What I've been doing.

With photos.

Yesterday, first thing, I wound up some yarn for gifts.

In the back is the thousand miles, uh, yards, of worsted weight Purple Trainwreck. In the front is a skein of merino/silk fingering/sock weight in color "Cotton Candy". This new stuff is WONDERFUL. Takes dye beautifully and has a nice sheen to it. When I pulled it out of the washer, after spinning the water out of the freshly dyed skein, my first words were "Oh, that's NICE." Even under the lousy garage lights, the yarn gleamed. I'm keeping back a skein of this for myself. Unfortunately, due to the cost of raw materials, it's going to sell for more than the regular sock yarn does. Sorry about that. But there's still 440 yards to a skein.

Anyway, after that, I dyed some coffee yarn. (Yes. Yarn dyed with coffee.)

I don't know exactly what went wrong - the fumes, me getting overheated winding yarn, my migraine medication, or most likely some unholy combination of all three - but I spent a good part of the day throwing up. Once I got the coffee smell out of the house, I was all right. If I ever make this stuff again, I'm doing it outside on the barbecue grill. That's why there was no real post yesterday. Even after I quit puking I had a killer headache for most of the evening.

During all the other activity, I was winding off literally miles of yarn into extra-long skeins for dyeing (I have to rewind into long skeins to get any kind of striping effect).


This morning I got up and wound the coffee yarn into cakes, because the skeins were too horribly tangled to send out to someone in good conscience. (Odds are, if you recieve yarn from me that's been wound into a cake, it's because I tangled it into an unholy mess during the dye process.)



At the moment, I've got a mile of Purple Trainwreck in the pot (that's a quadruple batch.)


And there's another mile of yarn soaking, waiting for it's chance to be turned into Easter Egg Rainbow. (I bought more egg dye - Easter sales start Sunday. Woohoo!)


If I'm feeling particularly motivated, I'll wind up some double batches of Mermaid Tail, and some single color dips like Raspberry Ripple. Plus I need to play with this merino/silk blend. I've got some good ideas. Heh heh heh.

Sorry I haven't announced the yarn contest winner yet. I'm going to get to work on that tonight, after The Baby goes to bed. Hopefully we'll have a winner tomorrow.

As for knitting, remember when I said I thought I was almost done with the first part of the half-round shawl? Hah. Turns out I need to increase until I have 381 stitches, not 281. A slight difference of 25 pattern repeats. So it's still in the works. I'm doing a repeat or two a day.

And there's still a cat face mooshed into my boob. She's purring and making my chest rattle.