When I Grow Up...

Today is my birthday, and guess what I want to be when I grow up... A chihuahua!
I think my little Valentine's got the perfect life, napping next to me, cozy on my knitting...

Birthday Collection

This week is a special week. I am turning 40! I decided to celebrate and create a collection of my favorite colors. I created them using natural dyes. Indigo, osage orange and cochineal were my inspirational companions this week. I chose favorite deserts, favorite places, favorite trees, parks, and of course my all time favorite color: orange! Creating these colorways was the loveliest birthday present I could ever give myself!
I hope you will enjoy the Birthday Collection.

It is Open Studios this weekend

SockPixie is busy with Open Studios this weekend. And I am having great fun meeting art and fiber lovers here in Boston.The next color update will be on Tuesday September 29.
Have a great Sunday!

Stranded Worsted Weight Patterns

I've been on Ravelry a while now and I'm firmly convinced the most valuable feature is the pattern finder. I'm going to be extremely busy the next few months with work stuff and I was worried I wouldn't have enough knitting output to keep this blog going. I went to Ravelry and found a bunch of worsted weight stranded accessory patterns that I can finish quickly so I'll have something to show on the blog. In fact I found so many patterns I'm wondering if I have enough Cascade 220 to last until the end of the year.

Here are a few of the patterns I'm considering making this fall. I've noted which ones are free patterns.

Tuulia's Red and Black Celtic Gloves (mittens actually, free pattern)
SpillyJane's Quo Vadis Mittens (free - I might do this in a rainbow sequence)
Dave's Latvian Winter Mittens (love the candle on the thumb)
Inka Hat (check out some of the variations using lots of colors)
Virginia's Floppy Fairisle Hat (one of those rare hats I might actually look good wearing)
Dancing Stars Hat (designed for multi-colored yarns but I might just use striped background)
Bernat Stranded Balaclava (I've never seen a stranded balaclava but I think DH might wear it)

I also want to mention a few books that contain stranded patterns for worsted weight yarns. Anna Zilboorg's hat, mittens, and sock books I think call for DK weight yarn but I always substitute worsted and go down a needle size to get her gauge. Also, Kristin Knits by Kristin Nicholas has a lot of stranded worsted weight patterns.

If you're in central New Mexico and you're interested in helping out a great cause, check out this lovely rabbit quilt some of the local rabbit rescuers made. It is being raffled off - tickets are $1 each or 6 for $5. You can purchase tickets and see the actual quilt (38 by 50") at the upcoming Weems Artfest or tomorrow, Saturday, September 26th at the House Rabbit Society Adoptathon at the Petco on Lomas from 10 am to 2 pm. Next on the agenda to be raffled is the gorgeous rabbit Christmas stocking Kate from San Francisco donated - I'll let you know when that occurs.

Still Natural!

This week, like last week, I continued to explore natural dyes. This time, walnuts, henna, annatto, and indigo were my companions. The walnuts gave me hours of fun! I love how they can give a myriad of brown shades, each one richer or subtler then the next. The annatto brought sunlight in my week. The yellows it produces range from a deep punpkin to a soft buttercup. They are so sunny! The henna gave me caramel tones so juicy it made me want to eat crem caramel all day! And there was the indigo. Now it was my first time doing indigo vat dyeing, and I loved it. It was a slow meditative process. I immersed the fibers slowly so as not to introduce any oxygen in the vat numerous times to reach the blue of my dreams. I will definitely explore indigo again. The vats are waiting in my studio as we speak.
Here is the Natural Collection:




I was so in love with the richness of this week's colorways that I started knitting argyle socks using the colors Dark Chocolate, Sand, and Pumpkin Pie. I will be doing my lines with a duplicate stitch but have not chosen the color.
The natural colors are glorious, and blend so well together. I love their subtle shadings. I find myself seating late at night promising myself and my husband that I will just knit one more row. But after that one more row, comes another and another...

Colors for Bandelier Mitts

After trying inside and outside, in the shade and in the sun, I think I finally managed to capture the colors properly in dappled sunlight. The light green color is the one that isn't showing up properly (it looked yellow in the previous photo) and there are actually two different colors of purple although that is less obvious. Normally I'm never happy with my color choices for patterns that have changing background and foreground colors (I'm hesitant to use the term Fair Isle for this pattern because it does contain some pretty long floats) but I like this. If I could change one thing I'd change out the baby blue in the very center of the star/snowflake because I would like something brighter to make the center really pop out. In person the green in the background is the color that pops out the most.

I'm going to do two repetitions of the pattern with no thumb gusset and I'm planning to make individual fingers. The actual glove width is a bit larger than I'd like (74 sts when I'd prefer more like 68) to divide into fingers but I'll take the advice of Tim Gunn and just "make it work".

Hollyhock

Do you have a favorite flower? Well I do, and it is the hollyhock. It has not always been though. It used to be the tulip, but lasty year, in the spring, I planted some hollyhock seeds. The pictures on the seed packets looked beautiful, but the first year as is often the case the plants barely grew. Then this summer, they started growing, and buds started appearing. Every time I walked outside the door, I would check on their progress. And finally they bloomed, one flower at a time. The blooms were so beautiful, all plump and ruffled, and so vibrantly colored.
I had to few hollyhocks to create a dye out of them, but I still wanted to capture the rich reds, so I used cocheneal instead, and created Hollyhock.
There is a little more to it though. To give it this incredible depth, I first dyed it with Alkanet which gave it a grey tone, and then overdyed it with cochineal. That was a lengthy process, but the result was worth it!
Every time I use natural dyes, I am in awe of the intensity and depth of the colors, as well as their range. They definitely require so much more work, and patience than chemical dyes, but working with them is always rewarding. The results definitely are, don't you think?

It is all natural!

This week is my first Collection since the end of my holidays. As you know, I went to Bar Harbor, Maine. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the area, by nature. All this natural beauty made me want to use natural dyes to create a special collection. All the yarns this week are dyed using the bark of Alkanet, or sandalwood, and the reds and pink were created with cochineal.
I hope that you will enjoy the Natural Collection.

Bandelier Socks Turn into Mitts

I was so busy knitting to see what the design would look like for the Bandelier Socks (from the current issue of Interweave Knits) that I neglected to check to see if it will stretch over my heel. It won't so this will magically morph into a pair of fingerless gloves. That actually works out better because the socks would likely only last me a few months (I'm very hard on socks) but as gloves they'll last years.

The colors of Knitpicks' Palette I'm using are in order of appearance: Blue, Purple, Mint, Marine Heather, Mist, Sky and Eggplant. I'll get a better photo of the actual colors once I finish the gloves.

Organizing My Knitting Patterns

I am a pretty organized person naturally - I usually know where everything in the house is located. I am not exceptionally clean however and usually have to force myself to keep up appearances. Every spring and fall I like to do a large cleaning/decluttering/organizing effort. This year I'm probably more motivated after watching a not-for-the-faint-of-heart reality show series on hoarders but mainly it is the change in seasons.

My yarn stash is pretty organized and decluttered already so I decided to say goodbye to my Spin-Off magazine collection. It is the only magazine I collect (and I haven't purchased any issues in the last few years) and I'm not sure why I've kept the magazines since I rarely even spin. Our house is tiny and I really don't have the room. (I don't even save magazines I've had articles published in - I just rip out the actual article to save). I went through each issue and pulled out any article or pattern I wanted to save. I also saved the entire hand spindle issue since that is a really good one. I put the old magazines in our library's recycling box.

Next I tackled my knitting pattern files. I save various patterns from magazines and the Internet in individual file folders labeled by type of project. Here's what I managed to toss - frankly I'm not sure why I was saving so many of these patterns. I even had a pattern for a simple ribbed scarf and many, many patterns that didn't even appeal to me. I even had duplicate patterns. I went through each pattern file to find stuff to toss.



Here's what is left. I keep a file for each of my own pattern designs and I also keep multi-pattern booklets in this file container. The one file I didn't even bother to look through is my Dale of Norway booklet file - there's no way I'll ever give those up as long as I can knit. (I get asked about selling my various old Dale patterns quite frequently.) If you look closely between the Baby file folder and the Design Ideas folder you can see that the Dale of Norway booklets are a pretty large section of my files.

Fall 09 Color Forecast

Thank you everyone for all your help! I'll post the completed yarn list by the end of the week with any luck. Christina asked about the troubles I had with cotton and superwash. I did do an entire Dale of Norway baby sweater in some Norwegian superwash that was so slippery I never did manage to secure the ends properly even with knotting. It had over 20 colors so that made the sweater unusable. I haven't had much experience with cotton for stranding but it is less elastic which can screw with your tension and tension problems are less likely to block out like they do with nice elastic wool. Obviously not all cottons or all superwash wools are bad for 2-color knitting so I make sure I swatch before I consider using them.

Here is the Pantone color forecast for Fall 09. They strike me as a bit somber but then I'm a bright color girl. My favorite is the periwinkle blue second from the top left and my least favorite is that gold. Oddly enough I recently received an email from Crate and Barrel I think stating that this fall's colors are dark plum and silver and a nice sage green so I guess the "in" colors for this fall are whatever you want them to be.