Dying for it

I know that you are all hanging by your fingernails waiting to find out about what happened with my linen spinning: I tried “counter clock-wise” and decided that it sucks! It seems like it shouldn’t be a problem, but it’s like trying to write with your left hand…or you right hand if you’re left handed. The water acted like glue, and when I tried to draft I only got a few strands at a time, so I ended up with this ridiculously thin yarn. I have thread that’s thicker than this turned out to be. I kept it up for an hour or so, and when I plied it I think I had about 4 yards. So, yeah, I don’t care if flax naturally twists to the left, ‘cause I’m gonna twist it to the right.

The excitement of having all my “free” wool spun up made me pull out all of my spun but not yet washed yarn. I draped them all on my quilting machine….and I think I could knit a 12 foot long scarf for every person I know. I have a ridiculous! quantity of handspun. Make that a ridiculous quantity of undyed handspun, so I think my next foray into craftasticness will be dying. I’ve asked the proprietor of my favorite yarn shop for advice about dying, she is an amazing weaver and dyes a lot of the yarn that she sells, so I’m hoping that she will have some sort of magic wand, or golden ticket to sell me so that I can become a pirate of the dye kettle. In the mean time my house is going to look like wash day at the yarn farm. Somehow I convinced myself that it would be easier to wash it all at once…and forgot that I have an extremely small sink.

This is random, but I think entertaining. I sell my art work under the company name “Fine Art Quilting.” I also sign up everyone I possibly can that lives in my household for Crappy Fabric R Us’s sales flyers, since they all come with 40% off coupons in them. I sometimes need to buy large quantities of fabric and I have an allergic reaction to paying full price. The cat gets one, Rat Girl gets one, Manimal gets one, roommates who moved away three years ago get them. I have not resorted to making people up yet, because I never use all the ones that I get, and because that would be dishonest. Anyway. I signed up under the name “Fine Art Quilting,” and either I have really awful hand writing, or the drone entering the addresses in the computer that day was feeling really tired, because I get a flyer in the name of “Fine Arr Quilting.” See? Even Corporate America knows that I’m a pirate.

And this relates to undyed yarn because when I don’t have to buy large quantities of fabric I buy the “Fisherman’s Wool.” It’s a Lion Brand product, but it’s 100% wool (100% scratchy wool) and it only comes unbleached. I think you’re supposed to knit unwearable chunky Irish sweaters for your worst enemies or something. However, it felts like mad. So I’m going to dye it with fire colors and make myself a felted knitting bag with flames on it. If it works out well I will submit the pattern to Anticraft, because I just love those people. I’m going to try my best to document the whole process, so that I’ll have some interesting pictures to put up on the blog.

Ta for now!
Ragnar…soon to be pink from the elbows down.

PS. Blogger just told me I wasn't authorized to view my own Blog. I found that pushing the refresh button several times made it admit to the error of it's ways.