lazy days

I’m having a super lazy Saturday. I spent some time catching up on some Playful Day podcasts whilst I painted my nails, and I LOVE how my nails turned out! They’re gold scribbles on a baby blue base.

I have a heel for my mystery sock.

And I’m thinking of casting on for another mystery sock, despite being so woefully behind in the other one, in some of my hand dyed yarn. This skein is a complete experiment. I was dyeing a semi solid grey when I accidently tipped a whole pot of grey dye stock all over the yarn. Luckily the darker section doesn’t look too bad, I dunked it in water immediately so it’s blended out somewhat.

I did then decide to dot some orange dye around to see what it would look like, but I’m not entirely convinced that it’s going to knit up too well! I’ve a feeling this would have looked better with yellow instead of orange, but I won’t know until I try. The pattern I have in mind for this has quite a few cables and travelling stitches, but now I’m in two minds about whether to knit this up as plain vanilla sock instead. I probably shouldn’t because I’ve already got a vanilla sock on the go, but I’m just so indecisive!

And just because I love my nails so much right now, and I really like the way the gold looks in the sunlight!

Hope you’re all having a great weekend!

more lovelies

I’ve already bombarded you with a couple of posts on my dyeing exploits, but I’m far from done.

Beautiful purples and blues, bright sunshine yellow with splashes of orange, a multitude of browns, and a seafoamy, vintage inspired duck egg blue dotted with pale grey.

This is my favourite. Multi tonal purple with flashes blue and and even hints of green. Love.

I absolutely hated these browns when I first pulled it out of the dye pot, but I kind of love it now. It has wonderful depth.

This one is another favourite of mine. The colours are so soft and lovely, it’s definite spring colour. The hints of grey are much more apparent in this photograph. I inadvertently contaminated this skein with a few dots of red and yellow dye, but I should be able to use my notes to recreate it.

And a slightly better picture of the grey that I posted the other day. The blue and the grey are the superwash 2ply BFL that I’ve already mentioned, but the other are a lovely soft superwash wool blend.

There was also an organic merino that I dyed, but it almost ended in disaster as I forgot it wasn’t superwash and almost felted it!

Thankfully it reskeined beautifully so it wasn’t too disastrous. I must remember to be more careful with non superwash yarns in the future!

versatility

The lovely MissHSoo contacted me to pass this award on to me a few months back, and more recently it’s been passed to me by KiwiPurler so it’s high time that I blogged about it!

I’m so so sorry to MissHSoo for not blogging about this earlier, but the thing is, I’m rather a shy person. Anyone who knows me in real life will know how ridiculously shy I am around people I don’t know. I open up to people after a while, but I’m really very introverted, and I’m usually unbearably quiet around people I don’t really know. KiwiPurler articulated my feelings towards blog awards so well in her post, and I’m so glad to see that I’m not alone in how I feel about them.

Being given recognition for my little home on the internet is a wonderful thing, it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling and makes me feel as though people do like what I’m putting out there and I’m very appreciative that these two people have passed this on to me. I understand that to accept this, the rules are thus - I must share 7 things about myself and then pass the award onto 15 other blogs. I think the reason that I shied away from blogging this award was the passing it on part. I subscribe to so many blogs that choosing just 15 to pass it onto was a big task in itself (not only am I shy, I’m indecisive), and then when I did decide on my 15, would they think me silly for passing it on to them? Which is a completely ridiculous thought, because I certainly don’t think that MissHSoo or KiwiPurler are silly for passing this onto me.

So I’ve decided this: if KiwiPurler can break the rules then so can I. Therefore I’m tagging all of you. Share 7 things about yourself, either in the comments below, or on your blog and post the link in the comments so that I can read all about it, because not only am I shy and indecisive, I’m nosy too :)

So without further ado, here are my 7.

1. I’m left handed, or as my other half the Boy likes to call it, cack handed/a southpaw. Isn’t he nice to me?! I very much like being left handed, it makes me feel a little bit special (apparently, only 10% of the world population is left handed!).
   
2. I was taught to knit at a fairly young age (I’m not sure how old exactly, but I think around 5 or 6). My Mum asked her friend to teach me because she was also left handed and for some reason my Mum thought it’d be easier for me to learn from a fellow leftie. I’m not sure why she thought that because I knit the same as a right handed person. I remember that back then I used to think that “purl” stitches sounded wonderfully exotic, and I still have the orange plastic needles that I used to play around with back in the day, although I’m glad to say that the hideous acrylic tangles that I used to make are long gone.
   
3. I’m an English style thrower, and the idea of backwards mirror knitting gives me a headache. I have tried Continental knitting, but my stitches end up too sloppy and I get frustrated with how slow my knitting is going so I never make it though a full row. I’d like to master it one day, but I’ll have to overcome my impatience first!
   
4. I’m half Chinese, my Mum is from Singapore and my Dad was English with a tinge of Scot. It’s an endless bugbear of mine that I barely look Asian at all, and I’m always envious of other hapas who looks far more Asian than I. Alexa Chung, Maggie Q, Kelly Hu, I’m looking at you girls.
   
5. When I talk to my Mum my English usually end up descending into Singlish. This is not something that is consciously done, and it can get a bit embarrassing when I’m in public on the phone to her and hear myself drifting into it! I can’t speak Chinese though, although I did have Mandarin lessons last year but I haven’t been practicing (naughty!) so need to get back into that. I can speak a teensy bit of Hokkien, which is my Mother’s dialect. Incidentally, the first Hokkien words that my Mum taught me were swear words (classy family!), but I pretty much only know enough to know when my Mum is speaking about me.
   
6. I was obsessed with Sweet Valley High and Nancy Drew books when I was younger, and spent much of my childhood with my imaginary twin solving ridiculous imaginary mysteries. (As an aside, in linking to the Wikipedia entry for Nancy Drew I've only just discovered that Carolyn Keene isn’t a real person! The books were ghost-written! I’m in shock.)
   
7. At school I was an army cadet and I almost joined the Royal Navy. I was considering being sponsored through university to study engineering and then going on to train as a naval officer after graduating, but I chickened out. There’s a part of me that hugely regrets not following through with it. Other childhood regrets: not following through in a career in either astrophysics, marine biology or archaeology. These were all dream careers of mine, and if money and time were no object I’d still love to study any or all of them. It’s never too late for a career change, right?!
   

slow going

I feel like I was a knitting speed demon a couple of weeks ago, and it’s all come grinding to a halt. I’ve (yet again!) fallen behind in the mystery sock KAL. I’ve only just started Clue 3, which is the heel, and I’m really enjoying knitting a heel flap again after all the short row heels I’ve been doing lately! I’m a little disappointed in my yarn choice though. It’s not the yarn itself that bothers me, the Zettl Valbella is a fairly decent workhorse yarn, but the colour. Even though the designer said that the pattern might work better in a lighter colour, I chose an inky navy blue, and the more I knit the more I’m disappointed in how the dark colour obscures the pattern detail, and there’s a lot of detail in these socks! More than once I’ve been tempted to frog and restart them in another colour, but the fact that I have no idea what other colour I’d like to see this in, and that it’s taken me a month to get this far stops me every time. I’m hoping that they’ll improve after blocking and wearing them…

There hasn’t been a whole lot of progress on the self patterning socks either. I knit the heel and a couple of inches past it sometime last week, and I’ve only managed a couple of rows here and there since then.

There’s a rather strange ridge on one side of the toe of these, which I think was caused by my provisional cast on being much too loose. These were cast on for cinema knitting, and I didn’t notice the ridge until enjoying a coffee about half an hour before the film (The Descendants) by which time I was in no mood to frog and restart, so I forged on thinking that it might come out after a bit of blocking.

I did a little bit of a test block when I got home and the ridge doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere, but I love seeing how much of a difference blocking can make. The stitches on the foot of the sock were really quite uneven looking because I was using frogged yarn that was still all kinked up, and you can really see how the stitches have smoothed out after a quick block. The sock that I’d frogged only got as far the heel, so the post heel stitches on this sock are nice and smooth again, but I didn’t think that such a small detail could make such a big difference! I have absolutely no intention of frogging this sock again, so I’ll just have chalk it up as a character ridge and hope that a multitude of wears, washes and blocks will even it out over time.

a little bit more

I haven’t only been busy with silk, I’ve also been having a whale of a time playing around with dyeing wool.

I’ve been thinking of resurrecting my little etsy shop. I’ve been dabbling with etsy on and off since 2006 or 2007, and I had a little go at selling handdyed yarn a couple of years ago but was never entirely happy with the colours I was producing. I think I’ve learned a lot about dyeing since my last effort, and I enjoy the dyeing process so much that I don’t think I’m ever going to get a chance to knit up everything that I dye. Some of it might as well go to a good home!

  

Straight out of the dye pot on the left, reskeined on the right. I’m not sure how repeatable this colourway is as I was just experimenting, but I think I remembered what I used so I’ll have to try and recreate it sometime.

This skein is a glorious 2ply British Blue Faced Leicester in a fingering weight. BFL is hands down one of my favourite fibres. It’s so delightfully soft and has the most beautiful silk like sheen. I was a little bit unsure of ordering this 2ply base yarn, but I’ve completely fallen in love with it. It’s wonderfully poufy and lustrous, and I’m not sure how hardwearing 2ply socks would be, this yarn would certainly make a lovely shawl.

I also dyed a wonderful tonal grey which I love and which is definitely repeatable, or as repeatable as handdyed yarn can be.

There’s more, but I think I’ll stop there. This post is far too pic heavy as it is!