I really shouldn’t be buying yarn, but when I saw this sock yarn, I decided that it Must Be Mine. That copper color is gorgeous. I had kind-of-sort-of sworn off stripey yarn, but I fell hard.

The yarn is by Yarn Pirate (arrrr), purchased from Pure Knits. Ordering from Pure Knits was awesome - it arrived in lightspeed (2 days after ordering it), with a little bow, a handwritten note, and a little sample of Fable alpaca (which is extremely soft). I highly recommend.

While I was there, I also happened to pick up a teeny little ball of the Kaalund laceweight wool. It is a multicolor laceweight, but the purple and green are very similar in darkness (value? intensity?), so I think that the different colors won’t be distracting from the lace. I may or may not try the Trellis Scarf in this stuff.

Oh, you wanted to see photos of the Basalt Tank? Yeah, it’s complete, but I need to get a good, non-bathroom-mirror shot of it. I tried a photoshoot yesterday, but it was entirely too dark outside and the photos look like poo. I machine-dryed it, and it actually fits, very exciting!

I’m telling you, I love aquariums!

The Basalt Tank is blocking like a champ, which means that it is still sopping wet after 12 hours. It will do battle with the dryer this evening!

A day of completion - finished with thesis proofreading, finished with a Baudelaire!

One more to go. I absolutely love the cable detail running down the sides - I always thought that cables in socks would be bulky, but that’s definitely not the case. I also finished the Basalt Tank, but it needs some heavy-duty blocking before being released into the wild. I may try machine washing it and drying it to (hopefully!) shrink it a tiny bit, because it’s a bit too big!

I am the Cat Paparazzi. Silver’s response: “I’m trying to sleep, bitch.” Yes, she is hanging out under the sink. Silver now possesses the wonderful talent of being able to open all of our kitchen cupboards. Awesome.

Rob’s parents are in town, so we’ve been doing all sorts of Houstoney things, including going to Galveston to check out the Moody Gardens aquarium. I love me some aquarium action. It was crazy humid today though, which makes me reminisce about Massachusetts and autumn, sigh. Knitting content to come, I have a 95% completed Basalt Tank and an all-but-bound-off Baudelaire.

What I should be doing: Finishing the Basalt Tank, proofreading chapters 6-8 of Rob’s thesis.

What I have been doing instead: Baudelaire! In Koigu! I have thrown caution to the wind, and am knitting a textured pattern in non-solid yarn! Crazy talk, I tell you!

I must say, I’m pretty happy that I really only have two unfinished projects lying around - the aforementioned Basalt Tank (which looks exactly like it did last week) and the Counterpane Clutch. The clasp for the clutch is backordered, so no guilt there on not having it finished. I do technically have a couple of half-finished, pre-blog sweaters lying around, waiting to be frogged. And a certain Somewhat Cowl that I’m trying to decide the fate of.

I’ve recently mentioned some knitting plans, but I don’t think that any of them are going to pan out. The Cropped Cardi sounded awesome, but I definitely don’t have enough yarn. I’m biding my time, waiting to see if Yarntopia gets more of the yarn in, and hopefully the dyelot will be close enough to what I already have. The Trellis Scarf in Habu Tsmungi Silk? I don’t think it’s going to happen. The pattern calls for a k7tog, leave stitches on needle, do something else, k7tog through those same stitches, then move on. First off, that craziness is difficult to pull of in the non-stretchy silk. Second, the p7tog nupps in Madli’s Shawl really put me off to doing anything like that again, ever!

I will now carry on about how much I love Koigu. I love Koigu. Striping yarn (like a certain pair of Socks that Rock socks, also unfinished, that we’re not talking to) is old news. It pools and misbehaves. Boo! The mottled, deep-yet-lovely colors of the Koigu is where it’s at. This yarn is physically incapable of pooling. Just looking hot, with an occasional intense pink or blue splotch to keep things interesting.

I know that there are colorways of Koigu that stripe, but my love is for the splatter-painted colorways. Love!

When I first taught myself how to knit, I was psyched. I thought that I would make all kinds of cute scarves and sweaters, and that I’d save a ton of money from buying them from a store. Then I went to a yarn store. Holy shit, yarn is expensive! The wonderful ladies at Northampton Wools directed me at the best yardage-per-dollar yarn in the store, but I still balked at the cost. Eventually I discovered how to be a savvy yarn purchaser, the Webs 20% discount and where to get good deals. I think I’ve done pretty well over the years - I’ll drop some big cash on small things (like, um, Koigu), but I’ve never purchased a sweater amount of yarn for full price. Well, that’s not quite right - Green Gable was knit with full-price Knitpicks Shine, but that stuff is cheap!

The gist of this is that I’m very likely to take advantage of a good deal when I see one. Yarntopia was having a 30%-off-all-summer-yarns sale this past weekend, and I really, truly, could not resist.

Rowan 39: 20% off. I really like two patterns in this: Rambling Rose and Crinkle.

Elsebeth Lavold Hempathy: 30% off. Will become something summery. The yarn is sportweight, which is awesome for the unbearable heat and humidity that is Houston.

RYC Cashcotton: 30% off. A cardigan for me. I would have picked up a different color (I realize that I own way too much purple yarn), but the other colors were very meh.

Handmaiden Sea Silk: 20% off. Yum. Seriously soft. This will probably be a gift for someone, maybe my mother. The yarn is dyed very interestingly - the bluish-green is very dominant. I’m curious to see how it will look knitted up. Anyone know a pattern that takes one skein of this stuff?

The next day I got my Knitpicks order in the mail. Crap, I had forgotten about that. It was a cheap order though, right over the $40-for-free-shipping line. Pictured is some Wool of the Andes, I have two balls of each of those colors. I’m planning on making a felted cat bed - I’ve been wanting to teach myself Continental knitting on something where I don’t have to worry about how uneven the stitches look. I also purchased a size 5 Options needle (the Trellis Scarf? Impossible to do a k7tog in the Habu silk with a blunt Addi. Truly impossible.), some dyeable yarn, and the Hanging Garden Lace Stole pattern.

Time to get knitting. No more yarn purchases until I put a dent in what I already have.

The not-so-hot results from part one are here.

Last we spoke, our young heroines had nothing to show for their efforts except for Amy’s perfect peacock yarn. The heroines thought, “Well, that sucks!”, and vowed to try again.

We armed ourselves with the ultimate weapon… Black Dye! We also had Red and Yellow. We’re wild, I tell you. Amy had some roving that she bought when we had our spinning lesson, and I had yet another of my little guinea pigs, some natural-colored Cascade 220.

Instead of divvying up the Cascade into smaller test hanks, I threw caution to the wind and dyed the whole thing. I had a deam of a lovely reddish-purple (but not too red) color. I mixed 60% violet, 35% red, and 5% black and threw the yarn in.

Results: Hmm. Wow. I’m surprised. That’s kind-of the color I was going for. My teeny test hank of pink laceweight turned out quite a bit darker and less red, so I’d have to adjust for that.

Amy’s original plan was to handpaint her laceweight. The plan was quickly abandoned because somebody just wanted to sit around and knit her damn orange sweater. Also, there was a boatload of dye left in the pot, so she decided to throw in some of her roving and see what happened. The roving came out much lighter, but still looked pretty cool. I, unfortunately, do not have an even halfway-decent photo of Amy’s roving.

Step 2: Dye the laceweight. I decided that a teeny bit of adjustment would be Good Enough, so 45-ish% red, not-quite 50% of violet (we ran out), and 5% black. Results: Awesome! The yarn is actually a touch more red than these photos show. Afterwards, Amy again dunked in her roving for some more sloppy dye seconds.

One remaining issue with the dyeing thing is that we have consistently had tons of dye left in the water. The yarn is supposed to suck it all up, leaving the water somewhat clear. Our water was so not clear. We weren’t not measuring the dye by weight (because my scale is el cheapo and not very accurate), but by volume - the Knitty article I found says to use 2tsp per 100ml water (for a 1% dye solution). I’m thinking that this is way wrong, at least for our Jacquard dyes.

In any case, I’m totally pleased with the results from this round. I have two big almost-100-gram skeins of the laceweight, which will become a Baltic Sea Stole and will be beautiful. Yay! More glamour shots below!

I know, you’re yearning for some more dye-on-yarn action. You will wait! Last week, I swung by Yarntopia to pick up some more Renaissance, and they had Debbie Bliss Pure Silk as their yarn of the week - 25% off! I have no self-control. None. I bought two skeins. I remembered that I had a half-finished Counterpane bag lying around the house, and wouldn’t it look so much nicer in the Pure Silk?

The year-old half-Counterpane bag (the bottom bag in the photo) was knit in DB Alpaca Silk. Nice yarn, pretty color, way too hairy. It will be frogged. The Pure Silk is extremely soft and luxurious, but it’s a bit fuzzy. I couldn’t imagine knitting a sweater out of it - besides the prohibitive cost (I am a cheapo yarn purchaser, usually), it would pill like crazy.

The bag pattern is from Handknit Holidays. Knitting this bag renews my deep-seated love for that book - I bought it for the hot socks with the lace bits in the back, and the fair-isle pillows are also lovely (in non-xmasey colors). Yum!

I’m planning on some killer finishing for my little clutch. I bought a metal clasp from M&J Trim, which will look awesome. Unfortunately, the clasp cost more than the yarn. Ugh. But the bag, it will be so adorable!

Also, Yarntopia has DB Cathay on sale for 35% off tomorrow. I have a feeling that I’ll be stopping by there on my lunch break…

I’m also almost done with the Basalt Tank. I just need to add the garter border around the neckline. I added waist shaping by casting on less stitches in the side hexagons. I think that the sweater may turn out a tad too large - I wish that I had added more waist shaping. I also doubled-up the border on the bottom, because otherwise it would have been way too short. I’m planning on doing the same around the neckline, in the name of decency!

Part one of a series where Kelly makes fugly yarn bearable.

I had picked up a couple of skeins of yarn at Staci’s yarn swap, knowing that they Needed Work. First up was a skein of beautifully handpainted laceweight wool. However, the yarn was a light shade of bright-as-hell pink. Not good. The other stuff was some poo-brown marl. I did not choose the yarn, the yarn chose me. Unfortunately I forgot to snap any before photos of the yarns in question, but there’s a crappy shot here on flickr.

Evasive action needed to be taken, stat. I enlisted Amy for help in this mission, and a quick trip to Texas Art Supply armed us with all the Jaquard Acid Dyes that two girls could want. We also purchased a myriad of supplies, including $3-for-two pots (score!) to cook our yarn. Lastly, we armed ourselves with some natural-colored Cascade 220 to fuel our tests.

In case you’re not hip to the dying thing, you basically fill a pot with water, dump in some dye, throw in the yarn, simmer for awhile, add vinegar to set the dye, and voila! Beauty! At least that’s the plan. My main mission was to make the pink yarn not so pink, while hopefully preserving the variegation.

Step 1: Blue + pink makes purple, right?

Wrong. 2/3 Violet, 1/3 what-we-thought-was-Sky Blue. Eww. Amy: “That is straight up fucking cobolt. There’s nothing sky blue about that.” Always classy, that Amy.

The yarn is a bit darker than in this photo. The poor pink yarn looks as cobolt-ey as the Cascade 220. The poo-brown marl is tinted blue, but has stayed stubbornly poo-brown. Ugh, I think that it’s acrylic.

It seems that we accidentally mislabeled our blues, so we had in fact used Royal Blue, aka ugly blue.

Step 2: Let’s not make it so ugly this time.

100% really-Sky blue. Not bad, but eh. The pink looks a blah shade of blue. Poo-brown marl looks angry and still pretty poo-brown. Definitely acrylic.

Amy overdyed her straight-up-fucking-cobolt blue yarn with Emerald Green and got a beeeeautiful peacock color. We ooh and ahh over this.

Step 3: Make It Work.

We needed something to temper down all that blue. The colors we were getting are waaay too bright. Unfortunately, we had only mixed up the cool colors (my rationale: I don’t want 10937 jars of leftover dye rooting around in my fridge) and didn’t purchase any neutrals. 90% Sky Blue, 10% Emerald Green. Results: better, but not great.

Amy dyed some more peacock and was happy.

I really do have an understanding of color theory. Had I been thinking even a little bit about this beforehand, I would have concentrated on getting true, primary colors rather than Royal Blue and Sky Blue. Bleah. Also, we desperately needed some black dye.

Stay tuned for part 2, where we venture into the land of warm colors.

So last weekend, Harlot thing, knitbloggers, fun! Well I met Sarah, and chatted with said Sarah, and she mentioned that she had plans to visit Houston this weekend to hit some museums, including the MFAH. I’ve been wanting to see the Gee’s Bend quilts, so I totally crashed her party. Well, if you call going to a museum a party. I met up with her and her friends Jaime and Noah and checked out the exhibit, which was great. Jaime took an awesome photo of us in the tunnel between the buildings. I was a bad photographer and took a single picture - this mask in the entrance to the gold section. Ah well.

Naturally, we had to check out the local yarn shops. Sarah had visited Yarntopia on Friday, so we swung by Yarns 2 Ewe for some hot Koigu action. I picked up the summer Knit.1 magazine soley for the Cropped Cardigan pattern. Super cute. I’m planning to use some Classic Elite Renaissance that I picked up when Yarntopia first opened. However, I don’t have enough yarn, and Yarntopia is almost out. HCW last weekend carried it also, but their dye lot was crazy different from what I have, so I don’t think I’ll have much luck unless I find more of the same dyelot. We shall see how this turns out, I’m already planning on 3/4 length sleeves…