November Spinning

First I was spinning. I spun up some qiviut that Carina brought back with her from Alaska. She used to live there and so had a source for some inexpensive stuff. Less expensive because it still had the guard hairs in, but still nice to spin up:

One ounce on each bobbin

All plied up and ready for a nice soak

217.4 yards of lace to light fingering weight yarn just before dyeing

Carina was hoping for a teal and we kind of got a green, she's happy with that

Carina originally had planned to have me knit it up into a pair of fingerless gloves. Her husband thoughtfully pointed out how much wear and tear they would take on her hands and thought something around her neck might be better. I thought of a cowl/smoke ring idea and showed her Ice Queen and my Green Ice Queen. She loved that idea. We might now have enough yarn though so I'll have to see what I can do. Maybe go up a needle size and make it lacier?

While we were playing with the dye and over-dyeing dark yarn I brought along my pygora, then remembered I had a small ball of light green it would be fun to change the color of so added them to the dye pot:

Pygora, qiviut, merino

After I dyed the merino, I remembered I had been frogging the last block I was doing with it for the Barn Raising Quilt because I needed to add a few rows to it. Now I have to decide to do it in the new color or frog that part all out and use it to start a new block or what. No biggy. It will work out. I may have to frog the whole block though.

The last few weeks I haven't been spinning and I miss it. I still have eight ounces of the blue-red superwash merino to spin up. Might be able to get that over the weekend or next week to wrap up the month. Will see. ;-)

Started in January, finished in February

I had gotten the front and back pieces of Leeloo's Little Black Dress with Pearls and then for some reason set it aside. I finally got the two pieces mattress stitched together and added on some white beads I had in my bead stash for the pearls. Once I on, I realized that it was kind of short and that I might really want to do the single crochet around things.

 So off it came and I picked up stitches at the bottom under the ruffle and added a one inch 2x2 ribbing for some length. Then picked a corner and did a 3 stitch i-cord for eleven inches and then binded it back to the corner. Repeat on the other side and I had two back leg loops.  Then there was the single crochet on the ruffles back on it went:

I think it fits her much better! Her leg hair hides the loops too. The fluffy butt hair also makes it look shorter than it is. It stops just about her hips. 

Before going up to Ursulmas I cast on the provisional cast on for Ice Queen, but wasn't able to get started on it while up there and then a migraine on Monday. So getting it done in time for the month, just didn't happen. Its a nice easy knit and doing the Version A went quickly even with the beads. The slow down was the picot bind off. I had to start it three or four times because of not reading things correctly. Reading - it is a skill! The provisional cast on came off easily and I decided to do the beaded picot bind off just to make it a little more interesting. 

I haven't been happy with the green from the Blue Moon Fiber Arts Lace I got from Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival back in 2009. I used it for the dragon shawl and I still want to over-dye it too.  The Kool-Aid over-dyeing worked for this, but the shawl is significantly larger and I want a more even dye job. So with the cowl I first tried using the lemonade for yellow to work with any blues and brighten the green. Well it brightened it but with more of a yellow tone, so back to the mixing. I added in a Blue Raspberry but added some blue food coloring and Wilton's cake dye. This is what I ended up with with what it looked like before I did the over-dye:

Think this would look better if I were wearing my hair up. I have been thinking it might be something to use at outdoor events in the evening.

What it looks like as a cowl. Might need another wash though because it kind of felt scratchy, and I don't think it was the beads.

Friday must have meant dye day because I rolled right into over-dyeing some already Kool-Aid dyed yellow yarn. I was attempting for a more red tone. I used Black Cherry and it made it kind of a dark red-orange. I wanted to try for darker so pulled out some Grape and ended up with this:

Its going to be part of a Gunnister bag that I'm going to do this month.  

In further effort to wrap things up, I wound off the samples that I had on a bobbin from Yule spinning on Miss Molly the Ashford Traditional. Then the merino wool locks in the grease I spun up after finishing the Abstract Fiber Arts Blackberry yak-merino-silk at Wednesday spinning. I plied the samples up while at Revels and started the chain playing of the Blackberry today. I'm about halfway done with that and plan to finish it up on Sunday.