Snapdragons, Maybe?

 Today we were at the temple and saw these beautiful flowers out front.  Are they snapdragons?  Thanks for helping me identify them.

Swatching For Double Knit Button Band! Very Fun!

The sweater I am working on for the Knits That Fit course by Tonia of Nerdy Knitting calls for a ribbed button band.  I don’t want to do that. A year ago I saw a sweater with a double knit button band. I just had to knit that sweater so I purchased the pattern for a chunk of change. I then saw it was knitted with fingering weight yarn. That would take me about six years to knit in my size…so I scrapped that idea. Every pattern I have seen with a double knit button band has a V-neck. I like that neckline for shirts but I want a crew neck in a sweater to keep warm. I wondered if I could knit a double knit band on this crew neck sweater so I made a swatch!

Here is the cute little crew neck sweater swatch with a double knit button band…knit with two different-sized buttonholes so I could decide which size buttons to use…not these specific buttons but these sized buttons. Dear One liked the size of the yellow button. What do you think?

The steek went fine but I used the crochet plan for reinforcing the steek. I did not like that method nor the leftover stitches which made a bulky mess. In class tonight Tonia shared that she had needle felted her steek swatch and loved the simplicity of this method and the results. I have a good mind to make another swatch and steek with needle felting, though I totally can take her word for it…

Ran Out Of Yarn—If You Can Believe It!

 Today I went to the eye doctor. Love her and nice people there but it is always a significant amount of time invested. I ALWAYS take knitting with me so I don’t get into mischief. I specifically put the purple shawl in the car to work on and brought it into the office with me. After paying the upfront costs I went into the waiting room and pulled out the shawl. I was less than one row across when I ran out of the lavender yarn! 

So annoying since I expected a long wait. All of a sudden I remembered the sock project in the car so I excused myself, went to the car, retrieved the sock bag, returned to my seat and proceeded to knit for another five or six rounds before I was called.

As I was sitting there knitting I began a big fight with myself about buying another ball of lavender instead of only using what yarn I had at home. Checking my calendar I saw that this is the Hobby Lobby yarn sale week, so I lost the fight. I went to Hobby Lobby and bought one ball of  lavender yarn. I will use that up and call the shawl big enough. The second strand will be a mystery…! I really won’t buy any more yarn for this project. I will just slide in partial balls of yarn already in my collection.

First Strswberries of the season!

 Dear One brought this lovely box of strawberries home today!  I have eaten four so far. I was actually planning on eating strawberries for supper. He suggested pizza…

We did not have any ingredients except for crust so off to Food Lion I went.  Came home with pizza plus!!! He is happily munching Chester’s Chili Cheese Fries, some sort of chip-like thing. He will have eaten all his calories before he even gets to the pizza, I think.

First Solar Dyeing Project!

 Just finished, more or less, the first solar dyeing I have done!  I am thrilled.  I skeined up a ball of Patons Classic Wool and tied it in four places.  In a quart Ball jar with lid I placed one cup tap water and 1 Tablespoon of vinegar and stirred well. Next I added four or five drops of blue gel food coloring and stirred well.

Adding about half of the damp yarn I dropped on four drops of yellow food color then four drops of red food color then shoved in the last of the yarn.

After carefully filling the jar with water I put on the cover then shook the jar to make sure there was water everywhere.

Next step was to put the jar on the back deck railing in the sun for three days.  I brought it in every night so it would not chill down too much.  Heat is a big part of solar dyeing. I am thinking this summer will be a great time to solar dye!!!

This morning I emptied the jar in the sink and found that the dye bath was entirely clear! That is good news. I then washed the yarn and hung it to dry.   

Here the yarn has just been rinsed.

The yarn is hanging to dry.

I will be happy to see what happens when I knit it into something.  I wonder what I should knit...any ideas?

Monday Marvel!

 Over the weekend I finished the first project on the Ashford 32” rigid heddle loom. I am so happy.

As you know, I am trying to use up the yarn collection this year. This project, a shawl, used up five-plus balls of yarn…blacks and whites.

Every ball was different. Each was listed as bulky weight so I imagined they would weave well together.  Well, they almost did, but I think it was good enough.

Even with the problems, I am happy and will weave other one though maybe with the same type of yarn.

All Warped Up And No Place To Go...

 As I have said several times, this is the year I am going to use up the yarn in the house.  This is so I can with good conscience buy more for specific immediate projects.  This is probably a pipe dream, but hey, it is still a good idea. And it really is not a pipe dream because I do not now, nor ever have I, smoked anything of any kind--well, except for that one puff on a cigarette during play practice on the stage at South Royalton High School when I was a sophomore and coughed so much I nearly, or did, throw up.  That put me off smoking forever.  Adding that episode to my lungs being what they are due to all the pneumonia and bronchitis I had as a child...well, smoking has not been part of my life.  And I try to stay away from people who are actively smoking even today as it is still hard on my lungs.

So, that was an odd digression.

Now back to the subject in the title...

Yesterday I got up and started roaring around  getting things done early in the day.  By this I mean that I was downstairs by 9:00 AM having already completed my morning routine and was ready for something else. Well, Dear One would have loved breakfast but I was not interested in that. 

 I want to weave a shawl for the Relief Society closet.  The yarn I pulled out a few weeks ago for this project was all the bulky yarn I had picked up on very serious sale at Hobby Lobby.  These have been waiting for me in a nice flat-bottomed grocery bag from, I think, Harris Teeter (when we go on vacation I like to buy one of that type of bag from whatever store we use to buy our groceries-though on that front I am hoping not to be self-catering from now on, going out to eat has some real pluses to my mind--I know some people like to buy tee shirts to remember trips. Dear One likes to buy hats though they sometimes disappear on him...) so I pulled out that bag and took it downstairs with me.

Last year I had been fortunate enough to find an Ashford 32" rigid heddle loom with the old-style stand that has the little shelves on each side.  The loom was $175 and came with a good variety of parts.  If you don't know about weaving on a rigid heddle loom you should know that they are set up to use stick shuttles to wrap your yarn on for weaving the weft threads.  For the 16" rigid heddle loom, I use a boat shuttle which came with it. That loom and accessories were WAY WAY more expensive than this 32" loom but did have several heddles in different sizes, etc and would have cost a couple hundred dollars more if I had tried to buy everything new.  So this loom seemed like a good idea and was only a four-hour round trip to pick it up.

So...first thing yesterday morning I was ready to
warp the loom--which means putting the yarn on the loom through the heddle slots which will be the warp threads, as in the threads that run north and south in your project.  The weft threads are the east/west threads in your weaving.  Well, last week one day I decided how long the warp threads needed to be to give me the shawl length that I wanted and had measured the kitchen from the end of the island where the warping pegs would go to where the loom needed to be sitting to get that length.  I meant to take a picture of this but was so into warping that I just carried on to the next steps.

Here is the loom all warped up.  You recall that I said I was using up yarn?!  Those are all five different yarns. The things they have in common are: 1.  They were very cheap on sale...$1.26-$1.86  per ball, 2.  they were colors that I did not think would look terrible going together, but that was not high on my list of criteria for choosing them, and 3. I thought there would be plenty to warp the loom and weave the shawl.  Well, that dog did not fly! 

From right to left in the photo, they were all full skeins. They all except the lefthandmost yarn(that yarn was meant to be weft!) seemed to have lots of yarn in the ball.  Turns out, they were not even close.  Actually, looking at the photo, I guess that is not true...but I did think I had enough of the second and third balls to completely warp the loom.  Math was never my strong point...!

Anyway, I did get the loom warped and ready to go. The next step was to wind the warp onto the loom.  Usually you want to wind paper or some other separator in with the winding on process so the threads do not fall into each other.  This is probably especially important with wool yarns because wool loves to snuggle in together with its neighbor which would make weaving more difficult. This is acrylic yarn which came into being all those years ago to mimic wool yarn and be more price friendly. 

In the photo you can see one piece of rolled paper hanging down.  That is the leftover from the separator/winding on process. I didn't want to cut the paper because I might want to weave a longer length of fabric next time.  On the side where you do not see paper hanging down, the pieces of paper I used were all used up by that point. Actually there were several shorter lengths of paper that I used.

I moved the loom over to my chair in the living room next and started threading up.  Threading up is when you take one of the threads from the slot you had pulled the warp thread through and thread  it into the hole in the heddle to the right of the slot.  This enables you to make a shed where, when you move the heddle up and down, the threads in the slot go one way and the threads in the holes go the other way...up and down.  The space in between those is called the shed which is where you slide the shuttle through.  In this case the shuttle must be a stick shuttle as you cannot "shoot" a boat shuttle through as there is nothing to slide it on like there is on a floor loom which has a little "shelf" for running the boat shuttle along.

So now, finally,  we get to the "no place to go". My plan for the day had been to warp the loom first thing and then when I finished a taxing "fifteen" I would rest in front of the loom and do a fifteen weaving.  If I did all the fifteens I had written in my journal as the plan for the day, and did fifteen minutes in between each of them weaving, I was thinking I might actually get the shawl finished by bedtime. DID.NOT.HAPPEN!

Why did it not happen you ask, because I had not noticed that I did not have a 32" stick shuttle.  What a dope!  If I had checked things out when I first thought of weaving a shawl a couple of weeks ago, I would have known I needed to get one or more.  SO...I went to The Woolery's website and tried to order an Ashford 32" stick shuttle.  Did not have any available.  So I checked out Kromski stick shuttles. They were in stock.  I ordered two.  It was a bit wrenching because I am a brand loyal person. I really like Ashford.  They make good things that hold up.  Things I have: Ashford Traveller spinning wheel, Ashford E-Spinner 3, Ashford 16" rigid heddle loom, Ashford 32" rigid heddle loom, Ashford 10" SampleIt rigid heddle loom (Dear One's project), and multiple smaller accessories for the looms.  Brand loyal with good reason!  These tools work very well.  If I had a problem, Ashford answers emails and maybe even phone calls.  I won't swear to it, but I think I called them once.

When I was looking for the stick shuttles and realized I needed to get the Kromski brand I remembered that I had talked  with Kromski America before I found the first used rigid heddle loom.  I had thought I would purchase one of their looms but then the 16" Ashford fell into my lap.

So now we wait for UPS to come next week sometime, hopefully, then I will get back to the weaving project.  Maybe by then I will have completed a few other pressing projects and will be able to just sit down and spin.  Based on the math problems as I was warping, I am unsure if there will be enough of the weft balls of yarn.  The cream ball is half used. I have two black-ish skeins of the same type of boucle-like yarn but have no idea if there will be enough to finish the shawl.  If not, then I will figure something else out about weft yarn.  I WILL NOT BUY MORE YARN.  I am saying this out loud for my benefit, not yours. I just need to continually remind myself that I have enough yarn,  that I have to use up the yarn in the house NOW!  What a feeling that will be.  I will feel very virtuous if I get there.  No, I will feel very virtuous WHEN I get there.  Hopefully before Christmas.