I love the smell of Kool-Aid and Vinegar

...it smells like Victory.





I was looking for some Wool-Ease to make some Easter slippers and couldn't find any! None at Hobby Lobby; none at Wal-Mart; four meh colors at JoAnn. I bought the one most suitable for the giftee, a skein of white with sparkles.





Could I dye it? Wool-Ease is 80% acrylic, so I wasn't sure, but I did a test strip and sure enough, it took a good bit of color. I wanted to do something variegated, and went with blue, green, and yellow. Still a lot of white showing on the yarn, of course, but it's pretty! I did some pink lemonade, too, but don't have a good picture.

I still have Hancock Fabrics and Michaels to check--I'd like to have something with a bit of natural fiber for these slippers--who would have thought Wool-Ease is seasonal! Maybe spring colors are coming out?

Bargain Alpaca, Redux

The original color:

What to do?

The Result:

Now that the yarn is dry, the red is a bit too light in spots, and there's a blotch where the dye didn't take at all. The very darkest bits are still very dark blue, which makes me think the yarn is too saturated to take any other color. It needs another dip in dye, that's for sure, but on the whole I'm happy with the project so far.

Bargain Alpaca

A nice day today, dinking about and going to see Watchmen (my review: AWESOME.) Went to Tuesday Morning and found this stuff for $3 a skein--100% alpaca! 100 yards! So I bought the 4 skeins that were there.

The color in real life is more green, so the yarn is blotches of teal. I'd like to try overdying it to something I'd like better--would using red give me something purply? My first thought was to use Kool-Aid because it's cheap and as far as I know doesn't need jars of powdered lye or anything else that would be a danger to myself and others, and I hear it leaves the yarn smelling all fruity, which makes me happy. From poking around a bit in Ravelry, though, it looks like you can use Wilton colors too, and heaven knows I have a right smart of those.

The yarn feels like it's been in the bottom of a bin for a while, very matted as alpaca is wont to get. I rewound the skein that came without a label and it looks like this now:

It looks more promising this way but it's still too teal for me.

Comfort knitting

...so that's how you add pictures! More color around here for darned sure from now on!

After my Unfortunate Malaise of the weekend it was awfully nice to get back to this--it's a Simple Yet Effective Shawl (no links, bad blogger) in Bernat Alpaca Blend...so soft, so thick, so restful! It's about 200 stitches across right now, after, hmm, 3.5 skeins? and I have 6 more skeins if I need them. I want it to be large, blanketty large, even though I will look quite silly if I wear it out of the house.

Too sick to knit?

Scary. That was my weekend, though, some kind of Stomach Thing that left me giving knitting and most food a big fat pleh. Started coming out of the knitting funk yesterday, slowly, and got over it for sure around noon today, about the same time food started looking like a good idea too.

Finished the knitting and stitching of Nonie's Pocketbook Slippers today, washed them and threw them in the dryer (the magic of acrylic!), only to find they acquired a thin nasty sheen from the dryer sheets. Washed again, now air drying, so they still need buttons and giving away. I hear Nonie had some laproscopic stomach repair today but no other updates.

Duh.

Last night I heard a friend of mine was in the hospital, and it wasn't until bedtime I thought, "I can make her a pair of slippers!" Pocketbook slippers, that is, out of a skein of dark blue Bernat Satin that I bought one day because I just had to buy some yarn.

The Bernat Satin is very soft, almost too soft to make me believe it will stand up to any hard wear, but I think Nonie's going to be laid up for a while so that may not be an issue. It's 100% genuine acrylic, so it won't have care issues. I made my first couple pairs of slippers with Lion Brand Wool-Ease, which I think would be less sweaty but not as soft, and I remember the six inches of knitting around the foot were a purgatorial endeavor, but I just started this pair this morning and I'm already halfway through.

My great-grandmother made pocketbook slippers for me, once with very long strings to imitate ballet toe shoes. I wore them until the heels wore out, which was fine, because when I broke my leg in 3rd grade the hole fit over the heel in my walking cast and the slippers kept my toe warm. It was a plaster cast, which tells you how old I am.

Stress Yarning

When I was buying my house I was so upset by the process I went to McAllister's and bought a baked potato and a sandwich, which if you know McAllister's you know how ridiculous that is, because the baked potatoes are as big as your head there and the sandwiches are not small. Before that I wouldn't have said I'm a stress eater but there you go.

Last week I was under some stress--good stress, but nothing to do with knitting--and my coping mechanism was to shop for yarn. I don't think this is a substitute for stress eating but just an additional tool for self-medication.

Prinicipally I was mooning over the Lion Brand Yarn catalog, over the recycled cotton and the Cotton Bamboo in their new studio line. I haven't seen the recycled cotton in real life, but I hope it will come out in the spring--Michaels has signs up saying spring yarns are coming, but I am fooled by the blooming daffodils into thinking spring is here now, so the yarns should be too. I did get the only two skeins of Red Heart Eco-Cotton (75% recycled) in town, in Midnight Marl, a delicious color, that I am using to make a shopping bag so I will fit in with the real knitters at Stitches South at the end of April. I made the bag 25% larger than the pattern called for and am about to run out of yarn...there's always the internets to get more (crossing fingers).