For this project I used a different kind of silk scarf. One that is called “Habotai” and has a slicker, shinier surface than the chiffon. (Now there’s a tongue twister for you.) I figured it would hold the pleating better than the filmy chiffon kind.

I decided to start off with ironing the fabric into some fan shaped pleats, in the hope that I’d get some fracture-looking lines from the dye running along them.

The trick with ironing or pressing the pleats is that silk doesn’t like extreme heat. I used a low setting, mainly steam, and didn’t stick around too long in any one place. Basically, I used it to sort of ‘draw” the lines which I then tacked down with a needle and thread.

As a side note, I found it a little easier to stack up a whole section of folds and hit it once with the iron, than trying to fold and press each individual line. The individual way I spent way too much time accidentally flattening my previous creases.

Then I tied a whole bunch of cotton thread bits on the diagonal along the whole length of the scarf, giving me something akin to a very unusual spine.

After swishing this around in mild fabric detergent and rinsing it out, I squirted dyes directly on it. Gold ochre, chestnut, black, red, and teal all went into this, then I plopped it into a pot of hot water, gave it a couple stirs, and let it simmer away.

The brown proceeded to go crazy and swallow up everything in sight. When I pulled it out to rinse any excess dyes away, it literally looked like a pile of those dark, shiny brown leaves you see in winter puddles.

Then I took the ties off and pulled out the running stitches. And got this.

Cool, eh? I will be playing with this more – I think a crimson red will be in order – but I got these amazing fan-shaped color swathes due to the pleating and tying.

So, lesson learned – my “gentle pleating” method didn’t do much for direction the dye colors, but it did allow me to tie nice semi circles. Also, watch out for the chestnut dye. It’s rabid.

This week has been a little more laid back than usual, but I don’t mind that at all. Friday will be a dye day, with some “hired to dye” yarns in various colorways.

But last week I was able to dye a whole bunch of my Fall yarns, and I am thrilled to report that the new yarn bases behaved themselves better than expected. Here are three of the new single-ply fingerings –

And here is one of the two-ply superwash skeins. This one took the colors just like I thought it would – lots of brilliance and depth, and it held color changes quite nicely. I still really want to make something for myself from a skein of this yarn, and I finally found the perfect pattern. Now I just need to decide what color I want!

But, I got to spend a good four or five hours dyeing yesterday. Unfortunately, that means most everything is too wet to photograph, but I snagged a few pictures.

Believe me, four hours is a looooong time to be in the kitchen. Thankfully I had my lovely flowers to keep me company, and some friends dropped by for a visit. Anne is one of those wonderful people who can visit while you’re in the middle of working and make you feel like you’re on vacation, even though you’re running around the kitchen like the proverbial headless chicken. It was very enjoyable.

And, to make things even more fun, she and I worked on some super secret stuff for her latest project “Knitting With Jane.” If you like Jane Austen and are on Ravelry, you’ll find the juicy details here.

All this work dyeing is making me realize how much I miss spinning roving. I will admit to having jumped whole-hog on the “batt” bandwagon, but I’m beginning to feel pangs of homesickness. Especially when my arms are tired from long-draw spinning. Then the pangs are a little more tangible. =P

Granted, batts definitely have their place (besides being amazingly gorgeous), and I still like working with them, but I think it’s time to dig through my personal fiber stash and come up with something lovely. I can only hope that somehow, someway, I won’t have any roving and I’ll have to (gasp!) order some. Fat chance, but one can dream.

My sister was gracious enough to lend me her tiny teapot, so I curled up at my desk with my prettiest teacup, and a whole pot full of Lipton’s “Vanilla Caramel Truffle,” with lots of heavy cream and sugar. Sometimes an emotionally low day requires such things.

Unfortunately, the emotional benefits were quickly overridden with a sudden headache. Either I used too much sugar, or it was just inevitable. Either way, the tea tasted really good.

The irony of taking refuge in my room lay in the fact that I was completely surrounded by piles and piles of unfinished projects. (Not to mention stacks of old notebooks from my emptied desk!) We’ve been busy filming some how-to DVDs for my family’s business, so I had adhered to the deceptively simple practice of “Oh, I’ll just lay this here until I get a chance to put it away.”

Let me tell you, that doesn’t work so well. Especially not two-and-a-half weeks at a time. The piles were downright scary.

If you don’t believe me, take a look.

That was my view from my desk chair. Inspiring, eh?

I was definitely in danger of succumbing to “Unfinished Project Guilt Syndrome.” Thankfully, I managed to squeak out of that and have been spending a good portion of this morning in removing those stacks and piles. And organizing a bit. I’ve had some thumping good ideas for new (and better) ways to store my various belongings. Particularly my stash.

I did a little web research this morning to see how much my idea might cost me, and I’m still in sticker shock. I’ve inherited an interesting trait that can wreck havoc with my pocket book – I always go for the higher quality / more expensive stuff. Always. I’ve never tested it, but I can imagine walking down a line of unmarked sofas at a furniture store and managing to want the most expensive. Maybe there’s a way to earn a living doing that. I’ll have to look into it.

Anyway, my brilliant storage idea would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 – for the first half of the project. Excuse me while I go try to build cardboard bookshelves. (I’d actually do that if cardboard didn’t tend to get dusty. I’ve built some pretty amazing things out of cardboard, if I do say so myself, and I might just wind up having to do it again.)

But, back to the unfinished project syndrome. To combat the rising tide of painful-project-memories, I took some pictures of my almost finished “Oh, Brioche” scarf. Knit from Malabrigo Worsted that I dyed myself. And it turned out pretty gorgeous.

It’s as soft as it looks, too.

~ Happy crafting,
Rebekah

I loved every minute of it.

In fact, that’s all the confirmation I need to know that I’m doing what I really want to be doing. Selling fiber and yarn definitely holds enough excitement for me to last as long as God wants me here.

One of those sales was a refilling sale for the local yarn store. They needed more of the wholesale laceweights in certain colors, so I was able to stock them up on those. Here’s a picture of a few of the early colorways we put together. They have since been refined a little bit, and Dawn Treader isn’t pictured, but it’ll give you a general idea.

For the refill, they needed (among other things) six skeins of Dawn Treader. That’s the biggest yarn run in one colorway I have ever done, as of yet. I’ve got a custom Etsy order lined up for eight skeins of Blackberry lace, so that’ll take the record in terms of number of skeins.

I also dyed up my last two braids of Corriedale roving, so be watching for those in the store. One is the fiber version of my new colorway “Ink” (you can see the sock version here), and the other is probably going to be called “Japanese Bridge.” It’s reminiscent of Monet’s famous painting.

I’m discovering that I need to get way more fiber braids in my store ASAP. All the Bluefaced Leicester in Dawn Treader are gone, as are all the other braids I listed at the beginning of the month. I’ve got a bit more of undyed coming in (Wensleydale fiber!) but it’ll be a while before I can place another large fiber order. Hopefully we can hold out long enough.

Between all this order shipping I’ve been working away on a fun spinning project. It’s a llama, silk, and merino (I think) hand spun yarn, and I beaded a portion of it.
This was my first time beading a yarn.

For not having dyed in a while, I certainly jumped back in feet first. The ones up above there are my Malabrigo yarns. A friend and I are putting together some Malabrigo sets with matching stitch markers to put in my store, and I’ll be sending some little samples off to the Phat Fiber Boxes for April’s distribution. Lots of fun!

But, besides those, I went through a whole stack of yarns this time around. In fact, I felt like the Brave Little Tailor in one of my favorite old fairy tales. Seventeen yarns processed in one morning. (Yes, but don’t mention that I dyed less than half of those that round. The rest were twist-setting and dye-testing.) Still, I don’t think I’ve done that big of a batch since last year.

I’ve got some lovely laceweight, and a gorgeous set of bulky skeins, plus some odds and ends of other things. I was rather pleasantly surprised at how many I was able to do, what with being out of practice. The last thing I wanted to do was get halfway in and have an energy crash. When yarns are on the stove, there is no way to stop without risking the loss of the yarn. And, by extenuation, sanity.

Here’s the laceweight I dyed. It was supposed to be Dawn Treader, but I got way too much purple in there and came up with these three skeins. As I said before, I have no idea what I’m going to call it—besides gorgeous.

However, to get to the point, one of his shorter writings features tips on writing letters and contains this little gem: “My second Rule is, don’t fill more than a page and a half with apologies for not having written sooner!” And I have taken this to heart. I think it safe to assume that you’re fed up with my apologies for not having blogged sooner, so I will dispense with them forthwith.

I’ve been keeping pretty busy lately with various fiber projects. One of which was a large undertaking.
Eight ounces of superwash BFL fiber to be handspun and dyed for a Maiden Yarn customer. Oh my goodness – I practically had to fight off my knitting sister to keep the spun yarn. Bluefaced Leicester is rapidly elbowing its soft and lustrous way to the top of the fiber heap, so to speak. It’s simply wonderful stuff.

And, of course, it’s just coincidental that I happen to have more Bluefaced Leicester on my other spinning wheel.

This is the “Violet, You’re Turning Violet!” roving I mentioned earlier. A blend of BFL and silk, dyed by OrangeJello. I’m really enjoying spinning this, especially as I’m spinning it on the wheel that was formerly in disgrace. I hauled the wheel back downstairs from its exile in the bonus room and decided to give it another chance. Mainly because my other two wheels were full of custom BFL, and (amazingly enough) some more BFL that was a gift from my aunt. Do I sense a theme here?

This will most likely end up in the neighborhood of a two-ply fingering weight. I’m rather enjoying the ability to just kick back and spin and not worry about getting the weight exactly right, or making sure there aren’t any weird little bumps and slubs in the fiber. This is fiber for me, and yarn for me, so I will spin in such a way that it promotes my fiber experience. In other words, I’ll spin it the way I choose and pick up the chips later.

Not that I have a project in mind for the finished yarn, though. I’ll have to wait and see for sure what gauge it winds up at and go from there. Oh, and yardage. That’s a bit of a factor. I made the mistake of browsing Ravelry’s patterns again and discovered an interesting fact about myself. Apparently I labor under the delusion that bigger is better. Do I like the little shrugs or lacey half-sweaters? No, of course not! I go for the giant knitted coats with cables and snowflakes, or the shawls the side of bedspreads. Not exactly conducive to the four-ounce braid of roving. And I doubt I’ll have a chance to spin that much yarn anytime this year.

I’m so flabbergasted that we’re almost into December already! And this is a good sort of flabbergasted. This is a “oooh, Christmas is coming” sort of sensation. I’ve already snagged some fun little Christmas-y things for my two stores. Hurrah for half off sales at Hobby Lobby.

First up we have not one, but two braids of blue faced leceister/silk roving. Both from OrangeJello. “Bonfire” and “Violet, You’re Turning Violet!”

Then I got three sets of stitch markers from AnneKRiley. These are technically for a promotional thingy I’ll be doing for my Etsy store, but I get to admire them in the meantime.

Then we have the September Phat Fiber sample box. This is the box I got for contributing over fifty samples. (Actually, I got it because the “Phat Fiber” owners were very nice. I’d misinterpreted the instructions, but they let me have the box anyway.) All sorts of little samples (and some not so little ones!) to play with.

It was a challenge to figure out what to do with all of them. At first I thought I’d spin up the fibers, combine them with the yarn samples, and knit a hat out of them. Then I realized I’d have enough for socks. Then I thought about trying a needlepoint-type bag. However, I am now up to my ears in a new idea. Stay tuned for exciting developments. Or a frazzled blogger, which might be even more exciting.