Pictorial re-cap

I love posting pictures, I guess because I love looking at pictures on other people's blogs. I take millions of pictures of everything but (thankfully for all of you) I try to cut down on the amount that I actually post here for the most part. Today is not one of those days, LOL. I have a ton of pictures for you today so I hope you have a fast connection!

I started this past weekend with some dyeing. I actually don't have pictures of everything I dyed this past weekend for you today (waaaaay too many pictures) but I am going to show you one of my favorites. Here's you can see my high-tech, scientific dye preparation. *smile*

I decided that I need some spring colors so I started with Wilton's (cake dye) in moss green. Here you can see it in the dye pot. I usually start with a little dye in the pot, let that exhaust, move the fiber around and then add some more dye, let that exhaust, so on and so on.

As you can see from the resulting roving, this method produces a nice color shift in the roving. This is about 9 ounces of soft wool roving. I haven't decided if I'm going to keep this one or not (more on that later).

Here it is in a chain and ready for storage. Yummy!

Here's a quick shot of some of this weekends spinning and dyeing. In the immediate front you can see a bit of the sample skein of yarn I spun from the fiber I carded up below. Above that is a skein of the brown tweed yarn I have been spinning and at the very top of the rack you see the mossy roving from above. There's a ton more stuff on the rows of the rack below this but it was too hard to take a picture with the other stuff above it. I'm sure I'll be posting about the other stuff in the days to come though.

This was my favorite project of the weekend. I bought a pound of Jaeggerspun Zephyr wool-silk laps from Christene Mo on the Yahoo spin-sales list. This stuff is incredibly soft, I should have bought more but I had never purchased anything like this before so I only bought one pound. There's not really much I can do with one pound of yarn (I prefer to spin for full sweater projects), so.....

I decided to combine it with 8oz. of merino/tencel roving that I had bought at a guild meeting a while back. The colors are almost a perfect match.

Here is the first batt right off the drum carder.

And here's a shot of the roving I made from the batt. This stuff is slippery! It wants to spin really thin but I'm trying to coax it into a DK weight. There was much adjusting of the wheel for this one. I have a louet and I'm learning that while it will do the faster ratio's (with proper fiddling) and you can spin lace weight, etc. it is not the best tool for the job. The BF is encouraging me to buy a new wheel so we'll see. I'm hoping to sample some wheels at my next guild meeting. Or I might just head over to the new spinning shop in town Stick & Stone Fiber Arts. This shop was just opened by two members of my spinning guild, Janel‚— editor of Spindlicity and owner of Chameleon Colorworks ‚— and Margarete. I haven't had a chance to stop by yet but another of my guild members, Francesca, posted pictures of the grand opening on her blog.

I also started knitting Bomber from Rowan Denim People using my cheap-o Lily Sugar n' Cream that everyone is making dishcloths from. I'm almost done with the first sleeve and I think I will wash and dry this before I continue knitting the rest of the sweater just to make sure the my shrinkage rate is correct. I have to say this yarn really surprised me. It's very soft and nice to work with, none of the dye comes off on my hands and as I mentioned before, it's CHEAP!! LOL! only $1.33 per skein at herrschners.com. The other colors I ordered are also nice. I'll try to remember to post pictures of those next week. I'm thinking I might also try my hand at knitting a Denyse Schmidt quilt with my sample yarns a la Mason-Dixon knitting. I just need to figure out how much yarn I need.

This is the warm brown and the colors is actually slightly variegated. I don't know if this was done on purpose or if it's because it's cheap yarn, but I like it. You can see the slight variation better in this close-up (and if you click on the picture you can see this even bigger). I do plan to order more of this yarn to make saffy from the same book. After that I think I will have to move on to another yarn/pattern book.

Finally, I just had to share this picture of my graduates. I work at a college and today was commencement. Here are my PhD students are dressed and ready for the world. I'm proud to say that everyone has postdoctoral positions ready to go to once they leave me and I think they are all fairly sane and should do great things in the world. Congratulations guys!


Last buy not least I'm ready to announce that I will be living in sin! LOL! The BF and I are moving in together. We decided to consolidate at his place because it's more central to both of our jobs but that means that I will be going from a 3 bedroom apartment with two people to a 2 bedroom apartment with 3 people! Of course you know what this means, the stash must reduce! I'm going through everything right now to see what I can stand to part with but be on the lookout for a stash sale in the near future. Prices will be pretty low because at this point I just need to get it out of the house. I'm going to have some storage room at the new place and I will be able to store some of my fleece at my mom's but the bulk of of it is going to have to go. My plan is to start with the oldest stuff in my stash because if I haven't used it by now, chances are I never will...