Wheeeeee

I'm staying up all night to finish an art assignment I didn't start earlier because I was anxious about it.  (Entirely logical, I know.)  It's actually so much fun!  I spent 4 hours working out ideas, and only started the actual bit that gets handed in at 1am.  But - fun!

(On a related note: I have acquired caffeine pills.)

Know what's super irritating?

.... when the underarm bit on a knitted shirt felts with wear but nothing else does.  Bah.

Knitter's Fair 2012

I went to bed early tonight, since I have early classes all this term. Then I started reading Patricia C. Wrede's latest book and then I finished it and it was really good and exciting so now I am awake!  Oops.  Here is a picture:

It's what I got at the Knitter's Fair this year!

I was trying hard not to overspend (and I only overspent a liiiiiittle, so yay for that?), so I decided I wasn't allowed to get any commercial yarn.  Success!  None of this is stuff I can buy online (well, from major yarn sites, at least), and half of it is silk - I'm not sure why, but there was a bunch of nice cheap silk this year.  I also managed to not buy all blues - check out that wicked awesome roving on the left: it's 100% nylon but it's soo soft and has amazingly eye-bleed-y colours (from Studioloo, which was my favourite stall last year too, they have such weird awesome bright things).  Yeah!

Also, Amanda Palmer's Theatre Is Evil just came out today (AAAAAAAAAAAH!), so I obviously have to listen to it again before I try sleeping again.  Oh man oh man, it's really really excellent so you should go buy it if you haven't already.  I keep thinking a track is particularly good, but (spoiler alert) it turns out they all are.  Like gosh.

I've got something I'm dyeing to show you

What's better than puns?

That's right: NOTHING.

Taking pictures my of my handspun made me want to dye some fibre - it's so much more interesting to spin dyed fibre; I can only spun undyed fibre for so long before the lack of colour gets me down. Even fibre that's just been dyed a solid colour gets boring pretty quickly.  Picture time: (feel free to skip the words, they are about what colours I used, etc)

This one was originally solid magenta (the colour that's peeking through the purple).  I added some blue in patches, which spread to cover most of the fibre.  (I'm just working with food colouring, so I can't actually get this sort of purple usually, since I lack a magenta dye - the blue and yellow I have are actually reasonably close to process colours though, so I can get a good range at the other end of the colour wheel.)  I've already spun half of this - I'm working on spinning thicker singles evenly.  They are still pretty lumpy so far, but plying tends to help even things out.  Anyway, I called this colour "Ketamine," because it reminded me of the TRIP! logo for ketamine.

This fibre was initially white.  I dyed it a solid bright blue, then overdyed with orange.  I wanted to tone down the blue a bit; I've mostly done really saturated colours before, and I wanted to get subtler.  I also wanted to avoid any purple-y tones, so I used orange instead of red, and I'm really happy with how it turned out.  I'm calling this colour "GlowWorms."

 This one was also originally undyed white top - I did a first layer of pure (very bright) red, then overdyed with small amounts of green and purple to tone things down a bit.  There's some really subtle variegation: this one is much more solid than the last two, and at first glance it looks solid.  I'm going to knit something lacy with it when it's spun!  This colour is called "Apple Decay."

These were bits of undyed handspun.  I added green and orange into the same dyepot, which made the green a lot warmer (and evil-looking) and added the brown bits.  This is called "Elf Poison" because if elves had poison this is the colour it would be (or else it would be colourless, and it would turn poisoned people this colour - both are good options).

 This one is commercial wool I bought from ebay (it came from China).  Originally, it was white with a grey ply; interestingly, the grey ply seems to have refused to take any dye, so I suspect the grey ply is actually acrylic and I was lied to about the fibre content.  I do actually like how it looks, so it all works out.  I used copious amounts of blue and purple (and maybe a bit of red?  I can't remember.) that were reasonably well mixed.  (Actually, I used waaaay too much dye, a lot of it got poured down the sink (it's ok, it's food colouring!) and a lot more got rinsed out of the yarn.)  I called this color "Flecked Clematis" because I was slightly less grumpy than when I was thinking of names for the last two.

(Sidenote: I like picking ickier names when I'm grumpy - I stashed all my roommate's yarn in ravelry for her, and it's full of names like "Bruised Ankles" and "Drowned Face."  She had to change some of the names apparently, because they were too upsetting.  I guess the point of this sidenote is that if you want slightly gross colourway names, ask me to think of things when I'm grumpy.)

This one is my favourite from this batching of dyeing!  I dumped some green in the pot, but I was getting tired by this point and I didn't really want to think about what else to add, so I just dumped a bunch of different colours in the pot without really paying attention.  Which, of course, made these awesome dark bits!  I have a lot more sympathy for certain yarn companies who don't have dyelots now - these were all dyed in the same pot, but each skein turned out quite differently.  They will still be irritating to knit with, but now I understaaaaaaand.  (And only have myself to get irritated at, which is much less satisfying.)  The only problem with these is that the base yarn is quite scratchy; I'm going to try soaking them in conditioner, but I tried that with a knit shirt earlier today, and apparently my conditioner is extremely smelly, so I want to get some less smelly stuff first.  Must find some nice base yarn(s)!  That aren't expensive!  Oh, and I called this one "Swamp by Night."

That's all the dyeing for today, but here is a picture of the sweater I finished recently:
 

I'm really happy with it except that I ran out of yarn, so the bottom border is shorter (which is fine) and I cast off a bit too tightly (which....is fine so far, but I might get frustrated and fix it later).

Pattern:  Ravelry : Designer's Site


PS - everything I dyed is some kind of wool.  None of the things are for sale, but they aren't necessarily not for sale, so feel free to ask if you like.

Here are some pictures of yarn I've spun

I'm trying to learn how to take nice pictures.  It's a work in progress, but here are some pictures of yarn I spun:

(The pictures are all new, but some of the yarn is not.)

So. Awake.

I've been trying to form good habits.  (I have a lot of bad habits (including using too many parentheses), so there's a lot of better ones I've been trying to get into.)  I have a great deal of trouble getting to sleep at anything except an ungodly hour (falling asleep between 6am and 6pm goes swimmingly - nothing else does).  I now have an alarm that tells me to get off the computer at midnight ( the "sleep" alarm plays this - the "make dinner" alarm plays "bananaphone").

So far, it's only sort of worked.  I do get off the computer at midnight (yay!) but then I stay awake finishing apocalypse stories, which leave me paranoid and unable to sleep.  (They generally feature lots of murderings and/or zomies/alt-zombies.  (Alt-zombies are exactly like regular zombies, except they aren't actually called zombies.))  Last night I knit half a sweater, only to find out today that I'd fucked up the first arm, and had to frog almost the entire thing.  I guess it's nice that I get to knit with the yarn more (it's nice yarn), but still.  Ag.  Tonight I'm writing this blog post, I guess.  Maybe I'll watch Harry Potter, THAT won't have any murderings!  Oh wait.

The really worrying thing is that I've only read three of the books I got out of the library yesterday; I still have ...er...a lot... to go, and most of them are science fiction.  Which is, statistically, the most apocalyptic genre. [citation needed]

I could read some Prachett or Heyer, but I've been reading a LOT of both recently (it's summer) so neither really appeals.  I wish my teenage girl science fiction had arrived from the internet by now.  Maybe if I order more books it will arrive faster!  That's clearly the best plan.

Landscape

I made a thing. See:

It's ink, pen, more ink, and some embroidery.

I stole some style inspiration from brokenbees (go look! So good!) and the words are from this song (mostly because it's been stuck in my head the last few days).  

It just gets everywhere

It's the end of term: time to finish all the end-of-term assignments (plus a couple others that...never mind.  I have poor time-management skills when it comes to essays, apparently.)  A stressful time.  And whatnot.

Kids, this is what university is like: your eyes hurt when the sun comes up because you've been working on the computer all night, on a paper you put off for two weeks and now have to finish in one night.  It's 7am and you just realized you have no real thesis.

                               Here's my floor, post essay. ->

That nice, yellow-y glow?  

That's because the sun is coming up.

Or, you know, you manage your time better than I do.  That's probably the better option.

One of the ways I react to stress, it turns out, is to get out nice yarn and hold it.  Sometimes that will be enough, and other times I start thinking about the things I could make with it.  Sometimes I wind it into a ball, despite the fact that I already have six balls around (and under) my desk, waiting, patiently, to be used.  (Some of them are getting a bit dirty - but it's ok!  Those ones are crappy yarn.)  Some of these balls have half a gauge swatch attached, complete with needles.  Some of them even have multiple gauge swatches, with multiple sets of needles, all attached to the ball.  (Which makes some kind of sense, in my personal design process.)

Here is my desk, covered in yarn that accumulated without me thinking about it:

Remember to not stab yourself

I've been embroidering a bit recently.  I'm not terribly wonderful at it (yet) but I feel like I'm making a bit of progress.

I have learned a couple things about embroidering over acrylic paint or paper:

1. Always use a thimble, goddamnit!  A painted canvas is stronger than the top couple layers of your skin.  Needles are pretty pointy at both ends.  Using a sharper needle is also a good idea.
2. Also: puncture the canvas/paper from the front (even if your needle's in the back).  This one is less painful if you forget, but it does make things look nicer.

Pretty pictures are nice, so here are some other things I've embroidered:

"On an unrelated note..."



"All wrapped up"



"You may have already won"

Damn my sticky fingers

The worst thing about sex is having to get up and wash your hands before you can start knitting again.  Lame!

Slightly related: String Theory has BULKY YARN OMG!  My yarn diet is seriously being tested.  Ok self: when we've used up enough yarn, we can buy ourselves some gorgeous bulky stuff to make ourselves something awesome.  For our very strict definition of "enough."  Now get off the internet, we should have been asleep hours ago.

Slightly more related: get wet wipes.