fishie’s aquarium

I got off my ass and finally started dyeing yarn from that sweater I unraveled a couple months ago.

I decided I absolutely HAD to dye some yarn last night, after drinking half of my vodka/rum/caffeine free coke last night, so I had to walk up to the store and ended up walking home with two gallons of vinegar.

Apparently vinegar is the magic ingredient for getting the color to stick, because after only a couple minutes after I dumped in the color, the water was clear–meaning the yarn had sucked up everything.

I’m using this awesome tutorial from Knitty, and right now I’m doing the hot pour dye method just to test to see if the yarn will dye well.

It will. I’ve already named this color “algae”. Guess what theme I’m going for. If all goes well, I’ll have some yarns up on etsy and MAYBE HOPEFULLY make some money from yarning around.

I just moved from a 5 bedroom house with ample storage to a 2 bedroom apartment with … none. Until the move, my stash was easily hidden in a closet (not joking, that’s where I kept it), and my yarn diet was more of a joke than anything.

Now? It’s serious. In order to prove to myself WHY I don’t need to buy more yarn (and also to organize it better so I can actually put it somewhere), I pulled every ball, skein, hank, and sweater to be recycled out and arranged on my bed.

Somebody, PLEASE tell me why I’m still compelled to buy more yarn.

In the original storage containers

Me in PJs for size reference

That is a double bed. Also, the pile in the back is not propped up by a pillow. That pile is a pure pile of sweaters, Red Heart, and other nameless thrift store atrocities. There are also 11 cones shoved in there.

Close-up

It’s hard to tell from the pictures, but most of the yarn is piled. I guess if my skeins were epithelial cells, they’d be pseudostratified.

Now, time to start re-organizing it. If doing that doesn’t convince me I don’t. need. more. yarn., nothing will.

I wish the reason I haven’t updated in a month was because I was obsessively knitting. Unfortunately, life has been happening so the knitting has been a little stalled. I think getting so emotionally invested in getting accepted for publication, and then having the book canceled has also affected my knitting mojo quite a bit. Spending money on knitting, however, has been going in full force, in spite of my *cough* yarn diet.

Before I gush about all the yarn I bought at The Fiber Gallery’s anniversary sale, or the fact that I just registered for the Make 1 Yarn Studio Fall Fiber Arts Retreat in the Rockies outside of Calgary, I has to show you this hat:

Yarn is Noro Silk Garden, the pattern is Coronet from Knitty, although I modified it a bit. I didn’t feel the need to have a double layer where the brim folded, and I wouldn’t have had enough yarn for it anyway. Instead, I picked up stitches for the crown with the right side of the band facing, and did a row of purls before I dove into stockinette. I did the decreases a little too soon, so I plan to unravel the crown, spit felt the remaining yarn on, and do a few more rows before starting the decreases. I knit the whole hat in two days. Until I fix up my Styrofoam head to be the same size as my head, it will remain unblocked. But I’ll live.

I’ve also been working on a tank inspired by the Drawstring Chemise in the Spring ‘08 issue of Interweave Knits. I really like the look of it, but if I followed the pattern I’d look like a freaking pregnant woman. Instead, I used it as inspiration. I cast on this tank in mid-March, and I’m just now starting the lace bits on the bottom.

Progress a week ago

Made with three skeins of Rowan Calmer, knit from the top down. It fits reasonably well, although I really should have started doing decreases in the back sooner than I did. I’ll throw it in the dryer when I’m done and hope it shrinks a little. In the beginning, I was doing a great job at keeping notes so I could ultimately write up the pattern for what I was doing… but I’ve gotten lazy and bored, so I stopped. It’s not perfect and there are definitely some things I’d change knowing how my choices in decreases affected the direction of the fabric, but it’s really good practice for when I actually start writing patterns (I SWEAR I will actually do the dress that was going to be in the new Sensual Knits before they canceled it).

Now that I have all that boring knitting talk done with: YARN SALE! I got to the Fiber Gallery Saturday morning, right after they opened, so I could get some good sale merchandise before it was all gone. And I spent WAY more than I’d like to admit, but I made sure to only buy yarn that I had projects in mind for. In fact, I have a cheat sheet I bring with me when I go yarn shopping:

The last time I brought this sheet with me, I bought some Cherry Tree Hill Cotton to make the Yoke Pullover. This time, I bought some Cascade Fixation to make the Basic Slip (I’ll be using the Trellis hanging off the bottom of the sheet for the dropped stitch details), and a ton of Manos Cotton Stria to make Road to Golden. I’m really excited about the color combo. Here’s a general idea:

I do buy yarn for projects not on the cheat sheet. For instance, I bought some SWTC Amaizing, which is 100% corn fiber and some SWTC Bamboo:

But I made sure to buy enough of the Amazing to make a shrug (3 skeins) and enough of the Bamboo to make a sweater (4 skeins). I’m really excited to use my new yarns, even if that means finishing my WIPs.

The real reason I’m making this post isn’t because I felt the need to keep it updated with what I’ve been making. Oh, no. Really, it’s because holy carp. I’m going to the Fall Knitting Retreat in the Rockies. I’ve been dealing with massive amounts of stress in the personal life, and nothing erases all of my worries better than travel. The urge to just buy a plane ticket somewhere and be anywhere but here has been phenomenal lately, but the things causing all of my stress are things that make it necessary for me to stay where I am. Just like I spend hours looking at knitting patterns instead of actually knitting, I’ve been looking up places to go and reasons to go to them. I’ve been especially interested in knitting retreats. I don’t remember how I heard about this one. Maybe it was just through a google search. Who knows. But when I first saw it, I thought, “OH! I want to go! I shouldn’t.” My contract at work ends the week after the retreat, and I really shouldn’t take days off then. Also, I maintain my status as a part time college student to keep my massive student loan debt deferred, and I really shouldn’t miss class, whenever that would be in early November. Also, I would be going by myself, and I’ve never flown by myself before (I’ve actually only gone on two round trips in my life). And I won’t know anybody at the retreat. SCARY. But you know what, all those are just excuses. I want to go to this SO bad. Classes by Stefanie Japel, Cookie A, Amy Singer… The first thing I ever knit from a pattern was the One Skein Wonder. And 7 of the 11 garments I’ve knit have been from Stefanie’s patterns. After seeing Stefanie’s post with the map saying it was 1.5 hours from me to Calgary…

The e-ticket is already in my inbox.

Yeah, it’s not until November. BUT I’M GOING!

I got paid yesterday. What does this mean? All those urges to go out and buy sweaters to unravel became a reality over the course of two days. Not only did I get some nice yarn to recycle, dye, felt, etc., I also picked up some SWEET fabric. Observe.

I stopped by the Goodwill by my house. It’s nice living in the yuppy neighborhood sometimes. The store was small so I only picked up two sweaters, an XL mostly wool in somewhere around sockweight yarn for $3, and a small hooded bulky linen one for $4.

I’d never been to this thrift store before so I had a look around, and found THESE babies:

6.66 yards of fuzzy pink upholstery fabric for $7(I’m serious about the measurement too)

4.5 yards of that pretty color-changey purple fabric for $4

I also caught a glimpse of some nice looking nylon yarn ($1.50) that ended up being way way way less soft that I’d thought. I can still make something out of it though.

Chris and I both had dentist appointments today, but they were five hours apart so we used that as an excuse to run a bunch of errands. We stopped by a lumber store so Chris could take a gander at wood to start making his drums out of, and I got a dowel to make a niddy noddy to unwind my yarn onto. Then we stopped by the thrift store I used to work at and knew all the tricks and where all the good stuff was. Chris helped me look through sweaters too. I came home with:

37 ties ($6)

Giant pink cone of mystery yarn, laceweight ($2)

The exact same bulky linen hoody I found yesterday (can’t hurt to have more of the same yarn!; $3.50)

A splurge. Pink and green linen sweater ($10)

A red and orangish wool hoody ($2.50)

An 80% Alpaca, 20% nylon sweater in my favorite color ever ($5)

The hard part now is going to be NOT unraveling them until I’ve finished the second baby blanket and have the niddy noddy all made up. But oh man I want to do it NOW. I’m excited.

Kate’s sister is full of babies. Two of them. I hate babies, but I like Kate and her sister and the yarn is soft so what the hell. Plus I saw this pattern posted on Craftster and it looked like a good challenge. I’m going to be good this time and actually take pictures of my progress. So I did.

Yarn of choice. I needed two boy-ish colors. Blue and green seemed to work.
Yes. Twin boys. She’s going to have LOTS of fun with that.

The yarn is actually SOFTER than it looks in that picture. It’s NICE.

Not bad for full price. I’m estimating I’ll need three skeins per blanket (the pattern calls for 14 oz, each skein is 5)

I’ve been working on it for four days.

The pattern is old and weird, but I think I’m figuring it out pretty well.

ONLY 30 INCHES TO GO!

When these kids turn one I’m making them cupcake hats.