The dreaded "S" word

Last week at WHMU(WHSKAL), I swatched. Which is something that happens pretty rarely around here, so I thought I'd babble about it a little bit.


Usually I don't swatch. My gauge is usually pretty close to the recommended gauge on ball bands, so for things like socks I don't swatch. I don't swatch lace. I don't swatch for scarves or mittens or hats. In fact the only thing I do swatch for occasionally is a sweater.


Typically I'll start with a sleeve if I'm worried about the gauge and check that after a few inches. But if it's something that for which gauge is really important, I'll do a swatch. Or a yarn that I have no information on for appropriate gauge. Or if I'm not sure how the yarn and the pattern will work together, I'll do a swatch.

I've been wanting to do Manon for a while now (Rav link). And since it's another Norah Gaughan funky construction type of thing, I figured swatching would be in my best interests. So I threw the newly dyed Italian yarn into a bag along with three needle sizes and headed for Whole Foods.


Three needles sizes you ask? Yup, three sizes. Because nothing pisses me off more then knitting a gauge swatch with a particular size and then finding out that it's wrong. So I use multiple sizes on the same swatch and then pick the one that works best after washing/drying.

For this sweater the pattern calls for US size 9 needles. Usually I would try to bookmark the needle size (i.e. use one size smaller and one size larger), but I couldn't imagine that I would need a US 10 for this, so I took US 7/8/9 as my needle range.
Recommended gauge for this project is 18 st/24 rows for 4 inches. I cast on 26 stitches with the 7s, knit about 4 rows in garter stitch and then started working in stockinette stitch, keeping 3 stitches on each edge in garter. After a while, on a wrong side row, I knit 7 stitches. After a while more, I figured I had enough to be able to check the gauge, so I knit one entire wrong side row, and then switched to the 8s.

click for notes

The process proceeded as above except that instead of knitting 7 stitches in the middle of that stretch, I knit 8, and so on (9 stitches with the size 9s). This makes it very easy later on to figure out what needle size I used for which section of the swatch, without having to rely on an easily lost piece of paper. The swatch is finished with several more rows of garter stitch. I finished this one easily that night, and tossed it into a cold bath when I got home (although I did start the sweater before measuring the blocked swatch - thankfully the gauge didn't change!).

click for more notes

I'm happy to say that, not only was my gauge spot on with the US 9s, but the swatch didn't bleed at all, proving that my improvised solar dyeing/steam setting of the dye worked pretty well. It is slightly variegated, which looks just gorgeous when knitted up. And I've got a gauge swatch that tells me how the yarn works on 7s and 8s too, just for future reference.

Large turkeys

In my ongoing quest to attain dye-goddess-hood, I've been scouring local thrift stores and eBay for a crock pot. Actually, what I really wanted was this, but there was no way I was going to pay close to $100 for something to play with (my Yankee-Puritan heart shrivels up a little bit just thinking about it).

Last week I stuck a gold mine. There, on Craigslist, was an 18-qt roaster oven, brand new, never used, for $25. Several emails and a few hours later, I was the proud owner of an important dyeing tool. But the fun really started when I took it home.

Devil helped me unpack the box, and then decided to test out the capacity.

Boo was more interested in chocolate chip cookies, but decided to try it out herself to see what all the fuss was about.

I'm not sure it was her thing. Suffice to say, an 18-qt roaster oven will hold either an average size 3.5 year old, a largish 1.5 year old, or as much undyed fiber as you can shake a stick at. Like that merino hiding in the back there,

and all that stuff around the speaker on the left there,

not to mention the two pounds of Targhee I have sitting around. Whee!

Hey, it's Friday, here's some fiber

The lovely Corriedale fiber provided in our goodie bags at Yarn School, dyed by Adrian, colorway "Hooray Sheep"

I wanted to try a fluffier yarn then I usually spin, so I spun the singles from the fold with long draw at 10:1 on my Lendrum. The big skein at the top (3.1 oz, 272 yds, 11-12 wpi) was plied on the Lendrum at 10:1 with a fair bit of twist. The smaller skein (1.1 oz, 83 yds, 14 wpi) was plied on a DT folding Fricke that was sitting all alone in the gym, and happened to have a Woolee Winder on it. I have no idea what the ratio was for plying that one, but the tension was stronger then on my Lendrum, so it ended up having quite a bit less twist. When I held up both skeins, the Lendrum one was overplied, but not dramatically so, and the Fricke skein was balanced.

Finished them with a soak in hot water and hung to dry. It's very interesting to me to see how much of a difference the plying made in the wpi. Same singles, same number of plies, both are pretty soft, but the lower-twist skein has more squish to it, while the high-twist skein is more elastic. Next week I'll post about the differences between spinning from the fold long draw and spinning worsted short draw (which is what I subjected my HHHH fiber to after I got back).

I've definitely got my spinning mojo back - two nights this week got me through 3.8 oz of this

Superwash merino

which is destined to become some 2-ply sock yarn for a Christmas present.

Color me entertained

Is it just me or does anyone else wonder if Sarah Palin realizes that, when she refers to a "shining city on a hill" (and John Winthrop predates Reagan's use of the term by approximately 350 years), she's actually refering to this Bastion of Liberal Elitism? OK, maybe it wasn't that liberal in the 1600s - you know those wacky Puritans - but it is certainly seen that way these days. Enquiring minds want to know.

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A fine example of Love and Logic parenting in action:

A couple of weeks ago, Devil and I had a disgreement about getting dressed. Which is to say, I wanted her to put her clothes on and she was more interested in running around naked and hiding from me. Finally, I laid down this ultimatum:

"You can come and put your clothes on now, or you can take them to daycare in a bag."

Sure enough, ten minutes later she was getting strapped in to her carseat starkers, and off we went for the day.

About an hour later, I got a call from Ironman to inform me that, upon arrival at daycare, Devil hopped out of the car with nary a care in the world, and then decided she'd put on her shoes because her feet were cold. She made it all the way through the daycare, dropped Boo off at her class, and walked in to her class before she finally deigned to get dressed. Thankfully, the daycare staff chose to be entertained rather then concerned, and did not call CPS or the police for the blatent display of girlie parts parading through the center.

I was a bit concerned about the success of my tactic, but...last week when Devil and I had this exact same conversation, complete with an identical ultimatum, she immediately came over and got dressed. What's a little fatherly mortification when it works, hunh?

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Why I love fall: three pairs of handknit socks and one new sweater worn this week.

Fun with dye

Last summer I bought a bunch of acid dyes thinking that I would start doing some dyeing. And then I bought an bunch of undyed top and had great plans for doing my own colorways to spin.

And then, predictably enough, life got in the way and I never got around to it. About a month ago, I came across a thread in the Norah Gaughan fan group on Ravelry about a celebratory sweater - she is designing a sweater for the group to knit as a free pattern. She posted a schematic and I decided to paw through the stash and see if I had anything appropriate.

I found this yarn I got in Italy a couple of years ago and thought “Wow, that might be perfect if only it were a slightly different color.” One thing led to another and I found myself some time later hovering over the stove with lots of little jars with 1 oz samples of yarn/top bubbling away. Now I’ve got a notebook filled with dyed samples, and I decided to give the yarn a try.

Click on this picture to see which color I was aiming for

I pulled out the Italian yarn and got to work.

Now, that there one of two skeins of this stuff, resulting in 815 g of worsted weight yarn. I do not have a pot the appropriate size that I can donate to the non-foodsafe dyeing cause, nor did I want to drop umpteen bucks on something just for this one experiment. Instead I went to the local Target and got myself a large plastic box. Since I live in the South, and it is 90 degrees until November, maybe I could do this outside.

I soaked the yarn with the appropriate amount of vinegar (according to Deb Menz, Dyeing Goddess Extraordinaire) and a whole whack of water. Technically it was supposed to be 31.87 liters, but I didn’t have that much distilled stuff on hand so I just filled up the tub about halfway with the hose and threw the yarn in to soak.

Then I pulled the yarn out and added the dye directly to the soaking bath. Deb Menz has very specific formulas for the amount of water needed per dry weigh of yarn/fiber, but I’ve seen more then one other person say that the amount of water isn’t the critical factor, so I decided to wing it.

Devil wanted to help

I put a big piece of plywood and a Crepe Myrtle log on top to keep out inquisitive squirrels and children and left it overnight.

Much to my surprise, I came out the next morning and found this:

I knew from my 1 oz experiments that with this particular formula, the turquoise didn’t exhaust completely, but I was shocked to see how much of the dye had exhausted!

But...I rinsed the yarn multiple times, and found that it was still loosing a lot of the blue/purple dye. So I put it back into the dye bath/rinse water and added more vinegar and left it for a couple of days.

Then I pulled out each skein individually and wrapped them in plastic bags and steamed them in my very large lobstah pot (which gets lots of use down here, let me tell you). I figured that the dye had gotten into the yarn in the outside step, but still needed to be heated to complete the process.

It seemed to work. So now I’ve got 815 g of dark blue yarn with purple undertones. It turns out that the NG pattern calls for DK weight yarn (perfect for the bag of purple Silky Wool I have hanging around), so this will get to be something else. But I'm definitely more excited about it now!