Butterflies?

Stacie and Tracy have suggested using thread instead of yarn to make smaller butterflies. My husband commented today that my butterflies actually look like butterflies, but he's not sure those hearts actually look like hearts.



Per the rules of the afghan, I should only use the yarn I was given by them. But that rule was implemented to have color consistency, and I happen to have crochet thread in that shade of red... hmmm... I need to think this over. While I do that, I'll occupy myself weaving in some ends on another project:





Yes, my husband will have to break into new wool socks now that the weather is warmer.



In other news, he's been telling me to write a blog in Spanish. Sadly, there are very few knitting blogs in Spanish out there. So let me introduce you to my Spanish blog. It's going to be essentially a translation of what I blog about here. There's a lot of work to be done regarding formats and pop-up windows, but I'll start translating my entries as of today. Do you like it?

I finally ripped

It took some courage, but I ripped the last two rows of my afghan square and, you know? It wasn't as bad as I expected. I finished the inner square and started on the red seed stitch border. I took pictures but that will have to wait until tomorrow.



And now I really have to think about what to put on the branches. Heather suggested little birds, but no bird made out of this yarn is going to be little. (However, a crocheted bird is a good idea, I'll save that for something else later on). Kathy and Michele suggested apples, and Elaine suggested crocheted leaves. Now leaves would be OK, but I have to use red yarn. So apples it was. I tried paper apples, just to see how they'd look, but I hate to say, they looked silly. Apples are supposed to hang down from tree branches, and all my branches are pointing upwards.



Butterflies was one of my choices, but not anymore. This yarn is too chunky for butterflies. So what do you think about hearts? Is that too cheesy?

Taking a break

The dyeing disappointment and my reluctance to rip the last two rows of the afghan square made me want to work on something else. Luckily I have plenty of UFO's lying around, so I was able to stay busy by crocheting one more round on this one:






On close inspection, I should have started the increases much later than I did. I don't expect it to look exactly like the real Lorenz Manifold, but it will come close. Meanwhile, I enjoy watching how it evolves round after round.

If you celebrate Easter, enjoy! I hope you spend a wonderful time with your loved ones.

Tree progress

Thank you for all that encouragement. I like how the tree is coming out. What I don't like is the empty inch I'm going to have at the top of the tree. According to my swatch I needed 52 rows for the tree. But I've measured again and I actually need 60. I tried making the last branches a little longer to compensate, but now they look like antennae.



I don't want to rip at all, but I think I'll have to shorten the last two branches, and live with an empty space. I could rip a lot more and make some height adjustments, but I don't want to face the resulting tangle.



Heather raised an interesting question: What will I do about the back, indeed? I had no plans, but after taking a good look at the reverse side, I'm thinking I'll need one:




If this were an afghan for myself, I'd simply weave in the ends and ignore the ugliness of the reverse side. But this is part of an afghan that will be raffled for a good cause. If you won an afghan in a raffle, would you like it to be pretty on both sides or would you only care about the front?



My second attempt at brick red was not sucessful. I still got salmon pink, only deeper. Here's the before and after pictures:







This is the lesson I've learned: you might get certain color when working in a small scale, but when you mix dyes on a larger scale the little differences get multiplied and the original color will not be reproduced exactly. Sometime I'll get the money to buy a balance, but until then I must learn to live with the results. I'm leaving this skein of yarn alone for now. It's a miracle it did not felt with the second dipping.

Gnarly tree

I liked that description by Vaxgirl. It's getting even gnarlier:





Thank you for the encouragement. I plan on adding red somethings at the end of the branches. Flowers? Hearts? Butterflies? It'll have to be something easy to crochet and preferably small. That's leading me to choose flowers, but I will not crochet them until I finish the tree, so feel free to suggest other stuff.




I followed Kathy's advice and dipped that yarn again. It's now on my kitchen counter cooling down. I stopped zapping because I had to come to work, but it was looking much darker. Tomorrow I'll know for sure if I've acheived brick red this time.

Does this resemble a tree?

I hope it does, because there's no going back. I had to rip a couple of rows and ended up with a huge tangle that took forever to clear out. I've decided to avoid any more ripping, so if I make any mistakes I'll just call them pattern adjustments and keep going. You know how the saying goes, that no war plan survives first contact with the enemy. This applies to knitting too (though I hesitate to call yarn an enemy). What looks good in paper may be a nightmare to knit, and a change of plan might be required.



My first batch of food-color yarn is drying now. The color is not very consistent and I'm considereing whether I should dip it again or not:






My husband says he likes it. He is very polite, but there's a difference between saying you like a color and actually wearing it. Would he wear this salmon pink when in reality he wanted brick red?

It's only a square

That's what I keep telling myself each time I have to untangle this mess. My design idea was a *simple* tree, but here I am struggling with five strands of yarn and I have not yet started the branches:






You'd think an afghan square is a very portable project that you can bring with you to work, but not when you have five balls of yarn that get tangled with each other and with your circular needle. This square will be knitted at home. I've still got time but I don't want any last minute rushes.



Thanks for the comments on my test colors. Apparently my chaotic husband has already chosen brick red and orange for his own pair of socks. He must have faith in me, because I have not finished the first pair of socks he requested. A 50 g skein is sitting in my microwave just now. I keep adding food coloring and I cannot get the same intensity the test strand had. If I were to do my tests again, I would weigh each strand and make a better calculation of the final amount of dye.

Zapping yarn

What works with Kool-Aid should also work with food coloring and vinegar, right? My microwave had enough space to accomodate all these test jars:







I was trying to get two shades of each color: brown, green, and orange. The colors in the jars were not exactly what I was looking for but I zapped them anyway. I was cooking for two minutes every hour or so. By the end of the day I had colorfast yarn. Not even detergent and hot water could make these strands bleed. I placed them on a paper towel and now that they're dry, I realize the colors are more or less what they were supposed to be:






I originally thought I wanted to use brown and green, but I like the brick red (second color from the top). My husband thinks it looks good with orange. What to you think?

Yet another WIP

Believe me, I did not plan on this. Someone asked me to sell tickets for an afghan raffle, and you can guess the rest. I ended up with these skeins:








Which I will use to knit a square. I'm still working on the swatching and the design.




I had my husband try the problem socks and he wasn't able to tell which one had two extra rows before the ankle:








And so I'm satisfied. Magic Stripes is still cheap enough that the irregularities can be overlooked, especially if a couple of rows make no difference in the fit.

Brown and Green

Thanks for all the color suggestions! I already have vinegar and food coloring and will make some tests based on all those possibilities (I also like Heather's idea of using natural dyes, I'll try that later on). I am inclined to believe brown and green should be easy to acheive and will look good together, but I will not make a final decision until I can see how the colors turn out on my test strands.




I worked on the blue thing's neckline and finished the right side:





I also picked up my husband's second sock, which I had abandoned for a while. I had a small issue with that sock. I counted the same number of rows from toe to ankle and the color sequence was slightly off compared to the first sock. So I knitted two additional rows to make the stripes match. They look alike, but even if it is not noticeable, those two extra rows bother me.



This did not happen when I used my own mouthwash-kool-aid self striping yarn or when I used socka yarn, so I'm willing to blame the Lion Brand Magic Stripes. But I can't, because I knitted a previous pair with Magic Stripes and the socks matched perfectly. So I don't know what to think. Was it me, or was it the yarn?

Gotta knit this!

It's the Seamless Argyle Sock. It's shareware, the creator requests a $3 donation if you use the pattern generator to knit it, which is, I believe, a bargain.



Ah, but I'm not supposed to buy any yarn until I finish certain WIPs. So, am I hurrying up with them? No way! I will use the yellow yarn from my stash:







Yes, that's the same yellow yarn I've been dyeing with Kool-Aid and mouthwash and whatnot. My grandma had lots of it, she must have liked yellow a lot. Or maybe she found it on sale, got carried away buying it all and then never got to use it.



Of course, there will be some dyeing involved. And I need some help here. As my husband says, I'm color challenged (remember my green and yellow socks? believe it or not I do wear them). What colors do you think would look good in an argyle sock? Keep in mind that the original yellow will be a problem. Even though it is a very faint yellow, I wasn't able to get a decent purple out of it.



Tracy pointed out that my comments are not working any more from her computer, but you can still use the contact form while I get that fixed (or rather, the helpful blogdrive people figure that out for me).

More dyeing experiments

I wanted purple yarn. And I still have lots of yellow yarn, the one I used for my striped socks. Of course, you cannot turn yellow into purple, but if you use enough purple dye you might just disguise that yellow. Or so I thought. Turns out, you need lots and lots of Grape Kool-Aid to prevent orange hues. Which means you get really dark purple yarn. The color is much darker than the picture shows:





I wish grape Kool-Aid had more blue coloring in it, or less red. The blue tends to take longer to be absorbed by the wool, and I felt I had little control over the whole process. It might be time to migrate from Kool-Aid to food coloring and (yuck) white vinegar. I know there are better, more professional dyes, but anything that comes into my kitchen must be, as a minimum, edible.

Catching up

After reading all Friday and getting many more doses of chocolate I picked up the blue thing and started again from row 70. I'm happy to say, it has armholes again and I'll soon start shaping the neckline:










By the way, when I say I read all Friday I really mean it. I started a book on Thrusday evening and by Friday evening I had finished it. That's the effect Mrs. Bujold's books have on me. I just cannot put them down!



I was reading some stuff about her on her site and I came upon this: 'Earlier in the summer I was looking at the box on my dresser of award nominations pins that had accumulated over the years, thinking "Thirteen tie tacks and no neckties. Deconstruct the subtext of this one, grrls..." '




I assume Science Fiction writers like to show off their nomination pins on their lapels or ties. But not her, of course. She instead asked a friend of hers to make a necklace with all those pins. You can take a look at the necklace here. Now, isn't that clever?

Rip, rip, rip, rip....

Argh! Don't you hate mistakes? Especially when you make them early on and you don't notice until much later. The plan with the blue ribbed top was to cross cables after 14 rows, then 42, then 70, then 98. There's a 28 row interval between crossings.



But I crossed my first cable after 12 rows, so crossing them after 42 gave me an initial interval of 30 rows. I failed to notice that mistake until I was well past 70 rows, doing the armhole decreases and expecting to make the final crossing of cables at 98, Oh, sob, sob, sob. What am I going to do now?



Rip, rip, rip. But I'm not ripping down to my 12th row. No way. I ripped down to row 70 and I will now use 30 row intervals. I'll have cables crossing after 12, 42, 72 and 102 rows. That means a higher neckline, but hopefully not very much. The blue thing now looks like this:







It was looking real good before I ripped it, it even had armholes. I wish now I'd taken a picture of it, but that would have frustrated me even more. I need some motivation here, I think I'll go get some chocolate.