as promised

Here are the sock yarns I got to dye last Sunday. YOU, esteemed reader, can order these yarns right here: Dyenamics Yarn. Dyed by Allison and Melanie, who were my faithful customers when I had my yarn shop.

This first one is the signature colorway for the 52 pair plunge KAL. As you can tell, I have not yet reskeined it, and the colors are in their full glory, albeit separate. Once I've reskeined it, the color distribution should fall such that I will get really neat stripes on my socks. If you look at the Dyemanics yarn website under "new yarns", you will see it re-skeined and you can tell the color distribution better.

Here's a little Black Eyed Susan that snuck in, from my yard.

This next hank is the sportweight version of Allison and Melanie's Dyenamics yarn. This is the one you see me pondering on Melanie's blog. I ended up dipping into dark chocolate (dye!) and deep turquoise. Allison is predicting stripes of a width of one round!

I cannot wait to get my current project, which is due a week from Monday, off the needles, so I can start these socks.

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Meanwhile, my email accounts are dying a slow death and I am feeling terribly disconnected....I can still send emails out, but nothing is coming in. Instead, all emails I received on the last day the email was fully functioning, keep loading over and over again and I am unable to delete them. Yes I am desperate. Any geeks out there who have heard of this and know of a remedy? DH wants to try a few things with it, we'll see. Other than that, if anyone wants to get in touch with me, leave me a comment, or call me!

I also got to thinking....after I got all worried about how I will get in touch with people, how I feel so disconnected, and how it's such a terrible tragedy that I can't freaking email anyone, and how I am cut off from my lists, etc., incidentally, my mother brought my attention to these situations; we were talking on the phone today and she told me that the weather has never been this severe in all her lifetime.

England: here and here

Greece -- also here.

Then I found this: Asia

And in more news: how to put your personal tragedy in perspective.

My tragedy is such a small one. A knitter's and blogger's tragedy. Minuscule. And it can be fixed.

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You know what? I am so so glad that there are people like Allison and Melanie. They're the kind of people who make the world a better place simply by being who they are. Thanks, girls! :)

quick, go take a look!

Run over to Melanie's and see what I got to do last Sunday! It's the link entitled "our wee farm". Right there on the sidebar.

Pictures of the yarn I dyed coming very soon.

I am much less intimidated by the dyeing process now, the hard part is choosing the colors....so for my second skein, I kinda chickened out.

Pictures on Saturday. I still have to make an entire sweater.

breather

Sometimes, you have to put your current project in time-out and take a breather. Last Saturday, I took my daughter on a little daytrip to Olana, which is only about a 45 minute drive for us.
The weather was spectacular.


After our tour, we had a picnic lunch on the lawn below the building.
We admired the architecture and the fine decorative touches.

This is the view from the terrace:

New York's Hudson Valley. The Church family surely knew what they were doing when they built therir house on top of that particular hill.

And you know what's on the other side of that hill?

A yarn shop. With baby angora bunnies in the bunny barn next door.

Crafty Girl and I were the only customers at the time, and Claudia, the owner, gave us plenty of time and space to look around her fabulous collection of wool (and some cotton) yarns. I picked some patterns, and only one skein of wool.

And then it happened: Crafty Girl walks up to me with a handful of Fixation cotton/lycra yarn. "I really like these three colors together....but then I saw this, and I JUST FELL IN LOVE WITH IT" . A purple variegated.

Of course I bought it for her. What knitting mom doesn't like to hear those words?

no pressure, really

There is no knitting to report. It's not that I am not knitting, which I definitely am (a sock, of course, but who want to see a partial sock? You all know what it looks like.)

I am also doing a tremendous amount of knitting in my head. Yes I realize that this might prompt someone to look in the phone book under "psychiatry" and pick a number to call, for my own protection.

I am fine, I assure you. So fine in fact that I can't even write about it.

See, I had a design accepted at a major knitting magazine, but I don't have official permission to talk about the actual project. I guess I can tell you that I have to make a sweater out of sportweight yarn on size 4 needles, size 34, with "sleeves to the elbow". They want the pattern written up in 5 sizes, so I have been a swatching maniac and been feeding my gauge to the recently purchased software. Which has no idea how to calculate a sleeve that hits the elbow.

So I have hit the books and the needles, I am hazarding guesses, and am letting some of it marinate for a while, while I mull over my next step.
I want the pattern to be perfect first, before I make the sweater. Which is such a departure for me....all my knitting life I would cast on first, then figure out the rest.

The real fun part of it is that I get to use my own ideas about this sweater, which was submitted as a shell but got changed to a sweater with the above mentioned sleeve length...but no matter. I have all the knitting greats on my side. I know how to do this.

I know how to knit.

I have until the end of the month to get it all done.

shawl=done

I blocked the shawl overnight, and here it is.

The specs:

Decadent Fibers "Marshmallow", undyed, 2 hanks @ 315 yards.
This is a blend of 80% alpaca and 20% merino.

Pattern: Evelyn Clark's Shetland Triangle from the book Wrap Style.

Needle size: 6, 32 in circular, but a 24 in would have been enough.

I added 2 repeats of the main pattern (10 instead of 8). No problems at all, anywhere in the pattern; it's well written.

The shawl came out slightly heavier (I imagine) than the one in the book because they used fingering weight and I had sportweight. But I still think it came out OK, don't you?

And now I have to say goodbye -- to the shawl --

-- because tomorrow morning, I have to deliver it so it can begin its journey to trade shows and Stitches East and the NYS Sheep and Woolfest!

shawl fun

After a knitting marathon of 3 hrs 45 min, I finished the Shetland Triangle Shawl today. I still have to block it, but first decided to have some fun.
Here's the piece just off the needles.



Right side:

Wrong side:

An intrepid space explorer traversing the moguls on the shawlscape:

There. That's better, using skis:

Heck, it was 90+ degrees out today and very humid. Whatever gets you through, right?

(Lego toy courtesy of tall son.)

more flowers?!

This month marks the 5th anniversary of our moving into this house.
One reason we bought the house was the yard.


The lady who owned the house before us was an avid gardener, and she put in a beautiful perennial garden. She loved planting so much in fact, that we are still in awe of how much she managed to put in. It eventually got to be a bit much for her, and by the time we "inherited" the garden, it was horribly overgrown. Vines covered rose bushes and trees. Ground cover covered --- everything. The first summer, we discovered we had 19 rose bushes.

We also have at least 6 different varieties of daylilies, which are about to come up.

July should also bring hosta flowers. We already had foxglove, the wisteria in early spring, and I think I showed you the peonies.

I am hoping the Rose o' Sharon will bloom soon, so I can get some shots of it for you.

Oh, and here's a photo of the latest pair of socks I finished. Crafty Girl snagged these (and I'm glad!)

I have no idea why this came out fuzzy! They were even holding still, unlike the flowers which were swaying in the wind yesterday.

Addendum 7/6/07:

The sock yarn I used is Austermann Step. The soft one which has aloe vera and jojoba oil in it. I used size 1 needles on these, but would go up to a 2 next time probably.

Happy Independence Day!

(Bead flag courtesy of my Crafty Girl, who heard me lamenting that I couldn't find a good public domain picture of Old Glory this morning.)