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

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.

Why I Am A Bad Knitter

1) I don't know how to do cables yet (but it's this year's resolution).

2) I don't know how to do stranded colorwork (and so far I'm okay with that).

3) I don't have pink hair (so I'm not a knitgrrl).

4) I don't swoon over all things Celtic (especially harp music).

5) I don't hate big box store yarns (though Hobby Lobby scares me).

6) I don't want to spin my own yarn (but having fiber-fu is cool)

7) I don't collect sheepy tchotckes (they clash with my ceramic cats).

About a year ago I wanted to knit something smaller than a lap blanket, so the nice woman at my LYS put One-Skein Wonders in my hands, and from there I found Ravelry, collected a bucket o' stash, knitted Christmas presents...I'm not a good knitter, but every project I can see I'm getting better. Still don't want any harp music though.