More pics

OK, I'm slacking at blogging again. What can I say, this week has been insane. A week's vacation was great, but now I have what feels like 4 weeks of work. Argh.

Anyway, I've been knitting but have no pictures of that... I've just about finished my second Lent-Along sock. That sock yarn was bought last year at Sheep & Wool, so it must be time to buy some more! I've also been working a little on the Bed & Breakfast, but I've picked up another UFO that is more suitable for Spring. Remember the Chai cardigan? I got it to vest stage (back and two fronts, sewn together and ends woven in), then stalled. The sleeve is now on the needles... trying to finish by Sheep & Wool (um, yes, that is next weekend... so what?)

I just got done ordering 10 more skeins of undyed sock yarn. Thanks for all of the nice words about the job my mom & I did on the dyeing - and my dad & Dan did on the skeining and reskeining. What other color combos do you like? What combos would you like to see in stripey socks?

And since I promised it in the title... here's the link I made to my Albie photoset on flickr. I added a few more to give you an idea of just how small, active, and cute he is. Enjoy!

Vay-cay-tion

...all I've ever wanted...

Yep, I've been on the road for the last week visiting friends and family in the exotic land of the midwest. We stayed with Dan's grandparents, saw his parents, stayed with my parents, saw my grandparents, and have had a generally relaxing and fun time. Tomorrow, of course, it's back to the grind, and today it's the drive back to DC. But first a few pictures...

Hello there!

When I first came in the door at my parents' house on Tuesday, this little cotton ball of fluff was there to greet me. He'd been home for all of two hours, and was excited to have more people to love and chew on. His name is Albie, and he's just so tiny and cu-uute...

awww...

He's made the days fun - playing in the yard, chewing on everything around, and crashing hard for naps (giving Mom & I time to go out shopping!).

We also spent a lot of time in the kitchen (official puppy territory), and what better activity to do than dye yarn, using up some of that Kool-Aid I just bought, as well as some of the Wilton's icing dyes that I wanted to try out.

Mom got in on the action...

...and so did Dad!

That's right, dyeing is a family affair here at Chez Snargle. Dan did some of the winding of skeins into mega-skeins, too.

Here's the final result:

pretty!

Six skeins of sock yarn. The three on the left are self-striping and the three on the right are variegated. Mom is keeping the one on the far left (which is why it's in a ball). I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing with the rest - two will be prizes, and I'll use a few, but I know I've got a log more dyeing in me. Maybe an etsy store is in my future... What are your favorite color combos?

And the winners are...

We've got some winners in the house!!! Thanks everyone for playing - that was by far the best participation I've ever had (most comments, too), and I enjoyed each and everyone. Sorry for drawing it out on you (and sorry for not responding to comments via e-mail yet), but I'm taking a little vay-cay at the moment and I'm not home. But more about that in the next post.

OK, have I drawn it out enough? I guess so.

The 1,000 commenter was....

Mary Jo!

And the number of Kool-Aid packets, with an exact, right-on, perfect guess was...

Lolly!

Yep, there were 204 Kool-Aid packets on that receipt. To those of you who tried to use math and calculations with the average number of lines per inch and my height, I would have done exactly the same thing. Unfortunately, each of the Kool-Aid packets rang up with three lines (each):
Original Price: $.27;
You Save $.15;
Actual Price $.12.
(More than 50% off - yippee!) Sorry to throw you off like that.

Thanks everyone for playing! Stay tuned for an update about actual knitting, dyeing (using some of that Kool-Aid already), vacation, and my new fur-nephew.

Famous Bloggers & a wee contest

On their whirlwind tour, Mason-Dixon Ann and Kay came through DC. Actually, they showed DC a lot of love, spending three whole nights in our fair city (and suburbs). I went to their first event, at Politics and Prose on Tuesday. (sorry, Maggi! I would have loved to see you at KH but was busy that night)

Lolly and I - love the self portrait!

Look! Kay's laughing at something I said!

I got to hang out with Lolly (always fun) and since she flagged me down as I walked by her table in the cafe (oblivious), I got to meet Ann & Kay over dinner before their talk. Lovely ladies both, and fun stories, and cool book. And they like linen yarn, too! (I made my Honeymoon Cami out of 100% linen) If they're coming to a town near you be sure to catch them.

And, funny story, I went out to get lunch on Wednesday around 3 PM (one of those days), and as I walked up to the local sandwich shop, Ann and Kay walked around the corner. Extremely surreal, especially when I said "Hi, Ann and Kay" and they recognized me (or at least my Clapotis) and said Hi back. And then we talked about how strange it was to run into one another on the street. And then I took my lunch back to work (really one of those days) and they went to be famous on the radio, which apparently has a studio quite close to my office (who knew?). I just hope I'm not promoted to Cara-like stalker status. (That's the real reason I didn't go to the 2 other DC-area events - don't want to look too much like a stalker, you know)

OK, let's have a wee contest, shall we?

Actually, it's like two simultaneous contests. But I'll explain that in just a moment.

Several of you asked in the last post exactly how many packages of Kool-Aid I purchased to get a receipt that long. The truth is I didn't bother to count, so I didn't know, but I immediately thought "That makes a great contest!"

To enter: add a comment or email me your guess with how many packages of Kool-Aid are on the receipt. The person who comes the closest will win a skein of Kool-Aid dyed sock yarn.

Of course, in the last entry I also promised a small prize to the person who wrote the 1,000th comment. We're not there yet, but this entry should do the trick. That person will also get a skein of dyed sock-yarn. If they happen to be the same person, I'll figure out what to do with that at that point.

For fun, we'll say one entry (comment) per person. (So don't cheat, Mom...)

(But Karen, I rebuilt my blog archives, so you should be able to get into January now - just in case ;) )

Dyeing Disaster

or, why watching Grey's Anatomy can be bad.

What could have been...

But first, some background. A little while ago, I signed up for Zarah's Project Spectrum hand-dyed sock yarn swap (say that ten times fast). (ETA: Sign-ups are on a monthly basis, so if you're interested for May you can still get in on the action!) An even littler while ago, I signed up for Project Spectrum, but I digress.
So I ordered 10 skeins of KnitPicks Dye Your Own sock yarn (I wish it was superwash, but you can't beat the price!), and stocked up on Kool-Aid. I toured around the Blogosphere looking at everyone's lovely dyeing, and was especially drawn to self-striping yarns. There are several good tutorials - Eunny, Scout, and Jessie have three.

First I knit a swatch - a fake sock. I marked a column of stitches, and then unraveled my swatch. The marks were about 27" apart, so that was my one-stripe length. I don't have a fancy-schmancy warping board (although I think that will change, soon - I just need to go to Home Depot), I set two chairs apart across the width of my house and used a third in the living room to make a triangle. Any bigger of a skein, and we'll have to move outside. Linus helped me wind my center pull ball into a ginormous skein (440 yards of walking!).

Linus is a good helper! (not)

After I got it skeined up, I counted out my stripes, and then figured out my color pattern. I decided to use my Klass Latino drink mixes - Limon, Mango, Tamarindo, and Naranja, plus mixes of two different flavors. My goal was to get a color gradation - light to dark and back to light. All in all, I had 8 different colors to stripe.

To make a long story short (too late), most of the weekend later I had 5 fabulous stripes and put my yarn on the stove to get the last three stripes:

Whew, almost done!

Then I went to watch Grey's Anatomy. I had been successfully balancing TV and the stove all night, hopping up at each commercial break to check, but that show sucked me in. The next thing I knew, I was turning to Dan to ask if he could smell something... bad.

It's done, all right.

Want a close-up? (You know you do.)

When yarn dyeing goes horribly wrong

Um, yeah. Don't let your yarn boil dry. As Dan was quick to reassure me, at least I didn't burn the house down. But my beautiful self-striping sock yarn was not meant to be. I had to cut the burned portion out. That hurt.

I couldn't bear to watch

I had bought a pot at Value Village specifically for the purpose of yarn dyeing, so my total investment was only $1.41 (pot) + $1 (drink mix) + $3.99 (yarn). And now I just have to live with what could have been:

So pretty. Too bad the ends don't connect

But not to worry - I jumped right back on that dye pot horse. (that sounds painful!). Yarn Swap Pal Theresa is getting some beautiful (and still self-striping) yellow and orange yarn:

Not burnt! An improvement!

And when I went to the grocery store last night, Kool-Aid was on sale 8/$1. I did what any rational knitter/dyer would do and filled a basket. Then the poor cashier had to ring them up individually. In fact, a manager took pity on the poor cashier (and the customers in line behind me) and opened up an aisle just for me. But look at this impressive receipt!

That much Kool-Aid should last me for a while.

More dyeing updates to come... as well as the Meet-up on the Mall recap and meeting Mason-Dixon Ann and Kay!

ETA: This is my 200th entry! And it only took me 3.5 years (what can I say, I'm the quiet type). FYI - the 1,000 comment is coming up soon, and there might just have to be something special for the commenter...

Progress Report

This weekend, Dan and I headed downtown to check out the Cherry Blossoms. For me, it was a preview for the Meet-Up this weekend! 2 PM at the Washington Monument. More details on Lolly's blog. Hope all you local gals can make it!

Anyway, as I was saying, we went to check out the Cherry Blossoms. The stripey sock went too:

Pretty!

So there's actually another green stripe in there that you can't see because it kind of curled up.

And it was purdy... and gorgeous, too.

We parked at Haines Point in East Potomac Park, right across the river from that cool building - which turns out to be the National War College (who knew?). And while the monument area was completely mobbed, we really enjoyed our walk along the river to and from the car - there are 1600 more cherry trees down that way, too! (You can check out the map with little symbols for all of the cherry trees at this link - but be warned, it's a .pdf and it's pretty big - 5 MB). We drove past "The Awakening" and will definitely need to get out of the car and explore it next time.

And I'm proud to say that I finally finished the Bed & Breakfast sleeves:

Two blue sleeves!

I thought I had finished them and got all happy... and then I reread the instructions. See, after you finish all of the increasing (and boy were there a lot of increases!), you still have to knit 2.5" straight. Argh! And I was doing both sleeves at the same time... to save time later, but it was torture to get through them both. But they're done and I even started on the front.

How many more days until Easter? I don't know if I'll finish my Lent-Along projects, but it's been fun working on them!

Flash Your Stash

Today is International Flash Your Stash Day. Here's my contribution:

Yikes! It's a Yarn Explosion!

Of course, this is the way I prefer to look at it:

All cleaned up and put away!

Much better! Want a tour?

The bags on the top are the yarn I bought from Iceland in February of 2004. There's three sweaters there - two for me and one for Dan. You can see pictures of them in that link. One of these winters I'll get around to these.

The two bins below the white bags are bags of yarn for sweaters - Rowan Cork (blogged here), Takhi Dazzle from the yarn swap, Lionbrand Landscapes from Christmas, Valeria di Roma cotton, Filatura di Crosa No Smoking (option Eeeny from the contest), the Brooks Farm Four Play (also in the contest) and a few others.

The bottom left bin is full of medium quantities of mostly wool yarn - Noro, Silky Wool, Bulky Alpaca (another score from the yarn swap) and various yarns for felting.

The big pink bin is full of Acrylic. Wool-Ease, Homespun, etc. I bought some of it as a newbie knitter who still though I would save money by knitting my own sweaters. I'm keeping it mostly for charity and/or baby knitting. This bin will probably go in the attic since I won't be needing the contents that often.

The last clear bin is the summer yarn - cottons, linen, ribbon silk, soy (!) and bamboo(!!). The three white cases hold Oddballs, sock yarn and scarf yarn (novelty). The green bowl is my Manos thrift store sweater, and the two blue things are Target learn-to-knit kits that I got for 75% off - there's a pet bed and a baby hat and bootie set.

Not included in this picture: the other half of the sock yarn stash (you didn't think it would all fit in that little bin, did you?), the fleece, or the WIPs.

OK, now I've showed you mine ;)...