and reading and fabric dyeing over the last little bit, nothing to really blog about but I thought that I would post a couple of pictures of two colour wheels that I recently did.

I drew inspiration for the colour choices from the ProChem website and their gradation kits. I didn’t follow their instructions for the 30-step gradation but rather did an 18-step colour wheel using fat eighths and my own dye formulas so the colours I ended up with were slightly different than those pictured on the site.

The first colour wheel I did was called Flower Garden:

Sapphire – Boysenberry – Tangerine

The second colour wheel is called Autumn Blends:

Turkey Red – Butterscotch – Olive

The Flower Garden wheel used full strength dye so the colours were quite intense. For the Autumn Blends wheel I backed off and used 2 tsp of dye per cup and a half of water. I was happy with both of the colour wheels but I’d already done several jewel tone wheels before so the Autumn Blends turned out to be my favorite this time around. The wheel really does remind me of the mix of leaves that you see in autumn – yellows, reds, oranges, greeny browns, browns and reddish browns – very nice.

Karen

Violet to Lemon Yellow Run and Tea Wallets

Thought I would post a colour run I did the other day for one of my group swaps. Jaquard’s violet and Dharma’s Lemon yellow.

Purple to yellow run using violet MX-2R and yellow MX-8G

I also made a couple of tea wallets yesterday using some hand-dyes of mine. The blue and white is Shibori using a larch stitch and the other colours are ProChem’s avocado, burnt orange and rust brown.

Tea wallets showing shibori on outside in Prochem’s indigo blue.

Inside of tea wallets, ProChem’s avocado, burnt orange and rust brown.

Tea wallets with four tea envelopes in the inside pockets.

These cute little tea wallets were made using a tutorial from a clever blogger at Christy’s creations. Look to the right bar and click on tutorials.

Karen

Over-Under Complex Cloth

I have a upcoming swap due this month for my Dyehards group and the theme is Over-Under. I’ve never done this type of complex cloth before so it was a new learning experience for me and since everything turned out quite well I’m pleased.

I drew a lot of inspiration from Ann Johnston’s book “Color by Design” so if you’re interested in this type of fabric dyeing I strongly encourage you to buy her book as it’s all there, a little powerhouse of a book.

I have to admit that after sternly telling myself to take pictures of the steps along the way I got caught up in the process and didn’t so what I have are the finished products and I’ll explain what I did to get there.

I used dry soda-soaked fabric as my base and then added thickened dyes to the fabric to create my pieces. The thickened dye was dye concentrate mixed with print paste.

The table that I work on isn’t large enough to hold a 44″ piece of fabric so I took the one yard and divided it into two managable pieces. First I taped plastic to protect the table and then I took a piece of large-sized bubble wrap I found in the garage and taped that on top of the plastic. I had some debate as to whether I should put the thickened dye on top of the bubbles or lay the fabric on top and roll the dye over the fabric. I decided to roll the dye on top of the fabric because cleanup would be easier.

Look closely and you can see golden yellow circles in the background. In her book Ann mentioned that the grid on the paint tray will indent the foam roller if you press hard enough so I tried this out with the fuchsia dye and it works really well, I was surprised so if you look at the fuchsia you can see some cross-hatch marks.

Next I took an old stencil and used some thickened black to make the flowers. I started off using a foam brush put it pushed the dye under the cutout and was blobby so I took a rounded pouncing foam brush and made up and down dabs, much better.

This second piece was much the same as the first but this time I took a rubber stamp, the Japanese symbol for love, and using the circular foam brush I tapped black dye on it and stamped in various locations all over the fabric.

There seemed to be a lot of white space on the fabric so I took a sea sponge and lightly dipped it into the black and gently sponged all over the piece to give it more texture.

The pieces were fairly dry at this point so I covered them up but was worried that they wouldn’t stay damp even though I know that the urea will work to keep the fabric moist for the dye to bond. Anyhow I gave into impulse and several hours later ended up lightly misting the two pieces with water, something I regretted as a couple of hours later when I checked the black had begun to diffuse and I lost the sharp edges of my designs.

Not to worry though because in the washout the crispness was restored so I have a feeling that adding the water several hours later didn’t really do anything for the fabric because the dye had bonded by that time anyhow. Next time I won’t mist and I’ll only work on one piece at a time so the fabric will be fairly damp by the time I cover it.

Karen

Baby jacket and bonnet.

Finally took a photo of the finished baby jacket and bonnet I made for my niece who is expecting a baby in August. I had a stab at making booties but failed miserably so decided not to do them.

Baby jacket made from a pattern in the Knitter’s Almanac by Elizabeth Zimmermann.

I realise that EZ is the guru of all things knitted but I have to admit I wasn’t to impressed by the directions given. I gave them a brief glance over and started right in. My mistake as you can imagine my woe as I discovered after spending hours knitting the yoke part of the jacket that I was supposed to be placing buttons holes along the edging. I was very peeved that EZ didn’t mention the buttonholes until after the yoke section of the pattern…sort of an…”oh by the way put in a buttonhole every eighth row”.

I then went to Ravelry to find out I wasn’t the only one who made this mistake. What I should have done was gone to Ravelry (forum) and look up info on this sweater in the first place as the girls there had all sorts of tips for making this jacket especially the sleeves.

There are people who are so brilliant at what they do that when they translate something it doesn’t always come across the way it should. In others words what may be obvious to them isn’t necessarily obvious to us so little bits get left out and in this case the instructions were worded such that if you’re not familiar with the terminology/concept then you can’t get the gist of the instructions.

Anyhow the jacket is done and I probably won’t make another. Not that it was hard once I knew what to do but rather why do the same thing over if I can do something else?

Karen

Yarn, toys and accessories

I’ve been working on a baby jacket lately, it’s almost done and I’ll post a picture of it soon but meanwhile some more goodies came in the mail.

I placed an order with Knitpicks for some lace weight yarn. I’d bought a book called “Victorian Lace Today” by Jane Sowerby and Alexis Xenakis and had a hankering to try knitting some of the beautiful shawls in the book. I discovered Knitpicks from the Internet group Ravelry. This knitting community has everything you can think of in the way of information for knitters and crocheters. Anyhow there are quite a few lace shawl projects finished and on the go by members of this group so I decided to take the plunge as it were and order some lace. The shawls are not supposed to be that hard to knit, you just need to concentrate on what you’re doing (famous last words?).

The yarn was quite reasonable but of course one thing lead to another and add the currency exchange plus shipping and of course boom my little order was soon over a hundred dollars.

I ordered three lots of yarns, three skeins each, one lot in the baby alpaca and six balls in Shadow a 100% merino yarn.

Knitpick’s “Shadow” – Midnight and Jewel.

Of course these hanks of yarn needed to be wound into balls so I ended up purchasing a ball winder.

Ball winder

However to use the ball winder a swift is required. The function of a swift is to hold the hank of yarn firmly and to rotate around as the yarn is being wound off of the swift into a ball. Unfortunately these babies cost a lot of money and no way was I spending $77 to buy one so I found a link in Ravelry to a blog where the lady had created a homemade version of one.

Homemade swift with a hank of Alpaca Cloud – Smoke on it.

The swift did work well but as I found out it was easier to feed the yarn off of the swift (stationary) into one hand held above the swift while cranking the ball winder with the other hand. The only problem came at the end when there wasn’t much yarn left on the hank and it slipped off of the swift. Normaly it wouldn’t matter but this was fine lace so of course it got tangled right away and I had to stop and unravel the whole mess.

Knitpick’s Alpaca Cloud lace weight yarn, colour smoke, very very soft.

I knew the lace weight yarn was very fine but until you actually see the stuff it’s kind of shocking how light weight this stuff really is. It should be very interesting knitting this I’m either going to love it or hate it. I probably only should have ordered the one colour but since I was going to pay for the shipping anyway and the Shadow was only $2.99/hank, I ordered more.

Well since I’d ordered the lace yarn I had to order the really nice needles with the slim points to knit it with (translate more money) and while I was there I tossed in a few more accessories.

Needle tips, cables, stitch holders.

The needle tips connect to the cables. They sell an assortment in a case for a reasonable price but since I was already looking at spending yada amount of dollars I kind of balked at putting out the money. I did the math and found out I really wasn’t saving any dollars by buying the kit. It was like getting a free carrying case if you bought the kit so why bother? I figure I won’t need several of the needle sizes in the kit anyway so why not just buy the needle sizes as I need them?

It’s funny because my brain was telling me there was no advantage to buying the kit but I was having a hard time letting go of the idea. Is this a case of brainwashing by being constantly bombbarded by marketing ads that make us think “it’s a deal, it’s a deal”? Another reason behind getting a couple of needles instead of the kit was that I wanted to try out these circulars and see how good they really are. The cable is supposed to be very flexible and without memory so it is easier to handle, we’ll see how it works. Until then…

Karen

Prayer Shawl

Well I finished the prayer shawl last night while watching television. I guess it goes to show you how much time is wasted sitting in front of the idiot box because I crocheted an entire ball of yarn.

I made this shawl from Paton’s Divine, a discontinued yarn that they had on sale at Michaels. I remember when they initially brought in this yarn for the weekly sale and it was priced at $1.99 ball. I thought wow that stuff is going to get snapped up fast but nobody seemed to want to buy it. One of the ladies that buys yarn for our group at church bought some so that’s what I used. From some posts I read on Ravelry I learned that this yarn is difficult stuff to work with.

I found the yarn soft and not that hard to deal with but it did take extra effort to pull it through the loops because it’s such a bulky yarn and I can see if you were going to knit with it, the yarn would be a nightmare. Anyhow it’s all moot as I’ve done the shawl. I’m not sure what blue stands for in the prayer shawl ministry but the idea was just to make someone a warm shawl to wrap around themselves.

This shawl was kind of hard to photograph as it was an awkward size. Blue fuzziness of soft wool, mohair, acrylic and polyester, Denium Storm.

A very basic pattern of double crochet, chain one into the spaces of the previous stitches. I wanted to crochet this project fast. It took four balls at about 2 hours per ball so not bad time-wise, I just needed breaks/days in between balls because of the elbows. Next time if I used this pattern I’d make the shawl less wide so it’s easier to drape over the arms.

I’m done crochet for a while (famous last words?).

Karen

Granny afghan finished.

I’ve had this finished for about a week now but am just posting about it as life gets in the way. Hopefully my son won’t see this but anyhow here is the granny afghan that I’ve made for his upcoming birthday using mostly scraps for the colours and nine (count em) 100g balls of black in Vanna White’s line.

Afghan hanging over back railing of the deck, yes it’s huge.

The first picture I took was on an overcast day and you can’t really see the colours so I took a picture of the ghan draped over a ball indoors. The colours are a lot more brighter in person, neon in some instances, it makes for a very colourful blanket.

Dan’s blanket of many colours.

I’m currently working on a prayer shawl for whomever using yarn provided by the church and it’s almost done. I’ll have to post another picture when it’s finished in a day or two. I’ve also started working on the first of many baby items for the two babes that are being born this August and October.

At some point some sewing would be good as well. Actually my two elbows are suffering from all the crocheting I’ve been doing and knitting is not helping either so it just might be time to switch over to something else.

Karen