The Good, The Bad, and the Beautiful

The Good: I got my invitation to Ravelry this weekend. I'm raspberry over there if you want to find me. Fortunately for the state of my marriage I didn't get a chance to log into e-mail and discover this until today. After I finished my huge list of Sunday and Monday chores. If I disappear for a month it'll be because I'm wandering through Ravelry in a happy fog. If you're on the waiting list, do what I meant to but didn't get around to and gather the info about all your projects together so that you can pop it all up easily. If you're not on the waiting list yet, go check out the tour and then get on the waiting list. It has the potential to be fantastic. I'm really impressed with what they've accomplished and how carefully they've been adding folks in so they can avoid implosions. It really must be a huge endeavor to manage that kind of environment as it grows. Even when it is growing in a controlled way.

I can't wait to see what all there is and get my projects organized there. Unfortunately, I'll have to. Today was full of errands and tomorrow is my upholstery class which sucks up the whole day.

The Bad: Last night I broke a Lantern Moon Sock Stix needle working on my February Rockin' Sock Club socks so they are on hold until I can replace it. I managed to get one heel finished and start the second so I want to keep going with these rather than switch now. At least the heel knitted with these needles is a better fit than the previous one.
That's one horribly pale foot propped on my other equally pasty leg in order to get a good shot of the heel. I need to enlist a helper for these photos I think. I'm rather annoyed with myself for not using the bamboos instead though. Especially since I knew I have to knit tight to make gauge for this pattern. Only, they were in a different project and I was too stupid to switch them out. And then this morning I cracked (just a tiny one thank goodness, but still) my beautiful David Reed Smith niddy-noddy by skeining a lace weight under too much tension. Sometimes I just want to smack myself upside the head. I'll have to see if I can get a replacement part for it or something. Sigh.

The Beautiful: Possibly I should have saved Beautiful for Ravelry and lead off with this as merely Good but I am so pleased with how this turned out (eventually) to be almost exactly how I envisioned it when I started, that I think it's beautiful. I mentioned last time about dying some yarn for Mystery Shawl 3. Well, I did it this weekend. I started Friday night with what I had in the house. Food coloring. I tried blending some colors and dropping them into the water on the yarn in some sections followed by using the new (to me) black food coloring with which I tried to get a grey fairly evenly over all the yarn. The idea was to end up with a grey backed by hints of other colors (blue, purple and green basically). Well, that didn't work out too well because the black food coloring isn't really black. It just looks black if it is dark enough. Lighter, it's more of a reddish brown or something I think. Which wasn't the look I wanted.

So Saturday I went out and got some Jacquard Acid Dyes and overdyed the whole skein with Gunmetal. And I got this lovely yarn which is not quite as blue as it looks here but it is definitely a blued grey which I think I actually like better than the grey I had initially envisioned.

hand-dyed laceweight arty shot

It felted a little bit in the dye pot because I had to leave it for a bit while doing chores and it boiled softly while I was gone. That'll teach me to not try to multi-task while I'm dyeing. I re-skeined it today while it was still slightly damp (I seem to remember reading some blog somewhere that mentioned doing that with slightly felted yarns to make it easier to separate the strands) and it looks fine. It was only a tiny tiny bit felted together. It pulled apart pretty easily except for a couple of places where I actually had to tease the strands apart a bit. This photo shows the color variation better but the one above is arty.

KnitPicks Bare Laceweight dyed with food colors (blends of regular and neon and Black) and overdyed with Jacquard Acid Dye - Gunmetal

It's still drying right now. But I can't wait to use it. I think I've finally got the right yarn for my Mystery Stole 3. I just hope that 880 yards will be enough. Melanie says it only took her 780 but I'm always convinced things won't work for me even if they do for other people. I need to learn how to color correct my photos I suppose but I haven't time for yet another interest. Especially now that I have Ravelry to explore.