After the Kool Aid

After a little trip to the microwave and a lot of rinsing, my little test skeins are ready for viewing.


As I'm sure you guessed, they are dyed with (from left to right) Grape, Lime, Cherry. The original Ruby Red wool/silk is across the top, for reference.

I like the bright red of the Cherry, but I already have another shawl that colour. I also like the brownish olive green the the Lime turned into, but I do have some Walnut brown wool/silk that I've been planning to use for a breezy lace cardigan, and I don't know that I need two brown lace items, just now.

Most of all, I love the deep almost-black purple that I got with the Grape: it's just what I was hoping for. I think we have a winner.

Milk Cake

I had a dream last night that I was eating a bowl full of pieces of stale cake soaked in milk to rehydrate it. Think about that for a second. I could have had a dream about flying with valkyries to a Nordic castle inhabited by Alexander Skarsgard, but I had a dream about stale cake and milk. Weird, to say the least. (It reminds me of another dream I had, once, where I was eating turkey leftovers (not even a fresh hot meal, but leftovers) and was worried that my HLM was going to steal them away. I mean, to be fair, even leftovers of turkey dinner are worth protecting, it's true.)


I decided not to overanalyze the dream, but to take it as a sign that it was time to make a Tres Leches cake. Ever since I saw this recipe on Pioneer Woman, I've been lusting after it. Thanks to the milk cake dream, today was the day. I bought the requisite three types of milks at the store after work and came home to put this baby together. For the record, it's just as lovely as it looks. Perhaps I went a bit heavy on the whipped cream layer, but I hated to waste any, especially since it has just a teensy bit of my tequila vanilla in there.

I also (finally) finished the knitted lace edging of the Bridgewater shawl, a few minutes ago. Having finished it, I am thinking about overdyeing it before I block it out. Maybe it seems crazy, but I've made enough projects with this ruby red that I'm ready to have a shawl of a different colour now. (Note to self (and also to you): buying lace yarn on cones gives you a lot of yarn.)


So I tried out a few colours of kool aid to see how they look. This is clearly the Before shot. I can't wait for them to dry out!

More Bloody Socks

Just so you get a chance to see how nicely my overdyed yarn is knitting up, here is a shot of the lovely variegated yarn on the sole of my Vampire Boyfriend sock. Purdy, ain't it? Perhaps it seems sacrilegious to overdye Socks that Rock, but I'm sure that Tina would approve of a little experimentation in dyeing, even if it's over one of her creations.


The socks are still moving along -- I am nearing the finish of the first one. The pattern takes some brain power, however, since the cables along the side are on a 7-row repeat, and the larger heart pattern in the middle is a 20-row repeat. Thank goodness I know how to read my knitting, for those pesky moments when I forget what row I'm on, on either/both of them.

Knock wood, I should finish the first one tomorrow night. I hope so, anyway; I am already chomping at the bit to cast on both patterns from this month's Rockin' Sock Club shipment. So many socks -- so little time.

I Vant to Drink Your Blood

I have started the new sock project -- My Vampire Boyfriend socks from Knitty -- and I am loving how the yarn is knitting up. The less-dyed spots are pretty sporadic, and really add some extra depth to the variegated red. Almost like spots where the blood got drained dry...

The only question remains... does my vampire boyfriend have dark hair, or blond?

Live Fast, Dye Young

A long time ago, I had a gift certificate for Blue Moon, and among the lovely items I got yarn for, I also picked up a skein of sock yarn on a whim. The colours looked lovely and I was pretty excited about it. Once I had it in my hands and wound it into a ball, I just couldn't imagine what pattern I would make with it. It's been sitting within my eyeline for months, and I have toyed with the thought of one pattern or another, but nothing seemed right.


In an unrelated whim, this week, I had an inspiration to make a certain sock pattern, but the yarn for it would need to be a semisolid bright red. Since I'm not buying new yarn right now, I remembered a skein of undyed yarn I had in my stash, and thought I should try another experiment in Kool Aid dyeing. Then I thought of this skein and an experiment in overdyeing, instead.

The base of it was mostly a very soft yellow, with some light minty green, a pinky red, and a soft brown. I figured that the red overdye would leave it many shades of red, some orangier (from the yellow) and some brownier (from the green and brown). It turned out pretty much like I anticipated, but with some spots less-dyed than others. I was initially a bit dismayed by this (probably from a combination of unsaturated yarn before going into the dye and also my own lack of stirring to ensure the dye was evenly distributed after the yarn went in) but it is really growing on me. I am going to see how it looks knit up, and then decide if I want to throw the completed socks back into some cherry Kool Aid to even things out a bit.


Aren't experiments fun?

Electric Kool Aid Acid Test

So I mentioned the other day that I would be dyeing some Cascade 220 for a yoke sweater... Well, on new year's eve, I put on my alchemist hat and this is what I ended up with:


It may look like a horrible accident that would have me in tears, but believe it or not, it's pretty much what I intended -- I wanted the dye to be sparse and erratic, some large and some small blotches, with the majority of the yarn still the original colour (Duck Egg Blue, for the record.) Some of the skeins have more dye than others, since I started to run out by the last skein or two (though a couple that look undyed in the photo have more colour on the other side of the skein) -- I think I'll just use them strategically, to try to disperse the colour evenly. Or not. I wound one up so far, to see how it looks in a yarn cake, and now I'm pretty stoked to start the project.


For the dye, I used equal parts Cherry and Orange Kool Aid, to try for a colour that wasn't just bright purple but wasn't brown, either. It came out somewhere between plum and dried blood. I'm pretty satisfied with it. The only snag was that most of the KoolAid dyeing instructions out there on the web call for a microwave, or sometimes a steamer basket, neither of which I have. (Or even the sun, which is also curiously absent this time of year.) So I had to do a little extra searching to find some instructions that used a conventional oven instead. It worked fine, but my whole apartment had the sickly smell of Orange Cherry Wet Sheep for a day or two. My HLM was not impressed. I went through a lot of incense, what with my windows being frozen shut by Jack Frost and all.


In other news, I spent the last couple of days plugging away on a new knitting bag (so I'll have something pretty to store my new sweater project in, natch.) I got the pattern free from Knitting Daily ages ago, and recently saw so many nice ones on Ravelry that I had to try it out. Knitting the berry stitch so tightly for three days wasn't the best thing for me, but it turned out so nice that I can't complain. Once again, I used Cascade 220 (this time in Como Blue, which is quite a bit darker than this photo appears -- it's more accurate in the photo below) but doubled up, since the pattern calls for a much thicker yarn. And yes, if you're wondering, those are wooden knitting needles at the top of each panel (10.0mm diameter -- yikes!) The bag was knitted on much smaller needles, of course, but you end it with the big ones, and glue the stitches at the point end so they won't slide off.


The bag is totally roomy and sturdy. I lined it with leftover fishy fabric, since it sort-of matched. I was going to stabilize the handles with fabric as well, but I didn't have quite enough, so they will just stretch out, as garter stitch is wont to do. I will live with it. Right now my Bumbleberry socks are stored in there, waiting patiently to be finished. Did I mention that I turned the second heel?

the Portland Socks revealed

So I finished my Portland Socks during the last few days of my holidays. This yarn was last year's birthday prezzie from my sisters -- thanks girls! It was a Louet yarn dyeing kit, and it came with the three colours you see: poppy red, cherry red, and blue. At the time I was way into self-striping yarns, and reskeined the whole lot of yarn and made it into three colourways -- one was poppy red with blue, one was cherry red with blue, and one was the two shades of red. Seemed like a good idea, but then I decided that I didn't want socks that had stripes that change colours every third of the sock. Plus I wanted an excuse to try the helix stripes. So I decided to do the toe/heel/cuff in the two reds, and then alternate the other three yarns in helix stripes for the rest of the sock. Still with me?

The helix stripe technique is a bit fiddly. A bit more fiddly than just doing regular stripes. Of course the benefit is that there isn't a column of yarn crawling up the back of the sock, and there is no mismatched join between rounds. Not that you can tell with this yarn, anyway.

In any case, I like them -- I like the way that the alternating self-striping yarns make a pattern that looks almost random. They are warm and snuggly and make me smile.

Other news: plugging away on the entrelac lap throw, but it is slow going... The quilt frame is here and I have basted the whole quilt sandwich together. On with the quilting...