Yarn Diva

Summertime!

I love the fact that during the summer I get a chance to spend more time with my kids and travel a lot but crimeny....I haven't been home for an entire week at a time since school got out! Don't get me wrong, I enjoy traveling to visit my family and friends but I need to clean my house! Let's not forget KNITTING!  In just two short weeks all of the little munchkins will be going back to school and I can get some KNITTING done!

Of course the fact that summer in Arkansas means 100+ degrees for most of it and little rain, doesn't make one want to drag out the wool to work on a felting project or heavy sweater. I didn't think however that it would keep me from knitting socks too! I did injure my elbow on our first vacation of the summer which makes it difficult, I can only knit for about an hour and then I have to be done! I did cast on for Rogue last night though. I even knitted all of my swatches too! Aren't you proud of me!  I figure if I am going to finish by the end of winter I should start now!  I love the pattern and I spent yesterday practicing my cable needle freedom techniques so I can try to do this with a minimum of stress. I have to say, I bought the book to see how they did it and I totally had an aha moment, it is so simple! Why couldn't I have figured that out on my own????

Alright, I don't have any pictures to upload, so... I think I am done for now. Just think, two weeks from tomorrow I won't have any kids home during the day for an entire 9 months!  It makes me giddy just thinking about it! I need to run and do some school shopping so...until next time!

Back for a day or so....

I know, I know.....I have been missing in action for most of the last month however I did try to post last week and the modem went out for a minute and took the long post with it and I didn't have it in me to recreate it at that time...needed to recover! 

I sat down with the calendar this week and figured out that I had been home exactly FOUR days since school got out for Memorial Day! YIKES! We had a vacation and then a trip for the Relay for Life where I feel very strongly about supporting all Cancers together (long story..different time) and then another trip back to the same place the following day for another week due to a death in the family, back for VBS, then off to my parents and now home to do laundry and head off for a week on the Buffalo River with the in-laws! I am so exhausted by this summer I can't wait for school to start back up! What a relief that will be!

That said this has been nice being the first summer in 4 ...read it...FOUR that my baby sister has not had major abdominal surgery for her colon cancer. This has been really nice because the last three have been so fraught with Drama and her being incapacicated that it is a nice change of pace to actually get to spend time with her outside of a hospital! What would be really nice is if her treatments would start to work already but we will take what we can get at this stage! She is a teacher and tends to only get sick during the summers (don't know how she worked that out but her school is happy about it! :O)!

Ok, On to happier stuff and the knitting that people supposedly come here to see! I haven't done as much knitting as I would have liked here recently because along with all of the travel we have done here lately came a huge amount of driving! Guess who got to do that driving 99% of the time...ME!  DH has been working and not traveling with us most of the time so far (he gets to go this week since it is his family!) so the driving has fallen into my lap which has seriously cut into my knitting time! I have gotten some projects done though...

First I got my Dye-O-Rama package from Beverly who did an AMAZING job! I love the yarn and plan to start my next socks for the trip out of it today!

The soap she sent smelled wonderful and there was also a very nice bookmark! What a great pal! Beverly, I want you to know that the fact that it took me a month to pubicly acknowledge your package is NO reflection on your dyeing abilities, just the amount of time available since I got it! I LOVE IT!

I worked on this great new purse from KnitPicks last weekend.

It was a lot of fun to knit and only took me one day to knit and sew together. I made the freestanding version and Love it but I decided to order more yarn and knit straps for it because I HATE HATE HATE (read: Despise) Hard handles. The lining is still pinned to the outside waiting for the yarn to finish it!

Last but not least are the socks I finished out of my Kool-Aid yarn. Modeled here by some tremendously skinny ankles. I loved the way the stripes worked out. This was my first skein of self dyed yarn. I hope my pal Carry liked her yarn and it knits up well for her too!

Well, I am off to do some laundry and pack my knitting bag again for another trip! I will try to be better at posting when I get back! Maybe even have some more FO's for ya!

She's Back!

Sorry, it has taken me WAAAAYY too long to get this next post up but it has been crazy busy here since we are finishing up end of school year things! I am finally done with my responsibilities to two organizations that took up way to much of my time! We haven't had any plans this week in the evening and I can't remember a week like that since school began!

I have been knitting a bit but I have been dyeing and winding yarn more than anything!

7 Skeins of yarn, all dyed by me!  The skein in front is the one going to my Dye-O-Rama Pal. I am not going to tell you anything about her so if you are her and hoping that I will drop a hint that I am your secret pal you can just forget about it! I will say that I made her complete the dye-o-rama meme and she was a trooper, that was one long questionare!  This has been so fun, I love the dyeing! I have four skeins left to dye, I think two of them in the fingering weight are going to become my Amazing Lace KAL project! I think the superwash Merino has been my favorite to dye with so far!

Kevin made my dyeing habit a little easier by helping me complete my Warping board. I used Scout's instructions to start off but quickly found some issues with her instructions, great jumping off point though! He helped me make a few adjustments and we had a great board with multiple length abilities! It is fully customizable and allows me to remove pegs when I need longer sections between pegs and I am using it to rewind the skeins too! Here is a shot of it in action...

This has made making yarn look like this.....

or this...

Much much easier to create! Thanks honey! 

I am off to go spend the afternoon at DD's school, end of year projects and parties and all! Have a great day!

A little lace is nice!...and updated!

I REALLY dropped the ball on this posting didn't I! I needed a place to drop the HTML so I wouldn't lose it until I had the time to come in here and post it correctly! I really meant to get back in here over the weekend to fix it but with the inlaws here and one of the girls sick and DH having to leave in the middle of the weekend to go to a derailment for work and two soccer games I just didn't find the time! Sorry that you had to look at that alone if you came to visit and were expecting something cool to look at or read!

My mother and father in law came to visit to see a couple of the last soccer games of the season. It would have been nicer if M hadn't been sick and it hadn't rained all weekend! My MIL is the one that taught me to knit and she is constantly surprised at how fast I picked it up and how likely I am to start something that she finds scary. We did have a good laugh at her first sock which she brought to show me. I got her started and left her with instructions that she followed really well...until she redistributed the stitches for the foot and had them off by one needle so she finished the toe sideways! I have to give her credit for going online and learning how to kitchener but when it goes sideways it looks a bit funny, that and she decreased on every row all the way down to 4 stitches so the toe was a bit pointy!  She ripped it back while she was here and we did get quite a bit of knitting done since it was raining and we couldn't go to Toad Suck!

While she was here she got me started thinking about dishcloths again, I of course had to make this:
 

For

And if that wasn't enough ____-A-longs in my life right now, I had to join this too!

We have lots of travel plans for this summer so I thought I would be able to get lots of cool pics of my summer knitting visiting various parts of the country!  That my dear friends is what the Amazing Lace ring was all about in the first place!   

The Amazing Lace Join | List | Random Previous | Next Powered by RingSurf

Now I am off to finish my warping board for the Dye-o-Rama, I bought some more yarn this weekend so now it is time to go soak some yarn and get ready to hit the ground running for the rest of the day!

I will leave you with a picture of Mudgie and her new hiding place, DH won't let her in the house when he is home so she has found a new place to hide! I swear I didn't stuff her in there and make her stay so I could get the picture!  And she isn't as pissed off as she looks!

Warping Anyone?

We have the supplies for the warping board...I decided it was a necessity if I was going to do any more self striping yarn and that was really a no brainer wasn't it!  As fun as it was to have three kids help me wind a 36yd long skein of yarn I decided to do the right thing and head to home depot! The man there was really very helpful even if he thought the project was a bit wonky! He did seem surprised that there were detailed pictures and lists of things I would need on Scouts blog! He seemed impressed that there were enough of us out there strange enough to WANT to make these that written instructions were even necessary!  I am off to wash the kitchen floor before the inlaws get here! Have you ever noticed how Kool-aid stains tile floors? Guess that is to be expected of DYE!  Makes you wonder why we feed that stuff to the kids doesn't it!  I will post pictures of the board in action later this weekend, I am going to try to get to making it this afternoon before my husband comes home or he and his dad will take over help and then I will not be able to say I did it myself!

First Attempt

What do you get when you take this

Add this...

Do this...

and this...

...You get this!


Not so sure I like the colors but I will see how they knit up!  I did learn some things but I think I will try the wilton colors and saran wrap next time!  More dyeing later today!

Notes to self

Tonight is my first foray into dyeing...I have a few things I need to remember when doing this again!

1. Having a child help keep the yarn on the chair as you are winding the 440 yd skein into the correct lengths is helpful, Having three is NOT!

2. Tie the yarn loosely into shorter segments marking which colors go where in your design, USE DIFFERENT COLORS for the different colors!

3. Tie MORE segments once you have the color sections masked off! This will keep the massive tangling to a minimum, unlike the tangled mess you had in your kitchen sink when you pre-soaked the yarn before dyeing it, thus making it much easier to determine which parts go in which color later!

4. Have more than half a bottle of wine chilled and ready to go or you will have to break into the margaritas!

5....Isn't it fun what we will do for a stranger on the other side of the country!

I Love the smell of Kool-Aid in the morning!

We got our swap pals yesterday for the Dye-O-Rama swap! No I am not going to tell you who I got! Having blogs makes it so much easier to get to know your swap pal! I am so excited to get started on this, I am going to do a varigated yarn first and then try out a self striping variety. I need to go get the supplies for a warping board, I think that will be much easier than winding my yarn around chairs spaced 18 ft apart! My living room furniture kind of gets in the way! I suppose my husband might object if I wanted to start selling off furniture so I had space to wind yarn but at least it would help pay for more yarn to dye!  Maybe that is something I need to think about!

I'm a Meme Virgin no longer!

It has been seen so many places but I have to give the credit to Mim, where I saw it first!

Here goes...

It's not terribly exciting but there it is!
It has also been uploaded to the flickr pool!

What a cool idea!

Have you gotten tired of not being able to see what you are doing when you take your kids to see Disney on Ice and they have the nerve to turn off all of the lights which makes it REALLY difficult to do that pattern stitch that you need just a scoch of light to knit!  I am all for sitting in a huge auditorium with thousands of other peoples kids but being able to knit makes it much more enjoyable! Enter the wonderful Edith Eig and her husband....they created LIGHTED KNITTING NEEDLES for just that purpose!  Available next month they should be great just for the "cool" factor! Or...as I like to think of it, the why didn't I think of that factor!

Not much else going on, I am still waiting for my Knit Picks Color your own yarn to get here for this...

 

Still haven't figured out how to add stuff to the sidebar of this darn Typepad thing yet, if you know how, please help! I kind of miss blogger, it was much easier to add stuff to my blog there!  May have to switch back sometime soon!

Anyway, I already have the kool-aid for the project, I am going to dyelift the color scheme from my friend Mei. She was right, the people at the grocery store do look at you a little strangely when you are buying kool-aid in the boxes!

I guess I will go knit something and catch up on Sunday night TiVo! Hate those clip shows on Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy though but I guess it is better than nothing like last week!