This morning, after Veronica’s playdate comes by to pick her up, we’re heading out to pick up fifteen pounds of locally grown strawberries already sliced and sitting in their juice in a bucket. I’ve never bought strawberries this way before, so I don’t know how far they’ll go, but I’m hoping to make my year’s supply of strawberry freezer jam this afternoon. I’ve got the Costco bag of ripe lemons, big bag o’ sugar, and many boxes of liquid pectin all ready to go. My kitchen counter is even clean.

I have a feeling we’ll be making biscuits in the near future. Which’ll send my blood sugar into chaos and I’ll probably have to sleep it off. But whatever. We had cupcakes with whipping cream and fresh raspberries last night after dinner, and I felt fine.

I still haven’t figure out what sets me off, but I’m making considerable efforts to get more protein, and to get it frequently throughout the day.

Ok, what the heck just happened??? I scanned my post after publishing it, and all my dye talk has vanished. It’s gone. I’m so grumpy.

So the short and cross version is that I’ve come up with a new colorway that I really like. It looks like watermelon. I only have a pound of it dyed right now, so I need to dye more, lots more as I’d like to make myself a vest a la the cool sweater in the first Debbie Bliss magazine that I like. Yes, I said a vest. Me, who has ranted about how much I hate them. I’m over it. I concede that like anything, there are good vests and bad vests.

In my post that vanished, I said something about dyeing enough that I can have my vest and sell it too. I was quite amused by that.

The three vests that I have worn for years (not fully realizing that I was wearing vests) are about worn out, and I’d love to make some that fit me well. That go in at the in bits and out at the out bits. (I do in fact have a waist).

I’m excited.

I also test dyed a bit of one of my dark gray lamb fleeces with a dark, golden yellow dye. The fleece came out the most fantastic, warm, chocolatey golden brown. I want to try carding it with black alpaca and gold silk. I think it’ll turn out a bit dressy. More formal than a typical tweed. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m trying to figure out what exact color of green it is. Moss green, maybe? I didn’t have a recipe for juice that both used the things I wanted to use, and that I had all the ingredients for, so I made one up. I started with 4 carrots, and their tops. Added half of a fat cucumber, half a red bell pepper. Some kale, some celery… and then added an apple so it’d taste a little better. It probably made 16 ounces of juice, which is lot. I’m working my way through it. My stomach has been unhappy all morning, so I’m hoping I can keep it down. But it sounded good. Fresh. Full of vitamins, etc. Maybe it’ll give me some energy.

Liv finished spinning her colorful yarn from wool she dyed. It’s really pretty. Veronica kettle dyed 4 ounces of wool. Kettle dyeing is SO much cooler than handpainting, which I find to be tremendously tedious. And I hate throwing away a handful of plastic wrap when we’re done.

I’ve spent the week primarily spinning, dyeing, cleaning the house and enjoying the kids, now out of school for the summer.

I’ve been working on a new batt color, and while I love the base, my tweedy bits don’t quite match it. That’s the thing I’m finding with the tweed aspect of my batts. If the color doesn’t come out JUST so, the whole color scheme is off. Like my boysenberry silk. It needs just a TAD more red in it to be perfect with my salmon base. And it doesn’t have it. It’s too purple. So I’m going to bag it up and save it for another base color, a nice green perhaps, and I’m dyeing some mahogany to see if that fits the bill.

I’m having a heck of a time coming up with an additional color. The light green I’d envisioned isn’t all that great. So what now? A blue? Light or dark blue? Maybe I’ll keep the boysenberry and add the mahogany? No matter what I do, it looks like I need to cut down the amount of silk for this colorway. I put the same amount in the salmon base that I did in the purple, and it looks messy.

We may break out an origami kit later in the day if we get bored.

I finished Clark’s second pair of socks, and am planning a third. They’re so cute! and he loves them, though he “don’t wanna smile” this morning.

If you possibly can, please ignore my messy bathroom. I’m too pregnant/sick/tired/apathetic to make it photo ready (can’t even move 2 buckets and sweep, how lame is that?) and it’s the only spot in the house with enough light on this dark, wet morning for a picture.

Yesterday, my friend Carol invited me over to dye some of her yummy sock yarn. She showed me how to dye semi-solid in a crockpot and it was tremendous fun! We dyed 15 skeins in 3 colors.

I’m really excited to have the subtle color variations and still have a color solid enough to look good in a patterned sock.

I’m 19 + weeks now and can still wear my jeans, though I’m pushing it. I have a little more energy. My horrible cough is slowly getting better. I’m still really nauseated a lot, like right now, and have a hard time eating much of the time. It looks like I’m going to make it in to Veronica’s class today for the first time in a couple months.

I have a couple of quiet hours this morning, and I’m making batts.

This is all of it.

This is one batt’s worth of fiber.

I have enough to make about 48 batts. 6 batts per 4 ounces/2 pounds total.

I’m a little worried about the silk. This dyelot was still a test, just on a larger scale. I didn’t weight out the colors of silk, just dyed by handfuls. As it is, I do have enough of the silk, but the distribution of colors isn’t exactly right. I have too much of the light blue, and since I’m using much less light blue than the other two colors in each batt, I’m going to run out of the other two too soon. So I guess I’ll have some batts that don’t match the rest.

I’m anxious to try out some other colorways, but my alpaca supplier hasn’t had any alpaca since early December. I’m going to need to find another source.

I washed one fleece yesterday and it looks like it washed up nice. I’m waiting for it to dry so my drying racks will be free for the second.

Last night, I spun my sample purple batt into 3 ply. Today, I knit it into a long cuff, just to see how it would look and feel.

The photo is a smidge bleached out, and the towel on the floor in the background is making me crazy, but the color is pretty accurate. Just imagine it a little richer and with more luster. It’s really, really nice. I love how the tweed handles in a 3 ply. Definitely the way to go. It was knit on size 6 needles and I spun it worsted. Not my favorite method of spinning by any means, but I really liked the resulting yarn.

I think I have enough fiber already dyed to make about 2 pounds of these purple batts. Gotta start carding. I’m meeting with a friend on Monday who is going to help me figure out packaging. I need to come up with a weight and price point for packages of batts, and then I’ll be ready to move forward. Not exactly sure HOW I’m going to sell them yet. If I can get Tweedybatts.com up in some simple format, or if I should go with Etsy, or what.

So, it went pretty well. I test dyed two little skeins of yarn. The first was overrun by blue, the second wasn’t quite as dark as I’d like. I test dyed 2 ounces of tan alplaca top.

And then I realized I hadn’t added vinegar to any of it.

So I added vinegar to my dye and redyed the alpaca top, feeling like an idiot. Then, I held my breath and dyed 2 ounces of baby camel.

Here’s some pictures.

This is the alpaca and two skeins of yarn I test dyed.

I happened to have a sleeve of seed beads on the counter and saw that they might look really pretty with the yarn when spun up.

Here’s my camel, still wet. The red color isn’t that red in person. It’s more of a plum. And the green isn’t that green in person, either. I wanted two blues and two purples and that’s pretty much what I got. Maybe there’s a reason most people handpaint fibers. It’s easier.

While I was digging around in my fibers yesterday, I came across 2 ounces of dyed bombyx that a friend of mine asked me to spin for her. I thought I’d given it back because I was worried about ruining it, but I still had it, and being more confident in my spinning skills now, I’m not worried anymore. I spun a tiny little sample and it’s really pretty.

I’m going to spin the alpaca and the camel, even though they’re the same color. The camel is a gift for someone else.

Three times now, when I’ve been at my worst, microwave popcorn makes me feel better. Yesterday, I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it to my guitar lesson. I was actually thinking of quitting, because I was so horribly sick and had been for days. So in desperation, I used our last package of microwave popcorn (which I try to avoid eating because I think it’s toxic) and within about 15 to 20 minutes, the awful taste was gone from my mouth, and my sour stomach had sweetened considerably. I’m wondering if dairy is giving me the trouble? Today, the only thing that sounds good to me is a Kidd Valley cheeseburger. Maybe I’ll try a hamburger.

Anyway, I’m going to see if I get the same benefit from pan popped popcorn, which I don’t have issues with at all. Though it takes more time to make.

I didn’t knit a stitch yesterday, as I was running all over the place. And today, I’m planning to dye 2 ounces of baby camel top for the next little gift scarf. I probably shouldn’t dye 2 full ounces since the two ounces I spun for the current scarf is too much, but wouldn’t it totally suck if I ran out?

Oh, and to answer Jean’s question yesterday, knitting with beads isn’t hard at all. Though it can feel a bit tedious and time consuming. I’ve never tried pre-stringing beads onto the yarn before starting to knit, because 1). I never have the foggiest idea how many beads I’ll need, and 2). that sounds even more unbelievably tedious. So I use a tiny (size 11 I think) crochet hook and put each bead on the actual stitch it sits on right after I knit it. There are tutorials online. That’s how I learned how to do it a year or so ago when I was knitting the girls’ birthday shawls. It’s fun, and glass seed beads look gorgeous and delicate on laceweight.

I’m soaking a little bit of the tan yarn left over from Clark’s sweater to test colors on. I have a couple little balls of his yarn undyed that I used to test colors for his sweater. Since the naturally tan yarn is the same color as the camel top, it should give me a pretty good idea of how it will turn out.

The yarn is soaking in my breakfast blender right now. It was rinsed clean, and convenient. It still looks ridiculous so I took a picture, but Clark’s watching a movie on my computer with Photoshop so I’ll have to add it later.

I’m going to handpaint the yarn and top as opposed to kettle dyeing. I want to do multiple colors, and while I’ve read that you can do that in the kettle, my attempts have had dismal results.

I have a cute picture of Abby toe braiding with her friends on Friday night.

I blurred their faces ’cause I haven’t asked their parents if I can put them on the internet.

We were busy this weekend. It wasn’t the relaxing-knit-and-spin weekend I’d intended. There was too much work to be done on Saturday, but I got my room clean.

So exciting. It was a disaster, and it was driving me crazy.

That evening, I sample spun up a little bit of a Mystery Batt from Fantasy Fibers. Have any of you spun one? It felt a bit coarse to me, so I’m trying to figure out the best way to spin it. My little skien has gone missing, however. I can’t find it to show you. Basically, I tried a slub yarn, and a boucle.

Yesterday, the girls and I spent all afternoon needle felting gnomes.

Mine still needs arms, so I’m only going to show you a little bit of her.

But she’s SO much cooler than I anticipated. I’m planning to take the kids up to the cabin for mid-winter break again like I did last year. I can’t hope that the weather will be as nice as it was then, so we were thinking about bringing needle felting supplies up with us to give us something to do indoors, and I wanted to complete one beforehand to make sure we would know everything we’d need.

Like band-aids.

In other news, Clark ended up wearing his sock for three days. He loves it. It’s so sweet. I’m doing the toe decreases on the second.

And I did end up digging the pink and purple chevron sock out of it’s hiding place and committing it to fingerless mitts, probably for Abby.

Here’s a bad picture of the silks I dyed last week. They all turned out SO well! They’re dyed solid, all the way through, without light or white spots. That’s truly an accomplishment for me.

And while I really thought I’d card up some purple batts over the weekend, our felting party got in the way, so here’s a purple batt with some silk on top of it.

There are two different blues there, it’s kind of hard to tell. Nate doesn’t think he likes the lighter blue, but I think that in a very small amount, it’ll look neat.

I have a huge list to accomplish today. On that list is re-mopping the kitchen, since it’s already sticky and gross. I mopped the whole upstairs thoroughly on Friday, so I’m pretty grumpy about that. And all of this wonderful fibery-ness has distracted me from my guitar homework the past few days. I need to brush up before my lesson tomorrow or I’m toast.

It’s pretty,

but I want it darker, so I’m going to re-dye the alpaca. It’s light, and much lighter when I open it up, there are even white spots. It’s amazing how things lighten when they dry. Even the wool wasn’t as dark as it looked like it was going to be. I’m not complaining there. Just observing.

Hayden is coming to visit on Monday. We’re all very excited.

Update-

Ok, ok. Now that I’m thinking about it, and looking at the photo, if I dye the silks really dark colors, like navy and superdark purple, that could have some nice contrast. With maybe a bit of a lighter blue.

What to do? What to do?