Thank you for all your nice comments about my blog's facelift. Chris is wonderful, isn't he, doing all that work for little old me. I am very pleased with the results too. And now he is plannign to give Celia's Basket a facelift as well. You know, he'll also work for a fee. Yes that was a shameless plug for dear Chris and his work, but you know what, I think he's pretty good at it and I am very proud of him. (And no, he's not bribing me to say this :)) So, if you have a web design job for him, email me!
And now for some fiber-y goodness. I saw
this post at the Yarnharlot's blog about dyeing roving. So I thought I'd try it. I changed her method a little, though.
Here is a picture of my 'sausage' before I soaked it in warm soapy water.
After about thirty minutes, I dyed it with a mixture of colours which I mixed using food dyes and vinegar. When I was satisfied with the results, I zapped it in the microwave twice, 90secnd each time. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I wrapped it in glad wrap before I zapped it. It then looked like a bruised sausage... like this:
I allowed it to cool for abotu an hour. When it was cool enough to handle, I placed it in the kitchen sink and ran warm running water onto it to wash out any excess dye. There was hardly any. I then took it downstairs to the laundry and spun it in the washing machine for about a minute. It came out semi-dry and looked like this:
I was so worried that the colour would all turn out evenly and the browns that I added and the white bits that I so carefully left behind would all be gone. Imagine my relief when I extracted the top from the nylon stocking and saw this:
I dried it in front of the fan for most of the evening and about an hour and a half ago, it was dry. I started spinning it. This is what it looks like on the bobbin:
I am rather pleased with how it turned out. I am trying to workout whether I want to ply it normally or whether I want to take this opportunity to learn Navajo plying. What do you think?
On the knitting front, I have been knitting a sock. I used the leaf lace pattern to create a knitted sock. I used some Patonyle yarn that I had bought cheaply at Spotlight at the beginning of this year, or was it last year?
It's not much to look at when you can't see the lace pattern clearly, I suppose.
I tried to give you a closer look
And here it is, in it's completed glory:
and again...
I have written out the pattern. I am going to put it up on Celia's Basket, in the free patterns section. Before I do that, I'd like someone to test it first. Although the atterns are free, I always feel bad when people write back telling me there is an error in my pattern. I know I hate finding errors in others' patterns, so I'd rater not put up a pattern with errors if I can help it. Let me know if you are interested in kitting this sock in the next week or two.
