4 posts tagged “sock”

A while back M. and I did some experimentation with yarn dying with kool-aid. I tell you what, if you are wanting to kick a kool-aid habit, dying yarn with it should do it for you. It's kind of creepy how well it dyes the yarn. Kind of makes you wonder what it does to our insides. We started off with Knit Picks Bare Merino Wool Fingering weight yarn.

 

We did a couple of skeins of just solid. One with pink lemonade kool-aid for M. and one with black cherry kool-aid for me.

 

Then we branched out into multi-colored yarns. We tried two, three, and four colors:

 

 

 

I got the idea of hanging the yarn into the quart jars of kool-aid from a tutorial on the web. I thought the yarn above the jars would absorb the color, but it didn't, so I ended up with sections of undyed yarn in the multi-colored skeins. Here is the finished yarn from the first dying. It's hanging to dry outside on our patio.

 

I like the white sections in some of the color combos, but not all of them. Also, some of them turned out a little brighter/more pastel than I wanted, so I overdyed a few skeins a couple of weeks ago.

 

The skein on the left was originally dyed with orange and black cherry and then I overdyed it with a mixture of both orange and black cherry. The skein in the middle was originally dyed with tropical punch, grape, and lemonade and then overdyed with blue raspberry. The skein on the right was dyed with black cherry and then overdyed with grape. I'm pleased with how the over dyed skeins have come out. I have one more skein that I might overdye, but I haven't gotten it done yet.

I've started knitting with one of our dyed yarns. M. requested a pair of socks out of the pink lemonade dyed skein. This was specifically her skein.

 

This was the first skein that we dyed and I sort of messed it up, but it ended up being a happy accident. I had the kool-aid too concentrated and not enough water in the bowl to fully emerse the yarn, which meant that the color wasn't evenly distributed and there were some paler and even white spots. I was really upset with myself for messing up M.'s yarn, but it actually turned out really neat.

 

 

Just based on the kool-aid experience, I don't think I'll ever become a serious yarn dyer. It was a fun experiment, but not anything that I would want to do too much of. Plus there are so many fabulous indy dyed yarns out there for sale, that I'm not lacking for yarn!

 

 

Behold, my "Blanket of Insanity", a work in progress. When I was looking at quilt patterns and quilting material for the quilt that my grandmother made me, I fell in love with scrap quilts. I have tried three different times to learn to sew, once as a child, once a teenager, and once as an adult, and it has never stuck, so there is no way I will ever become a quilter or make myself a scrap quilt. Then I heard about sock yarn blankets, which seem to be the knitters equivalent to scrap quilts. These are blankets knit out of leftover sock yarn. I favorited a bunch of these on Ravelry, but never found a pattern that I just fell for. They all seemed so complicated that I felt like I would need to knit it all at once or else forget how to do it. Then I found the Zig Zag Pram Blanket pattern. I love zig zagged stripes as evidenced by the quilt I did have my grandmother make me and it's a simple enough pattern that I don't think I'll forget what I'm doing if I don't knit on it for a while. The pattern was for a small baby blanket, but I wanted a larger blanket, so I cast on 361 stitches instead of the stitch count called for by the pattern. I was hoping this would give me 5' wide blanket. I measured today and it's 56" wide, so not quite 5', but close. I also decided that it would drive me nuts to try to put a solid border around it as I go, so I decided to just skip the border.

 

I bought a set of size 7 circular needles with something like a six foot cable on them that I could just dedicate to this project. The plan was to knit up all of the sock yarn scraps that I currently have and then just put the blanket aside and knit in the leftovers each time I finish a pair of socks or any other project that uses sock weight yarn. I now have all of my scraps on hand knit in and the blanket is about 19" long. The yarns included so far are (from bottom of blanket up to the needles):

·         Knit Picks Essential Sock Yarn Navy – used for garter stitch bottom border, never knit with before.

·         Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock Medium weight Lemongrass – leftover from chevron scarf.

·         Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock Medium weight Rolling Stone – left over from chevron scarf.

·         Colinette Jitterbug Toscana – left over from first pair of simple socks.

·         Brown Sheep Wildfoote Luxury Socks Brown Sugar – left over from second pair of simple socks (Wasn’t knitting up well with the size 7 needles, only knit a partial row with it and then switched to a different yarn).

·         Claudia Handpaints Yarn Fingering Dessert Dusk – left over from the Dickerson Park Monkey socks.

·         Claudia Handpaints Yarn Fingering Hokies – left over from the Hokie walker socks. This is the yarn that I traded S. for that turned our fingers orange.

·         Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock Medium weight Farmhouse – leftover from second chevron scarf.

·         Collinete Jitterbug Velvet Leaf – left over from second chevron scarf.

·         Shubui Knits Socks 5001 – left over from nutkins socks.

·         Claudia Handpaints Yarn Fingering Hokies – left over from Hokie socks for M.

·         Misty Mountain Farms Jubilee Evergreen – left over from Broadripple socks.

·         Pagewood Farms Alyeska Fabulous Fall – left over from Fawkes Sawkes.

My initial estimate was that this blanket might take me 20 years to finish, but I'm saved by the fact that I knit short socks and thus generally have a lot of yarn left over. Now I'm thinking that it might only take me 5 years to finish. I've also been weaving the ends in as I go so that I don't have hours worth of ends to weave in once I'm done.

 

I'll keep you updated on this one as I go. The only bad thing about these blanket is that now that I have all of my scraps knit in, I almost hate to finish the socks that I currently have on the needles, because that means more scraps!

 

Mosaic got in another shipment of Claudia Handpaints in the Hokies colorway shortly after I finished the pair of Hokies socks that I was making for myself. When M. found this out, she requested a pair of Hokie socks for her. I wanted to do something a little different than a basic ribbed sock, so I looked up the instructions for a spiral rib and did a spiral rib on the cuff.

 

After getting past the cuff of the first sock, I sort of wished that I had stuck with a basic rib. The spiral rib mixed the colors up oddly and without the spiral rib they were actually striping nicely. I asked M. what she thought and she said she was happy with how the cuff looked, so I left it as it was. Beyond the spiral rib cuff, this is just the basic sock pattern written by S. down at the knitting store, adjusted in size to fit a child's size 12-13 foot. I'm actually not terribly happy with how these turned out, but M. seemed very pleased with them, so that is all that matters.

 

The other project that I've finished up recently but didn't blog about at the time because it was such a small little thing was some to-go cup cozies for the administrative staff in my departmental office for administrative professionals day.

 

I had enough of the Hokie-ish colored Malabrigo left over to make each of the ladies in the office a cup cozy. Then all of us PhD students chipped in for Starbucks gift cards to go with them. We'll be giving them out tomorrow. Hopefully they like them (and drink coffee or at least tea or hot chocolate). As much as I love the Hokie colors, I think I've about OD'd on knitting with the Hokie colored yarn for this year. I still have three more skeins of the Claudia Hokies sock yarn from the last round, but it will have to hang out in my stash and wait for a while before I knit with it.

I managed to hit yarn stores in Indianapolis, Kansas City, St. Louis, and Memphis while we were on our annual holiday trip. I would have liked to have gotten to stores in Dayton, Springfield, IL, and Knoxville, but we got to all of those town late in the evening and then left early in the morning. My goal was to take a picture of the signs of all the stores we visited. I got pictures of the stores in Indy. It was after dark in Kansas City. It was pouring down rain in St. Louis. By Memphis, I have just given up. Instead of posting pictures of the stores, I'll post pictures of the yarn that I bought in each store. I only bought sock yarn (that right souvenir sock yarn), and, with one exception, I only bought yarns that I can't get at my LYS. I also discovered on this trip that a big component of the quality of yarn stores for me is that it must be cozy. My favorite stores were not the ones with the biggest selection, but the ones where I thought it would be a good place to pull up a chair and knit a while.

Indianapolis

I'm going to lump the Indianapolis stores together since they are owned by the same folks. I visited Mass Ave Knits and Broadripple Knits. Mass Ave was by far the larger of the two stores, but Broadripple was the one that I enjoyed the most. Broadripple just seemed cozier. After we were down shopping, S. and I sat there and knitted and chatted with the very nice lady working there while we waiting to meet up with D. and M. for dinner. We went to Mass Ave first and I spent a good part of their time there waffling over whether to buy the black or the brown Malabrigo sock yarn. I bought the brown. Then we went to Broadripple and they had the same Malabrigo sock yarn, so I bought the black there along with a ball of Socrates by Alpaca with a Twist. I thought the Socrates was especially appropriate since I was in Indiana and it's a yarn produced in Indiana.

 

 

Kansas City

The first store I visited in Kansas City was The Studio. This store was recommended by a ravelry friend, and it didn't disappoint. They appeared to be gearing up for a class or knitting group or something, and it seemed like a cozy little shop to hang out and knit in. The staff we very friendly and helpful. They didn't have a whole lot of sock yarn that I can't locally, but I did find a Merino Sock yarn by Northwood Dyeworks, which is a yarn company that I hadn't heard of before. I also got some really great buttons for the Tilted Duster that I'll be casting on for soon.

 

The second store that I visted in Kansas City was Stitch Knitch. I guess this store is technically in North Kansas City. I chose to visit it because it would be a convienent store for my mom and I wanted to check it out for her. They were in the middle of a knitting group when we showed up and it seemed like a nice group of ladies. This store is pretty tiny, but they did have a selection of sock yarn that my LYS doesn't carry. I left with a ball of Austermann Step.

 

St. Louis

The first store I hit in St. Louis (Kirkwood) was Kirkwood Knittery. This was one of those cozy, overstuffed stores with super friendly staff. I mean really, really friendly. They chatted with my husband and daughter while I browsed and then they loaned my husband an umbrella so that he could go get our car and pull it up under the awning so that we wouldn't get drenched in the pouring rain. This is the only store place that I didn't get something that couldn't be bought locally. They had a few things that the LYS here doesn't carry, but none of them struck my fancy. They had Colinette Jitterbug on sale, and I know I like Jitterbug, so I bought a skein of that.

 

The second store that we visited was Knitty Couture. This was my favorite yarn shop on our entire trip. It's on Delmar, which is a great little street with cute shops and restaurants. The two ladies working in the shop were so nice and a lot of fun to talk to. In fact, I stood in there and chatted with them for so long that my husband texted me from the car (our daughter had fallen asleep) to make sure I was okay. This is a tiny, cozy little store with not too much selection of non-sock yarns, but they have lots of really neat sock yarns. I could have bought 5 or 6 skeins in there, but I limited myself to two. I got a skein of Bambino by Chameleon Colorworks and a skein of yarn by Ancient Threads. The Ancient Threads yarn is neat because it's all naturally dyed. I'm trying to decide is Sockittome is the colorway or the name of the yarn. I'm guessing the colorway, because I couldn't find it on Ravelry.

 

 

The final store we visited while in St. Louis was Knitorious. This was a big store with lots and lots of yarn. The yarn I bought there is my favorite yarn from the entire trip. Like any yarn, the first thing that caught my eye was the color. Then I zeroed in on the label. It had a fun name, Strong Arm Sock Yarn by Dyebolical Yarns. I love fun names. Then I noticed that it was dyed locally in St. Louis. This was obviousally a yarn I wouldn't be able to get here in Virginia, so I snatched up. When I was checking out I was chatting with the ladies behind the counter and through the course of the conversation I mentioned that I was from out of town and I picked that yarn because it was produced locally in St. Louis. The lady running the cash register laughed and said, "Yeah, you can't get much more local. I dyed that yarn."

 

Memphis

The last leg of our journey. Memphis. In my research about Memphis yarns ahead of time, it seemed many folks were very impressed with Yarn to Go. I have to say that I was really disappointed. They really didn't seem to have much in stock and what they did have seemed to be mostly novelty yarns. Maybe they were just low on inventory when we went. It was right after Christmas. This was the only yarn store that I didn't buy anything at.

The second yarn store that I check out in Memphis (ok Germantown) was Rainbow Yarn and Fibres. I liked this store a lot more. The only thing I didn't care for in this store, is that I didn't see any place to just sit and knit. The website says they have classes, so there must be a back room or something. I just like there to be a place in the main part of the store where knitters can just come in and hang out knit. There was a good selection of yarn in this store. The sock yarn selection was a little light. Or at least the store disorganized, so I had a hard time locating the sock yarn. I did find a lovely skein of Donegal Sock yarn by Hand Painted Knitting Yarns.

 

Well, that wraps up Yarn Crawl Midwest (or maybe Midwest/Midsouth). It's a good thing that it will be a while before we travel again. I've got plenty to knit and I need to save up my pennies.