A Life entangled in Thread, Wool and Needles

Maybe Mr. Powers thought of something different, but I have found it after all!

Surprise surprise, a finished pair of socks! This time it is the pattern “Mojo” and I highly recommend it. Its easy, I like the look and moreover its free!

Pattern: Mojo

Yarn: Undyed sockwool purchased at wollatelier

Colorway: my own handdyed

Vor einigen Tagen ist endlich ein kleines Päckchen aus Österreich bei mir eingetrudelt! Und hier ist der Inhalt:

An Anfang von jedem Heft werden die Grundtechniken erklärt und dann folgen insgesamt ca. 120 Zopf-Strickmuster. Die meisten sind davon 1er Zöpfe, aber auch einiger 2er oder Mischungen. Die Strickschrift ist die gleiche wie Yarnissima sie verwendet, also am Anfang etwas gewöhnungsbedürftig. Außerdem sind auf den letzten Seiten pro Band noch ca. 4 Strickanleitungen für Westen, Socken und ähnliches welche wirklich restlos aus Zöpfen bestehen.

Bestellt habe ich es bei demVerein Schloss Trautenfels in Österreich. Das Porto war zwar schon recht hoch, aber es hat sich gelohnt

A few days before I recieved a little shipment from Austria!

The very first pages of every volumes is used for instructions on the very basic cabeling techniques. Afterwards there are all in all about 120 cable patterns. Most of them are one stitch cables but there are also a few 2 stitch ones or mixtures of both. The way the charts are done is similar to the charting of yarnissima, so it might be a little confusing at first.

Moreover there are approximately 4 patterns in each volume ranging from socks to sweaters, every one of them consisting completely of cables.

I ordered it at in Verein Schloss Trautenfels Austria. The shipping costs were quite high, but it was definately worth it.

… make the newly renovated bedroom of my parents a little more colorful. Up until now it is much too plain white.

I did it as a birthday present for my mother. Can’t wait to see if she likes it but I need to wait until may. She loves red things, especially poppies. So I did this little wall hanging. It was the first time for me to use so much beads in hand stitching and I spilled way too much of them on the floor on various occasions.

I can’t stop knitting socks… here are is the new finished pair.

The color pattern isn’t the same on both socks but I like them the way they are. I didn’t even tried to put the dye on the skein so that the pattern wouldn’t change while knitting it up….

And for the ones of you interested in the pattern: it’s one more time the firestarter. Okay, I modified the cable a little but it is basicly the same.

Here are my second socks and they are big enough to fit my feet (size 42)! I needed to add 4 stitches to the normal of 60 and added one more patternrepeat before starting the gusset. I’m quite happy with the way the yarn and even more because it was the first time I used my handdyed.

Pattern: Firestarter

Yarn: Undyed sockwool purchased at wollatelier

Colorway: my own handdyed

And the following ones are knit of the green wool I dyed recently.

After carrying around my knitting in plastic bags for far too long I came to sew a few projectbags. One for big projects and two for smaller things like gloves, socks and so on.

And the best thing: one hour and a bag is finished

Not long ago I couldn’t imagine that knitting socks would be any fun at all but now I have finished my first pair and am knitting on the second one. It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be..

Here they are:

Yarn: Lana Grossa Meilenweit Cotton Stretch

Pattern: made it up

Colorway: brown? can’t remember the color number

And here is the first half of my firestarter sock knitted with some of the yarn I dyed last week:

I dyed a little more today and I came to the result that I like dyeing in a pot much more than dripping dye over it without water and heat around it. There is so much dye in the water that will not bond to the yarn at all so I drove to a near supermarket to buy a pot I could use for dyeing. Before I considered seriously using my only cookingpot I have around here but even I got to thinking that this was not a good idea at all. Another advantage beside the more efficient dye use is that dyeing like this is much less messy. My kitchen didn’t look much different afterwards than before! I hate cleaning the worktop, the sink, the stove everytime I dye something.

I didn’t thought of using a pot for dyeing because I held that I would get only solid colors but I really should have known better. After I had placed the yarn in the water and put the vinegar in I just poured the dye over it and the resulting yarn is not solid colored at all.

The only thing which really annoys me is the awful long time it takes to dry a skein at the air. I put it next to the heating (bad gal, read in 2 books that this is no good idea at all) but it was no great use. Still much to damp to wind a skein. Hey, dyeing doesn’t needs so much time at all, but drying is soooo boring and tedious. Hate it.

Here they are: (one day later)

I actually tried to dye wool. I wanted to wait for a little time to do it at my parents house because there is so much more space than in my tiny 14 squaremeters students room but I couldn’t hold back.

So I prepared the stocksolutions and spilled blue dye all over the worktop in really really small kitchen because I wanted to shake it a little to dissolve the dye even more but the lid wasn’t properly screwed on and so… SPLASH ALL OVER THE PLACE. In that moment I thought feverishly about what I will say to the owner when I move out of here, but fortunately I could remove the deep blue stains with lots of scrubbig.

The dyeing itself was really easy and fast done. I took the hanks of yarn and immersed them im lukewarm water with a little detergent for about half an hour, than I removed the water and filled water mixed with citric acid in the bucket with the yarn so the dyestuff will bond better to the wool. After a few minutes I removed the water and mixed my solutions. Thanks to my new scale which didn’t work at all (I bought it because of the 0,01g minimal weight) I needed to take my kitchen scale which only gets 1g s. So my measurements might be a little vague, but hey, the colors will be unique! I’ll never be able to get them again.

For each hank I did 2 separate dyesolutions in different colors and poured them slowly over the hanks. I needed to squeeze a little to get the dye everywhere but it was overall really easy.

After that I pressed the excess dye out of it and placed it in my steamer for about 40 minutes. Afterwards I let it cool a little and then washed it cautiously with a little perwoll.

Actually it took 2 days to dry.. and here are the results:

A blue one for a dear friend of mine (I intended to dye it a little lighter shade, but the lack of practice produced it differently)

And here is the one for me:

I hope to dye more tomorrow because it was such fun.