(with apologies to MP).
Today I did something a little differently than I have as of late. I read a book – Julie and Julia in fact. I heartily enjoy reading the occasional food related memoir. I haven’t been reading very much for the past 38 weeks or so, unless you can count the six or seven baby books we’ve been browsing our way through. As a blogger, I emphasized with a lot of the emotions that Julie must have been going through as she worked through her project. And it was lovely to sit down and read again. I was completely taken out of my head with her experiences; something that is lovely when you are 38 weeks pregnant and feeling larger than a house.If you want to read about what inspires bloggers to blog or to take on the projects they do, read Julie and Julia. If you want to read more about her adventures in cooking, than I refer you to her blog archives. I’ll be reading more of them and I expect that a short blog entry will be what my attention span while breastfeeding Sasha after she makes her debut.
Knitting, while it will always be one of my favorite passions, will never replace books for me as my first love. I learned how to read at a very early age (somewhere between 2 and 3) so I could be in the church choir and was instantly taken by the written word. I’ve read fewer books than I might have over the past few years that I’ve been blogging about knitting. Even fewer this last year with the pregnancy and the dyeing, especially if you discount the books on pregnancy and labor.
What’s worse, is I’ve been spending less time writing. I started the blog, believe it or not, to maintain and strengthen my writing skills during one of my hiatuses from paid work. The hope was and still is that someday I’ll kill my writers block sufficiently to write something else. Knitting is a great vehicle for me to focus on the craft of the writing without having to worry so much about the content. Unfortunately for the past couple of years or so, there less of a focus on the writing and and more on knitting and related crafts. Don’t get me wrong, I love the dyeing and the knitting, but it was always about the writing FIRST. I’ll still be dyeing and knitting for the time being, but hopefully this fall I’ll be able to bring a little more to you in terms of writing about the dyeing process.
In the meantime, please feast on Christine’s Stay On Baby Booties [r] by Christine Bourquin. They were knit with Three Fates Yarns Bluefaced Leciester Platinum Sock on Size US 1 needles. Thanks to my husband for the fabulous photographs. It’s 75% Superwash BFL and 25% Nylon and comes in 437 yard hanks that way approximately 100 grams. These were knit in my new Sock Summit inspired colorway, Aqua Vitae in the light version. The remainder of this skein (about 395 yards) can by found at my Etsy Shop, Three Fates Yarns at a discounted price for the yardage. I can only say that this was a fateful project I only did it since the skein broke on my new winder. Can you guess how much yarn was left over when I finished the booties from the lump I left off the finished product? About three inches.
I’ll be putting up some more of the Aqua Vitae (in a medium shade) in BFL in the shop over the weekend.
This yarn was dyed using a variant on the cold-pour method and the watercolor method with a little bit of kettle dyeing thrown in. I started by choosing my colors and mixing my dye solutions to various strengths. I spent a lot of time with depth of shade with the colors I’ve produced recently for the BFL-Nylon base. That is to say, many of the colors were created by adding differing amounts of black or by diluting my stock solutions with water. Then I layer the yarn and pour color over each skein. This dye is soaked into the yarn so quickly though (aka striking) that I usually have to turn over the skein to dye the other side. As I add each additional layer of yarn, I first plop the skein into the pot and soak up what remaining dye there is from the previous layer. Then I add more color. What gets interesting to me though is that I don’t worry so much about dye from the second skein hitting the first skein, so some color can seep from one layer to another. I can get about five skeins into a pot this way, with the lightest color skeins on the top. Finally, just to add more color, I inspect all of the skeins for white spaces and add more dye or fill the pot with a light color. I just love how the BFL absorbs the dye and if it sells well I’ll invest in some 100% Superwash BFL this fall.
