Coloring

I've always wanted to try and dye my yarn myself. Just to see how it turns out. My original plan was to take some of the cheapy, natural colored yarn I've bought last time Aldi had sock yarn on sale, use the Kool-Aid (natural food coloring) I've picked up for that purpose last time I was in the US and go for it.
The first problem I've soon discovered was that I didn't pick up any Kool Aid last time (of for that matter any time). I did pick up some Dye Rite instead. Well Dye Rite is more for cotton and I wanted to dye wool, but after searching the internet a little I've found that it does seem to work with wool as well, so I decided to give it a shot.

I took the two skeins of yarn, wrapped it into a hank and placed it into a glass dish.


Then I added water


The next steps have no pictures because I forgot to make them. Sorry.
I've had three colors: Teal, dark green and dark blue. I've mixed them up with water and just poured the dye over the wrung out yarn. After everything was saturated I placed the dish into my microwave and nuked it for a good ten minutes.
I've then tried to wash the superflues dye out, which took a long time (like ten times and still dye got out).
After drying it it looks sort of like this:
A bit more green than that really, but I seem to be unable to take a proper colored picture of the finished yarn.
All in all I'm quite happy and am looking forward to see how it knits up.

I've finished a scarf - Kernel using Noro Maiko.




Seriously lovely!!!

200

Yeah, this is my 200th post here.

*throwing confetti into the air*

I've started blogging about 3 years ago. My idea was to show of my stitching (which was at that time my primary hobby) and give my family and friends an opportunity to take part on what I'm doing when I don't see them. Due to my job I do travel a lot, so I do see them not quite as often as I would like.
I finished quite a few stitching projects in the mean time; travelled to Japan, Scotland, Iceland and the USA; switched my focus from stitching to knitting; bought a new, really nice, Nikon camera and really enjoyed to sit down once per week and let everybody in to my life.
One positive side effect from this whole blogging business is that when I try to remember when I work on one thing or another, I only need to go to my blog and check out when I wrote about it.

This week I've finished a new pullover, and just in time. I did snow in Dresden on Thursday, something I didn't figure on when I packed on Sunday, so the fact that I had something extra to wear was very, very good

The pattern is Margot, from the last Knitty, the yarn is called Soft-Merino from Wolle Rödel. I love the color of that yarn and am quite happy on how the pullover turned out. I haven't washed it yet, and hope it's not expanding - this would not be good. I've got one ball of yarn left, and right now I'm thinking about making the pullover a little bit longer, but I'll wait for the after washing to decide.

My mom asked for a winter hat, so I quickly made one
This pattern is called Coronet and is also from Knitty. My mom's request was for the yarn to be machine washable, which it is. I quite like the result.

S.E.X.

This is not what you think it is - or maybe it is, but I don't think so.
S.E.X. is nothing dirty and has nothing to do with what two consenting adults might get up to if they find themselves alone. S.E.X. stands for Stash Enhancement eXperience - or, in other words, a shopping trip.

There have been two during the last week. One was in Dresden where I found this really nice yarn store that stocks a lot of the stuff I really, really like, i.e. Rowan yarns, Noro and, best of all in my book, lopi, the Icelandic yarn. I tried to hold myself back, but I did end up with two really nice yarns.

One is a Noro yarn I've haven't heard of before (and even Ravelry couldn't help me with it). It's called Noro Silk Camdeboo and is a mix of 35% silk, 35% lambs wool and 30% kid mohair. When I googled 'Camdeboo' I learned it's a province in South Africa. The area is (I'm sure among other things) famous for their angora goats from which the Mohair is coming from (why it is that mohair comes from the angora goat while angora itself comes from a rabbit, I have no clue)


Anyway, it is a lovely yarn and I bought enough for a nice, luxerious scarf.

The other find was four plates of unspun Icelandic aka Plötulopi.


I've bought some of this on my vacation in Iceland and made a felted bag with it and plan on making another bag from this one. Though it's not really easy to knit, once it's felted its really sturdy and looks really nice.

The other shopping trip brought me to Michelstadt in the Odenwald. Every year there's a needle craft fair going on there and it was our second time we went there. There are a lot of German needlecraft stitch designers there with a lot of really lovely stuff. Not much yarn, though felting was a big topic and also quilting.

I bought three pattern (even though I haven't really stitched anything in a while) and also what I think might be the start to my christmas card production.

I'm not 100% sure yet if I'll try to work with the hand painted fabric or not. Guess I'm going to play around a bit with it first.

Other than that, I've got two pairs of socks to show:

Those went to my sister and she got them and they fit, so all is well. My sister is working a lot with beads, so my though was that a beaded sock would be perfect.
The pattern is from the book 'Socken aus aller Welt' from Stephanie van der Linden.

The second pair is for a friend of mine. Her feet are about 4 sizes bigger than mine and as I couldn't ask her to try them on (we live quite a bit apart) some of my friends closer by got asked several times while I was working on them what shoe size they had and, when they had the correct size, to try them on.

The sock does look a little bit strange in the pic, but only because I pulled in onto a made up sock blocker for the photo and I think I went in the wrong direction with the width versus the length ratio.

Pattern is also from Stephanie van der Linden, but this time from her book 'Der geniale Sockenlehrgang'