Friday, December 18, 2009

Christmas Wool Project

I'd like to take a project with me when I travel to Oregon next week, for something to do in airports, but also something to do with my hands while sitting at my family's house.  I really do find it difficult to do nothing!  (An aside: I'd be surprised if there  weren't one or two broken things waiting for me to fix. Yup, I'm the family fix-it person!) 


Here's the project I want to make (Ravelry Heelhead Scarf by Carissa Browning).  This week has been an entire project-before-the-project to get enough of the right color wool carded before I can spin it into the yarn, before I can even think of knitting it into this project.




I want to make it with the same wool (thinner yarn though) that I made this neckwarmer with.  Except - I only had 3 ounces of this fleece left after making the neckwarmer yarn.
I love the color variegations of this green, so I tried to extend the remaining 3 or so ounces by carding in some of my other wool.  I carded in some orange, some pink, some green.  Except the greens I have are more turquoise.  The effect has been to make the whole thing lighter, which I do not want.  Plus, after hours spent carefully carding in different colors, I had only carded in one more ounce.  I had 4-1/2 ounces now - not enough to make much.  Must. Get. More. Dark green. Wool.

Hm.  I know!  I'll dye some of my light Romney that I got at Rhinebeck.  Except that I don't have dark green dye.  But I DO have blue and yellow and orange dye!  So Monday night I dyed 4 ounces in a mixture of blue/yellow/orange.  And got ... dark turquoise (on the left below), virtually the same color I already have.  So Tuesday night I overdyed 3 ounces of that in a yellow pot and got an interesting green (on the right below).  Lighter than I want, but oh well.  The wound up wool is part of what I have after carding in all those other colors, before adding in any of the stuff I just dyed.


Then I took all the dyed and overdyed wool and mixed it in with the previous wool to get this "interesting" mixture ready for carding.  I don't think it's going to be attractive.  It needs more blue and dark green.
 
I bought a few ounces of dark green and blue from the felting peeps (you can see them below), carded them in (also below), and will start spinning it tonight.  I need to get 450 - 600 yards for the hooded scarf.  I'm beginning to think I would have been alot better off, colorwise, if I had just bought some yarn instead of trying to make it!  I  know I gotta try and fail a bunch of times and that's part of the learning process, but who's going to wear a hooded scarf that's the color of baby poop, or throwup?

Later note: Interesting things happened when I started spinning the above wool.  The single looks like this - - really good!  This is the first ounce of it.  I've got 6 more chunks to go.  Then plying two singles together into a double.  This is my weekend project, right here.  I'll let you know how it goes.

6 comments:

  1. I agree! That's a beautiful color!

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  2. Your end result of dyeing and blending is a wonderful color! How cool that you also spin and knit. =)

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  3. Hey, thanks! I'll post another pic when I get farther along!

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  4. Indeed, there are lots of us knitters out there who feel no compulsion at all to spin what we knit with! For me, it's all about the pattern, then the yarn (sometimes, the reverse, but there are so many nice yarns out there, it's a good bet it will be easy to fine one that fits the pattern).

    Your work looks gorgeous, though.

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  5. Hey I like the color! Your baby poop comment reminds me of a party I had and the only sherbet at the store was rainbow...you know what your punch looks like when the rainbow sherbet starts to melt?? I will always love the guy who drank it anyway!
    I hope you have wooden or plastic needles, not metal...because if you can't take your nail clippers, the airport security probably frowns on the metal needles. I haven't flown in a while. I think I took little wooden ones that I made last time and they just tucked in.
    Hope you have a good visit. My dad's got lyphocytic Leukemia, just found out after Thanksgiving. Today I spent an hour or 2 filling out some paperwork he needs to take to the specialist in Pittsburgh when I take them down in Jan for an apt. I'm the one who's around to take care of the details. It makes me glad my mom was a DIY girl and I take after her, as they age and need more help, I'm the fix-it, get-it, pick-it-up girl here. And when she wanted valances for the dining room windows and they discontined the ones she saw at the store, we traced the shape of the one they had and went to the fabric store and made our own...then made a different shaped one for the big living room window..just because we knew that we could...half the battle of getting something done is just starting.

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  6. Hey Karen Sue - sorry to hear about your dad. Good that they know what it is, and good that you're there to help get things done. Hope the treatments go well!

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