Fibre DOne

DOne:

Twisted Socks:  a fun, straightforward knit once I got the magic loop set up right after the heel.  The cuff is a little tight, but that might be because I apparently do not know how to read a pattern.  The sizing was XXS, XS, S, M, L...  I wanted M.  I counted 3 numbers in and cast on.  Medium was 4 numbers in.  Oops.  Actually, the foot fits well, so if I were to do these again I would add stitches to the cuff somehow and then get down to the S numbers for the heel and foot.

Petunia Fractal fingering weight yarn:  Just needs a warm bath:

Baby Surprise the first:  begun, about 20% done. 

The beads on yellow string are a row counting abacus I made specifically for this pattern.  The BSJ depends on keeping track of your rows.  I still count ridges every once in a while, but if I'm good about moving the beads I don't have to count so often.

Peach Fractal yarn:  Found.  I knew I had spun a skein of this.  I just couldn't find it.  I did what I always do when I can't find something fibre related.  I called DaisyLady.  She always knows.  Like when I couldn't find my 2mm Addi Turbo.  "You broke it, remember?"  No, actually, I didn't.  That's why I called her, she remembers these things.  This time, it was "I think you sold it".  Really?  When?  At the Guild Sale?  Neither of us could remember.  At the February Guild meeting, however, all was revealed.  I had left it with Kelly at Just Knitting on consignment with several fractal rovings.  She brought it back as she has closed her bricks and mortar shop and switched to on-line only.

Sweet Tomato Heel Socks:  Wool-Tyme's annual sale is on.  I mostly bought Briggs and Little for workshops, but I did buy a tiny bit for myself.  Another skein of Bamboo/Cotton for the baby surprise jackets and a ball of Fortissma sock yarn in a neat purple.  And a variety of cottons for Thing Small who has discovered Kumihimo (more about that another time).

Most of my fibre time this week will be spent getting ready to teach a new workshop "Dye the Colour Wheel" on Saturday.  We (6 students and I) are going to try to make all the possible secondary combinations of my 6 primary dye colours.  And a value scale for each primary.  And 6 tertiary colours for each of the 8 combinations.  120 samples altogether, though I will have some of them done ahead as I'm testing procedures.  And we may be are in way over our heads.  I may be gibbering by Saturday evening.  The dyeing part is easy, getting them cooked and then labelled is going to be the sticky bit I think.  I still have no idea how I'm going to mount mine.  That will be an exercise left to the student...

Fibre DOing

I am usually a project monogamous knitter and spinner.  But not so much at the moment.  I just entered my current WIPs into Ravelry:

 1.  Swing Knitting Workshop 3 Blanket.  90% done - I just need to add another garter stitch band and sew in ends.  It's too big to drag around anymore.  Also, I didn't think ahead so I'm having to pick out a long tail cast-on to add the other band.  Note Ginny "helping" me with photo set up.



 2.  Swing Knitting Workshop 4 - Playground Wrap.  About 20% done.  This is the first panel.  I'm using 6 colourways of Fractal Roving going around the colour wheel.  This one starts with Peach (yellow-orange), then Forest (yellow-green), Ocean (blue-green), Periwinkle (blue-purple), Petunia (red-purple) and Pink Grapefruit (red-orange).  There are 24 short row "stanzas" per panel so I'm doing 4 in each colour.

It would be moving faster if I hadn't lost the freshly spun ball of Periwinkle somewhere in Kingston (probably the Invicta Centre, but maybe in the Napanee Arena) as I was knitting during Thing Small's last hockey tournament.  I have Petunia on the wheel now, so I'll have to finish that and then re-do Periwinkle before I can continue.  These are the yarns thus far.





Petunia on the wheel.

 3.  Current carry along knitting "Twisted" from Knitty in a skein of Apple Laine Apple Butter that had been languishing as a pair of toes for a very long time.  I've made it to the heel turn.






This does not include a few projects in hibernation or time out...

and updated my Rav queue with what I actually intend to do in the next while. 

3 Baby Surprise Jackets for 2 babies coming in June and August.  (I couldn't decide so I bought yarn for 3, either 1 baby will get two, or I'll go get more for the other one).
Longitudinal which I need to spin Peach Fractal for and I want to do in Portuguese style knitting, just to try it out.  It'll be a KAL with Jan, who is (still) learning to knit, this time we are trying Portuguese style and it seems to be working better for her hands and her (lack of) sense of direction.
Pull me Over which I need to choose a Fractal colourway for, dye enough for a sweater, and spin
Cat's Sweet Tomato Heel Socks.  Christine got me this e-book for my birthday.  It'll need a fractal colourway chosen and spun and to decide which pattern...
Swingy Hitchhiker in, you guessed it, more Fractal that I need to spin.  I want to use China Rose.  I'll dye some more or less solid of the grey from China Rose as the pause yarn.
Winter Waves  I thought I had the yarn spun for this, but I'm not sure I have enough, and something is up with the twist in the yarn, it isn't quite right.  So this one will wait a bit.

Oh.  Wow.  That's a bit.  I want to do a lot more in my Fractals, first, because I like them, and second, because samples are good for marketing and I need to do more of that.   More DOing required, less thinking.

My Word is "Do"

New Year, new beginnings.  Or so they say, I don't put so much stock in New Year's resolutions and other rituals.  Still, it's good to have a regular time to reflect and think ahead.  My friend, Ann, posted a very good suggestion on Facebook last week.  Instead of making a list of New Year's resolutions, she said, choose a word that will guide you for the year, one that will lead you to the actions that would have been your resolutions.  It appealed to the cognitive/behaviourist (the theory that what you think affects your behaviour) in me.  I know what I need to do to make the things I want happen.  But I've been having trouble sorting myself out to do them.  I find the tasks overwhelming and I don't know where or how to start so I don't do anything.  So, for my word, I chose "DO".  It's the attitude shift that I need.  To "DO" something rather than nothing even if it is only a teeny tiny baby step toward what I want to accomplish.  Washing 2 dishes is better than no dishes at all.  Tidying one shelf is better than giving up entirely on a closet full of clutter.  Planning one meal is better than giving up in frustration while trying to plan 5.  Giving away one small box of no longer needed items is better than waiting to pile up a carload.  Drops in the bucket, but many drops make an ocean, and I don't need a whole ocean, just enough to fill my bucket.

So, some of my doings for today:


1.  Write that little report for Mandy.  Really, it took all of 10min, why did I push it off for so long?  And it made her so happy.  Doing is good.

2.  Rescue the kitchen from the nightmare that was Thing Small granting her friend's Christmas wish of gingerbread house making.  Note to self:  DO NOT go off to New Year's Eve gathering and leave Thing Small unattended with such intentions unless you are braced for the consequences...

There was royal icing "cement" in my poor mixer and crushed candy cane all over Ash's favourite stool.

The gingerbread house itself experienced some kind of natural disaster:

But they had fun, and thought the "hurricane" explanation for the flat house a good one.

And, again, it took longer to mobilize the girls to help clean up than to actually get back to some semblance of normal.  Even a little doing actually gets things DONE.  Imagine that.  Who woulda thunk it?

3.  Make bread.  I restarted my sourdough starter and there is a batch of dough on the counter.  I'll tell you more about it later.

4.  Write a blog post.  Okay, this one is taking a bit longer, but at least once I started I'm finishing it.  And I will get the hang of this process faster if I (you guessed it) DO it.  To that end I also corralled Himself briefly to show me again how to work the fancy camera.  Honestly, I used to be a decent photographer with an excellent grasp of my old (completely manual) Pentax K1000 35mm camera.  Digital is nice for being instant, but the Nikon D200 is heavy, bulky and fiddly.  But again if I DO I will figure it out.  I also learned that the iPhone does perfectly well for blog pictures that won't need editing!


There are more things to DO today but somehow they seem just a little less overwhelming.

What's your word for this year?

What a Difference a Dye Makes or Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green

Many years ago a very nice, very experienced dyer on the CanSpin List took pity on me, a new dyer with vague if any colour sense.  Annette explained how to choose dyes for mixing and referred me to a book titled Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green by Micheal Wilcox.  It was written for painters but the concepts apply to dye work as well.  My MIL, who likes very specific Christmas and birthday lists, was happy to get me a copy and I learned a lot from it.  In brief, it explains that primary colours are only pure in theory.  In the real world blues aren't really pure, they either lean toward green or purple.  The same goes for yellow, leaning to orange or green, and red, leaning to purple and orange.  Most basic colour theory texts do talk about 2 sets of primaries: "Painter's" or "warm" primaries are red, blue and warm yellow; "Printer's" or "cool" primaries are cyan, magenta and cool yellow and go on to note that the painter's primaries make clearer oranges and the printer's primaries make clearer greens and neither makes a clear purple.

Wilcox suggests working with all 6 primaries as a base set and understanding what happens when they mix.  To make the clearest, brightest secondary colours you need to mix the primaries that lean towards them.  Painter blue and printer magenta make the clearest, brightest purples, mixing painter blue and painter red, or magenta and cyan make duller purples.  In the same way, cyan and printer yellow make clearer greens and red and warm yellow make clearer oranges.  Once you understand how the primaries interact it's much easier to get the mixed colour you are looking for.

Thus, I work with 6 basic dye stock colours from Ciba:  cyan, magenta, tartrazine, eriosin red, erionyl yellow and royal blue.  I can get a really wide range of secondary and tertiary colours using just these 6 dyes.  It's really amazing what a difference changing one dye colour can make.  As an example, I tried to duplicate China Rose - honestly, I do take notes, but sometimes I either don't believe them or I write them down wrong... (or both which was the case here).

 Clockwise from the top:  The original China Rose, made when I was trying to recreate "Antique", retry 1 made with Erionyl Red, Royal Blue and Tartrazine, retry 2 made with Erionyl Red, Royal Blue and Eriosin Yellow and the final (correct I think) retry made with Magenta, Royal Blue and Eriosin Yellow.  The final retry is a little darker than the original but that's probably measurement error.

The takeaway (besides "never trust E's notes") is the incredible difference between the 3 batches.  Changing one primary at a time makes a big difference.

Here is another example.  This time, I didn't have notes on which primaries I used, I just made an assumption based on Wilcox's theory.  I was trying to make this:

When I made it I was using dyes from ProChem - I had painter's blue, turquoise, warm yellow and cool yellow to choose from to make the green.  Now I'm trying to match those colours using the Ciba dyes.  I assumed that I had used turquoise and cool yellow.  So I used cyan and tartrazine (because at that point I was still trying to figure out which yellow was which) and got this:

Hmm.  Not quite what I expected.  Brighter and, well, greener.  Back to the dye table I used royal blue and tartrazine, as the royal blue should quiet the green a bit:

The picture is a rather blue shifted (battles with cameras and photo editing are another post entirely), but you can still see that it's a lot closer to the original.  In person it's much closer to the original. 

As a final example, I present yesterday's dye room adventure:

As I said, I haven't quite figured out which Ciba yellow is which.  On top of that, the Ciba dyes are not "leveled" like the ProChem ones.  That means that when you mix equal quantities of 2 1% stock solutions of the levelled ProChem dyes you get a secondary colour that is exactly halfway between the two primaries.  If you make 1% solutions of the Ciba dyes and mix them 50/50 the resulting colour won't likely be halfway between them because they are not equal strength.  In particular, tartrazine is very strong and eriosin yellow is very weak.  When I got the Ciba dyes the supplier suggested mixing strengths that do seem to work most of the time.  Most of the time...  It doesn't help that e. yellow and e. red are the hardest dyes to get into solution and e. yellow really, really likes to separate.

I was aiming for this:

I started with e. yellow and e. red. which I think are the painter's primaries and should make the best oranges.  I got this:

Uncooked it looked awfully red.  The e. yellow just got eaten by the e. red.  Recall that dyes are not WYSIWYG, so that didn't mean it wouldn't turn out, however, the steamer holds two batches, so right away I tried e. red and tartrazine:

Ah, that's it.  It's darker probably because I used the medium DOS range and I think the original is the light DOS range.

Lessons learned:

1.  E. Yellow is a pain to work with, it's weak and it doesn't stay mixed long enough to measure it accurately, but now I'm pretty sure it's a cool yellow.  Theoretically the clearest greens should come from mixing it with cyan. 

2.  I do not always want the clearest, brightest secondary.  I much prefer the blue green colourway made with the "wrong" primaries (tartrazine and royal blue).

2.  Tartrazine is really strong and makes really nice oranges.  It's on the warm side of yellow but only slightly and it has an acid cast which is why I thought it was the cool one at first.  It's been making decent greens but I might get closer to my original colours if I used e. yellow instead.

3.  Switching dye suppliers requires a certain amount of adjustment to one's recipes.  Really, I count myself lucky I've been able to match things up as well as I have.

4.  Wilcox is right, even primaries that appear very similar, as the two yellows do, can create very different mixed colours.  It pays to have a range.  It's probably worth exploring using more than one of each primary in a mix to get even more possibilities.   Or not, as it is there are already 4 combinations for each secondary colour and 8 combinations for each tertiary colour using just one of each at a time.  Should be enough to keep me occupied for quite some time yet.

Spinning Fractals

While I was at the beach I took pictures of the process of preparing Fractal Rovings for spinning so that they produce repeatable stripes.  In hindsight, Thing Small's towel was perhaps not the best background, however, the pictures do show the process:

 First I undo the ties around one of the roving skeins.  This is the long stripe, so I'm going to split it into 2 so that the stripes are fairly long.  When I make sock weight yarn this split gives me about 2" of each long stripe colour in a sock.

I want to keep the sequence so I start the split and mark both ends by tying strings to them.

 I split the roving as evenly as I can.  It usually has a natural split in the middle so it's pretty easy.  I roll each half into a ball as I go along.

The roving often gets twisted in the process and can jam so every once in a while I stand up and let it untwist.  To do that I let out enough of it to hang without hitting the ground and then bunch up the skein and wrap the end around it with a half hitch so it can hang in the air and freely turn until it's untwisted again. 

 Now I have two balls of roving.  I want to roll them into 1 ball so that I don't mix them up with the other roving skein that will be the other ply.  But if I just wind one around the other I'll end up spinning them both from opposite ends and my stripe pattern will reverse. 

 So I rewind one of the balls so that it's string tag is on the outside.  Then I wind it onto the other ball.  Now I have one ball from one of the roving skeins.








When I make socks split the long stripe roving as above.  I split the short stripe roving into 4.  The process is the same as above, except that I mark 4 ends at the start, split into 2 and then split each half into 2 again.  I roll into 1 ball making sure all the pieces are going the same direction.  Splitting the short stripe into 4 makes each short stripe go about 1 row when I knit socks.  (why yes, I did sample and figure this out ahead of time, so you wouldn't have to).

Next I spin the short stripe on one bobbin and the long stripe on another.  For socks I spin a singles with about 9 twists per inch and 40 wraps per inch.  Then I ply them together - 6 twists per inch for a balanced yarn.  With the roving split as described I get about 2 knitted inches of long stripe with 2 repeats of the short stripe pattern against each long stripe.

I'm not making socks with the above roving and I want longer colour runs so I'm just splitting each piece in half.  If I wanted the longest colour runs I could just predraft the rovings a bit to loosen them up and then spin them as is.  I think I did that with the other skein for this project - if I did I can show you the difference later...  Maybe I'll do a 3rd kind of split for the last skein for this project.  These skeins were destined to be a Colour Affection shawl in 3 values of the Periwinkle colourway.  Other projects may push this one to the back seat for a bit.  Stay tuned.

I can play with how I split the rovings to change my stripe pattern.  For the shortest stripes I could split the long stripe into 4 pieces like I do the short stripe.  I haven't tried it (would sort of defeat the purpose...), but theoretically I could match the short and long stripe lengths by splitting the long stripe in 4 and not splitting the short stripe at all since the long stripes are about 4 times longer than the short ones.  Hmm, I have a couple of "oops" rovings I could play with...

The Commander

Thing Tall had a rough winter.  The doctor finally realized that his iron was seriously low and responsible for most of his symptoms.  Thankfully, she did so in time for him to land a seriously cool summer co-op placement at Jenda Paddlesports in Osgoode.  One of his favourite subjects was Outdoor Ed. so working with kayaks and canoes was right up his alley.  The owners are lovely and have since given him a job there.  Well, he couldn't work there without a boat of his own, so one day we came home with one.  He got a 14' Commander - sort of a hybrid canoe/kayak, open like a canoe but set up to paddle as a kayak. Thing Tall does not fit well in most kayaks, his legs are too long and so are his feet.  One test paddle session I watched him get stuck getting out of a boat.  He landed sitting in a foot of water.  Funny, but uncomfortable...  Thus the Commander.  We took it to the cottage for the long weekend.

Kid who is usually cautious and careful is pretty relaxed in boats and on the water:

He came into the beach to try to get Rags to join him.  Standard Poodles are supposed to be water retrievers but Rags thinks the water can stay right where it is.  She lasted about 6" and hopped out.

I tried it the next day but it was really windy and choppy and Thing Tall was backseat paddling so I didn't get far.  We'll go out again when it's calmer.

Helpers

My Fibre Room is well supervised and well stocked with assistants.  The other day I was trying to take some pictures so I could list more Fractals on Etsy.  I thought the coast was clear, but the Assistants are ever vigilant:

Here is Ash testing for loft.  He has his "fierce face" on, but I don't know if that's because the fibre isn't cushy enough for his liking or that he'd rather there weren't evidence that he's really a softie.

Ginny is assessing the tangling potential of the skeins.  She was about to test shear strength when I convinced her her services were not required.  She sulked off.

Hobbes attempted to assist with the photography but he was too quick to get a shot of this time.  Instead, Thing Small provided the following evidence of his helpyness.  She found him guarding the fibre laid out for tagging:

Lastly, here is Puzzle helping with another photo shoot:

He also likes to inspect the water containers on the dye table.  He has to be convinced to be elsewhere when I am dyeing.

(for those who might wonder, Ash and Puzzle are brothers and Ginny and Hobbes are brother and sister.  All were originally rescued by my friends Heidi and Steve.  Ash, Puzzle and their two brothers were rescued from a hollow tree at 3 weeks old when their mother died.  Ginny, Hobbes and their mother Cora were rescued from a barn where the resident Tom Cat ate their two siblings.  Cora now lives with my MIL)