still here

I missed a good six weeks of LJ and I'm now doing a very cursory skim of what people posted during March. I figure, if dropping my LJ-reading in order to keep up on my email doesn't actually result in me keeping up on my email, I might as well go back to reading LJ, at least sometimes.

Fixed the missized earflaps on the slip-stitch hat.  The white yarn is cotton, and I can tell -- this hat is not anywhere near as warm as the other hats made with the same cashmere and mohair but without the cotton.

I finished doing the Bombshell and now I think I'm going to frog it.  For a number of reasons.  One, I only used half the plain green yarn, so that means I could have made the whole thing in plain green yarn, which is what I'd wanted to do in the first place anyway.  Two, I had to drop so many needle sizes to get the right gauge that the fabric doesn't drape right for a snug little sweater -- that particular tightly-knit fabric wants to be a jacket, or something.  Perhaps I'll frog it and make a different snug little sweater with a much larger stitch gauge and just in the plain green.  Chalk yet another project up to me learning, slowly, to better estimate yardage requirements when I do yarn substitutions....

....and the second picture demonstrates why I'm going to continue having to do yarn substitutions.  Because few if any patterns are written for the plain undyed yarn I dye myself, and I'm just loving dying my own yarn.  This 50% merino 50% silk is heavenly soft and delightfully shiny.  I've got enough to make, I believe, a pair of fairly long socks.  I think, despite having killed my last pair of hand-knit socks from over-wearing, that I'm going to go ahead and make socks out of it anyway.  And in the meantime I'm going to dye another hank of sock yarn and so then I'll have *two* pairs of hand-knit socks and maybe they won't wear out so quickly.

And then I've got some more silk/merino blend -- from knitpicks, this time, so not exactly the same yarn -- that I want to dye and turn into a shawl for a friend who oohed and ahhed over the Ella shawl I made for myself.  At the rate I finish things, I *might* have it done by the time it gets cold next winter.

Speaking of finishing things, I finally put up shelves for the games in my dining room.  I've only been talking about doing *that* for, oh, years.

And now, into the darkroom to make it usable for yarn-dying again. The floor just got a good scrubbing, and now all the stuff that was on the floor is on the counters.  I'm just about ready to write up my "dying yarn with a minimum of hands-on time" document.  Because, I've found, if I'm willing to let the process take several days, I can dye self-striping sock yarn in a pair of trays instead of over the stove, which means I don't have to find someone to watch the baby while I do it. Yay!  I mix up the dye while she's napping, and then I just go in every few hours and pull yarn from one tray to another and/or dump in some more dye.  Then when all the dye is soaked up I wait for another nap and steam-set it on the stove.