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On Sunday, Kristen and I headed out to West Kilbride for a day of yarn dye-ing with Old Maiden Aunt. We had a blast mixing colors, dye-ing our test skeins and trying our hand at larger skeins as well.
We carefully wrote down our proportions for the smaller skeins, so we could scale up for the larger ones.
Keeping in accordance with our normal odd sameness, Kristen and I both showed up with braids in our hair, tan vests, cuffed jeans and all-stars. Sometimes it gets downright uncanny.
Those are my tester skeins in the front of the photo, with Kristen’s at the back. We played around with how the same dye concoction would turn out on different fibers. The almost red and the light coral from my tester skeins are the same recipe and amount of dye, but two different types of yarn. Crazy!
Lilith, the mastermind behind Old Maiden Aunt, was friendly and sweet. We loved her ‘dash of this, dash of that’ mentality towards dye-ing. She made us unafraid to try anything, mix and remix any color and play around until we got the tone we wanted. The larger skeins in the photo are her work.
After my test skeins, I decided to dye a few more than my one workshop-included large skein. I dyed a 4-ply merino/bamboo blend in a deep purple to make a shawl/scarf:
The bamboo doesn’t absorb the dye, so there is a nice sheen to the yarn where the bamboo is mixed in – it adds a lot of interest to the color.
I also chose to dye three skeins of an alpaca/silk/cashmere blend to make the Plain and Simple Pullover.
The green is a little deeper in person. I am happy to report that both sets of yarn are for projects in my Ravelry queue – keeping me in line with my desire (though not a strict rule) to spend yarn money only on yarn for projects I already have planned. Though I will be honest and say that, had budget allowed, I would have bought a boatload of Old Maiden Aunt yarns – Lilith has a great eye for color!
Kristen and I had a great time knitting on the train rides to West Kilbride and back. We got to take a quick tour of the new, larger space Lilith is moving into next month. My fingers were dyed purple and teal when I gave up on wearing the latex gloves. A full day of craftyness? Amazing. If you are headed for Scotland, make sure you sign up for a workshop with Lilith. Even non-knitters would love this workshop!
Thanks to a friend’s link on Facebook, I have been listening to Adele’s latest album for free at work all day. You can too.
When we first moved to Edinburgh, I was whirling through finding a flat and a job and getting Seth settled into New College. Among these first ‘need to do’ items was also the searching out of a knitting group. We had only been here 4 days when I attended my first one – if you know me at all, that won’t surprise you.
The group meets Thursdays at a local cafe and is pretty large for a weekly knitting group. There are many regulars and hosts of others who cycle in and out as their schedules allow. Weekly I go and meet with Kristine, Imogen (who eats the frosting from my chocolate cake each week at group – starting with the first week I met her), Nichola, Jackie, Liz, Ysolda, Sarah and many others.
{Ysolda, me, Sarah}
Last week Anne Hanson and Cookie A were visiting Ysolda and came to our group. They (and Ysolda) are, as Kristine calls them, Knitting Royalty, but were the friendliest people ever and it was great to meet them. I was admittedly a little in awe, but mostly because someday I would like to have a creative job that I love and was willing to work really hard at the way they do.
{me, Anne, Cookie}
Now that they’ve come and gone, I’ve thought of all sorts of questions I should have asked and witty things I should have said…
Just kidding about the witty sayings part.
Dear Knitting Group – you are awesome and I am glad to be welcomed into your haven of wool and conversation.
Finally, a shout out to my awesome Wednesday night knitting group that I now can’t attend due to another commitment, and hugs back to my knitting group in Chicago!
(big grin) PS: There is a photo of me on Anne’s blog – knitspot.
Friday night I sat down to pick up stitches for the short sleeves of my almost finished 2010 cardigan. I thought if I just got them started, I would more than likely finish the sweater within a week or so.
Turns out those baby sleeves are pretty fast knitting (who would have thought?) and were both finished by later that evening. I decided to go ahead and weave in the ends and block the thing while I was at it, and by 12:30am – voila!
More seasoned knitters might think of better ways to block a sweater, but well – this way worked just fine. I don’t know if I mentioned it here, but while I was knitting this, I got a little worried that it would be too small. I think that’s why the sleeves took me so long to start! Fortunately blocking works wonders, and today I am wearing a finished cardigan:
Hopefully I can get someone to take photos of me in the sweater, but for now – here is my own self-portrait. The buttons look like they are pulling, but the fit is fine, so I don’t know why they look like that.
By the way, walking to work this morning I was amazed at the warmth of this wool. Maybe I don’t own enough wool sweaters to have a true knowledge of the warmth of a full-on layer of wool (truth: I now own ONE wool sweater – the one shown above), but today I am as warm as ever – and only wishing that I’d knitted long sleeves for this cardi.
Someday I will knit this sweater again in the next size up – it blocked out to size, but the body portion of the sweater lost a little beauty because of it. See how the collar fabric looks tighter than the body? I didn’t have to do any ‘stretching’ there and I like the look of the fabric better. Ah well – no other complaints and I am still going to wear the sweater.
I am so happy to be finished with this, but mostly because now I can wear it – the pattern itself was pretty fun to knit, yes, even with the miles of moss stitch…
Seth and I started baking our own bread last weekend. While we are probably the last on earth to hear about how awesome it is, we were pretty nerd-ily excited about doing it anyway. Seth had picked up some wheat bread flour and yeast for a recipe last month, and as I am all about seeing what I can make from what we already have – wheat bread it was. Making bread is WAY easier than I assumed it would be – mix up the 4-5 ingredients, tire your arms out kneading, then let it rise and bake it. What was I afraid of?
Our first loaf was baked on a cake pan and was shaped like a flattened sphere, but it tasted great – thick and weighty with a simple wheat-y goodness. My grocery store trip the next day had me buying white bread flour, a loaf pan and a proper bread knife, resulting in a second loaf as soon as I could talk the dough into rising (that’s the second loaf above). Making the second loaf was a great plan, since we had pretty much eaten all of the wheat loaf in one day.
I never understood the draw of having a bread machine until now – throw in the ingredients and have fresh bread in 2-3 hours? Umm, yes please. But until we can afford that modern convenience, I will be in my tiny apartment kitchen, kneading dough and trying not to eat whole loaves of bread as a meal. Come on over for a fresh slice with butter and jam…
Last Friday I hosted an evening craft night with some new friends in Edinburgh. I taught them how to make burnt-edge floral pins, as well as showed samples of various other styles of pins they could create – then let them loose with the supplies. They could sew their flowers onto a pin back or attach them to a headband. We held the party at my office – a beautiful Georgian townhouse in the City Centre with a really nice conference room.
Everyone’s creations were so different and pretty – I love to see what different people will do with the same materials.
Thanks for a great night girls!
A purchase of old film and negatives by John Maloof has turned into an amazing find of the undeveloped work of amateur photographer Vivian Maier. Vivian recently died at 83, just before John took a second look at her images and discovered their value. Her photos are of people and settings from various decades, and all have a beauty and a life of their own. There is a book coming out, and several exhibits have been held so far.
Don’t want to post any photos here, but you can see some of her work at the blog John has created and read about her life and the discovery of her photos in this BBC article.
ANNIE HORN 