yarn model

that is all.

[expletive deleted]

I did something stupid. Worse, I knew it was stupid while I was doing it. And yet...

How the hell am I going to get this thing wound? At the best of times, winding an entire 300g skein of Wollmeise Lace-Garn is a daunting prospect. After one has foolishly opened up the skein "just for a minute" to wind off a couple yards for a swatch, then FAILED TO PUT IT BACK THE WAY IT WAS, then DROPPED HALF OF IT while trying to move it... I don't know. If you hear some unladylike language issuing from the general direction of northern Munich later tonight, yeah, don't be alarmed. 

birfday yarn

Hot off the presses (out of the kettles?), it's Malabrigo's new sport weight superwash offering, Arroyo, in colorway Chispas:

...and it's mine!  All mine!

Seriously though, thanks Mom.  How did you know? 

by-products

When I frogged my Academia Vest, most of the yarn got a bath and went on to greener (better fitting) pastures.  Some of it, however, was hopelessly kinked, discolored, and in bits too short to bother futzing around with.  The stranded work produced some unusually interesting Ramen, with kinks at regular intervals depending on the row of colorwork it had come from.  We happened to also have some empty picture frames laying forlornly about the apartment, waiting to be filled with some weird wall art and, well, this happened:

See? ...It's a jellyfish.

The body is made of medium-weight cardstock inexpertly embroidered with a darning needle.  I played around with the tentacles until I was happy with their arrangement, then sandwiched the whole thing together and secured the frame before it could slide out of place. 

triple your pleasure, triple your fun

...or why I'm not crazy about holding yarn double, but triple's just fine:

I just knit a Baby Sophisticate cardigan for my niece.  It's cute, see?

Other than a few mods mentioned in the last post, I pretty much followed the playbook, except for subbing soft, sturdy, superwash merino sock yarn in two colors into a pattern calling for aran weight (and it didn't take weeks and lots of math).  I held the yarn triple.  It worked beautifully.  I don't usually think of multi-stranding my yarn - I'll sooner change up the gauge of a given pattern if I have my heart set on a particular yarn-pattern combo whose weights don't agree.  I don't like doubling yarn because it invariably makes for uneven stitches.  When two strands lie side-by-side, the resulting compound yarn is twice as wide as it is high (or vice-versa).  Here's a visual:

Can't get 'em any closer together than that.

In my experience, the wide, flat compound yarn effect isn't my favorite, but of course ymmv - if there's a pattern in which you'd find a flat tape-style yarn appealing, I say try it out.  Swatching never hurt anyone.

I'd sort of forgotten about the possibility of tripling yarn until this project came along.  I'd had a screaming pink, variegated skein of Wollmeise 100% Merino Superwash in Roter Himbeermund set aside for awhile to knit a baby girl sweater for the niece (to coordinate with this silliness), but wasn't crazy about the idea of a fingering weight baby sweater.  I mean fine, it's been done, but for something that'll only fit for one winter... I just didn't really want to suck it up.  I was messing around the other night and stumbled on about a third of a skein of Merlot in the same base... and a few short hours later I had a new baby cardigan.  Here's why I'm happy with the triple-stranded results:

Doesn't that look so much happier?

When you knit with a three-strand "compound" yarn, the strands want to snuggle up next to each other, like those pencils are doing above.  This doesn't make for precisely round result, but it's much closer to round than the two-stranded scenario.  Looking closely at the finished project, two strands are   visible in most of the stitches.  But the third strand is there behind them, evening out the fabric, making it all dense and springy and squishy.  Oh yes.

dyeing again, natch

(As promised, a brief chronicle of the onion skin dyeing experiment)

Materials:

30g onion skins

150g superwash merino yarn (fingering weight)

100g salt

1/4c? (very approximate) white vinegar

big ol' nonreactive pot (I used an enameled Dutch oven)

small squirt bottle

Here's what I did.  Do keep in mind that it was a pretty by-the-seat-of-the-pants operation, based on a combination of vague and varied advice found on the interwebs and what was in the house/seemed like a good idea at the time.  It should also be noted that Munich's tap water seems to be made up of about 30% dissolved limestone, so who knows what color this recipe might yield in water of a more...shall we say...conventional pH.

Moving on.

Brought onion skins to a boil in enough water to cover.  Reduced to a simmer for about an hour - till skins were floppy and translucent.  While onion skins were boiling, soaked yarn in a bowl of warm, briny water (with aforementioned 100g salt dissolved in).

That's what 30g of onion skin looks like, as it turns out.

Once onion skins had given up their pigment, strained dye liquid and returned to a heavy boil to reduce down a few, concentrated ounces - transferred into squirt bottle (in this case a clean Sriracha - i.e. cock sauce - bottle because this is a classy household).  Cleaned remaining goop out of pot.

Refilled pot about 2/3 full with clean water and a tablespoon or so of vinegar; after checking that the temperature of this and the yarn bath were in the same neighborhood, introduced the yarn to the party.  Set over a low burner to bring to a bare simmer, then cut heat.  Using squirt bottle, added dye to four or five strategic locations in the pot.

Just after adding the dye

No stirring!  The whole point of the concentration exercise was to achieve a nice kettle-dyed effect.  After letting everything hang out undisturbed for about half an hour, checked for dye absorbance.  The water was just about clear, so I pulled the yarn out for a bath in the sink with another tablespoon of vinegar.  Finished with a second bath in a little bit of Soak, then squeezed the hank out thoroughly, rolled it up in a towel and walked on it, and finally hung it up to dry and walked away.  This is what I found the next day:

Success!

The result is a more pinky-peach than I'd expected.  It's also way more colorfast than I'd worried it might be.  It'll be interesting to see how (much) the color changes over time, but the salt and vinegar fixatives really seem to have done the job.  And now I'm craving chips.

coming up for air

I'm a busy lady lately, hard at work on projects secret and not so secret (speaking of which, anyone want to test knit the 47" size?  ...Bueller?   ...Bueller?)

Anyway, there's a substantive post forthcoming, I swear.  I did a little natural dyeing experiment about a week ago and am terribly pleased with the results.  Until I get around to that, here are some pretty pictures of yarn from the Wollmeise sale to distract you:

I'm dyeing here

Last time I was in the US I picked up a skein of Fisherman's Wool with the intent of doing a little home dyeing experiment.  I dragged it out the other day and hanked it up by hand, which was frankly really kind of a pain.  465 yards of pain if you want to be specific.  Maybe I'll treat myself to a little birthday present and finally get a swift and ball winder...hmmm.  Anyway, I actually got around to dyeing the hank in question the other night.

Special equipment: food coloring, protein fiber yarn, white vinegar

1) Hank yarn if its current state is otherwise (see above).

2) Get out largest saucepan you don't mind getting food coloring on.  Since this low-budget process involves only food-safe dyeing agents, there's no need to quarantine your actual cookware from dyeing equipment.

3) Leaving enough space for yarn, fill pot most of the way with water; bring to a gentle simmer and set to lowest heat setting.  Add a few tablespoons white vinegar.  Over the whole process, including a vinegar bath rinse, I used probably a 1/4 cup vinegar for my 8 oz of yarn.

This is where we leave the realm of generally applicable advice and get into the specific stuff I did for this specific hank of yarn.  This was not a scientific or carefully measured procedure, but I think it came out pretty well.  So here's what I did:

4) Add food coloring; dip yarn.  I dip-dyed my hank for a nice subtly variegated/tone on tone effect.  I started with  a blue-only bath, into which I dipped the lowest-hanging 1/4 hank.  I let it hang out for a few minutes, until most of the dye had been absorbed by the yarn (easy to tell because the water becomes clear).  I may have added more coloring for extra intensity part way through.  This is the kind of thing that one can eyeball.

5) Continue dyeing.  I did a total of four color baths, each one including a higher proportion of green to blue dye until the final bath was about a 1:1 ratio.  Upon each subsequent dip 1/4 more of the hank went into the pool until on the fourth round the whole thing went in.  Because each section of the hank was exposed not only to slightly different colors but also different dyeing times, the effect was variegation of both hue and intensity.  In total, I used about 1/2 a dropper of blue food coloring and 1/4 dropper of green.

6) Wait around.  Once the whole hank was in, I cut the heat and let the party start to cool down and continue absorbing dye, stirring in a few more teaspoons of vinegar for good measure.

7) Rinse.  After everything's cooled down to a comfortable temperature to handle (and duplicate in your rinsing sink), check that the dye water is clear.  If there's still a lot of dye in the water, put the pot back onto low heat and consider adding more vinegar.  My water was clear and tepid, so I ran a sink of tepid water with a little wool wash and some more vinegar (helps with colorfastness).  I swished the yarn around in it a little, and when the color pretty much stayed put I decided to get crazy and do a second rinse with just wool wash.

8) Squeeze out excess moisture and hang to dry.  I employed the brutish but effective roll-it-up-in-a-towel-and-stand-on-it method.

9) Admire your industriousness and natural flair for harmonizing colors.

Wollmeise, within striking distance.

A wee sampling

Mr. dilettant and I have been in Munich for almost exactly two months now, and I have to concede that Germany has been good to my knitterly tendencies.  Not only does Bavaria have a rich handcrafting history and culture, but I found an English-speaking knitting group through Toytown almost immediately.  

I showed up to their stitch n bitch our second week here, and couldn't help but notice that 1) the group was super-friendly and welcoming, and 2) at least half of the group was working on projects in cult favorite Wollmeise yarn.  I inquired on the topic, and yes, the Wollmeise was just a quick train ride away, and did I know she was having a sale in mid-August?  

Before I knew it I was sitting on the train with a gaggle of enablers, en route to Pfaffenhofen.  Thirty minutes later we debarked in the small, typical Bavarian village, and hoofed it across town the the brick-and-mortar store.  And this wasn't just Wollmeise...this was Wollmeise on sale.  Veterans shoppers informed the newbies that that whole middle row of shelving had been brought in to accommodate all the extra fire sale inventory.  

I had been well-advised to come with a plan of attack and a dedicated sum of cash.  Even having taken preparatory measures...well, it was sensory overload.  Those colors.  Egads.  It didn't help that the ten of us had descended at once like a swarm of locusts, reinforcing one another's general sense of befuddlement.  

After much internal and external debate, I checked out with two matching skeins of 100% merino sock, one skein of twin, and one skein of lace weight.  As it turned out I ended up with considerably more yardage than I'd expected AND stayed under budget, mostly because the skeins are so generous.  The sock yarn was skeined up in 150g/510yd (466m) increments, and the lace weighed in at 300g/1717yd (1570m).  In case you're counting, that's barely shy of a mile.

Without further ado, the yarn pr0n:

Wow.  My color choices are predictable.

Admiral?

Die Auster.

Petersilie?

Being that this is all sale yarn, there's ostensibly something wrong with it.  The only flaw I found was one knot in the twin...and I did have to guess at the colorways.  I can live with that.