Easter Egg Dye… Apply Directly to….Yarn?
Yup. Over the weekend while the girls were dyeing eggs, I saved some of the dye for myself. I had some leftover bits of white Wool-Ease from my brother’s scarf and I really didn’t want that much white yarn. So I tried a little dyeing experiment.
I love how muted the colors are and since the acrylic in it didn’t take the dye, it’s a little bit heathered.
One important thing to note about dyeing Wool-Ease is that the dye didn’t exhaust. Maybe I’m impatient but after 20 minutes in the microwave I decided to rinse it and see what happened. Fortunately, the water ran clear.
Now I have something a lot more interesting to knit with than white!
O-Hisashiburi
Bloosbabybro here. The title is Japanese – it’s a greeting that basically means “long time, no see”. Who was my old friend I hadn’t seen for a while? Well, I’ll get to that in a minute.
Being that I had a three day weekend, I made the six hour drive to spend the weekend with my wife. Saturday morning we went for foot massages (technically, “reflexology”). The idea behind reflexology is that different areas on your feet correspond to different organs. I was a bit skeptical about the reflexolgy side of things, but since I recently started jogging again, I certainly wouldn’t pass up a foot massage. Since a couple areas on my feet were more tense than the rest, the diagnosis was that there was something wrong with my neck and stomach.
So, back to my old friend. I fell asleep on my wife’s couch last night watching TV. She came and woke me up at about 3:00 am. As I stood up and walked to the bed I broke out in a sweat, and my stomach started churning. I laid down on the bed, and when my wife came back into the room all I could say was “gomi bako” (garbage can). My dear wife brought the garbage can right over (and stood there with tissues in hand waiting for me to finish), and well, I’ll spare you the details. It’s been close to five years since I’ve um…ralphed. I could have waited longer.
Am I now a firm believer in reflexology? No. Am I less skeptical? Yes.
A Few Literary Recommendations
Today I listened to a few selections from LibriVox.org. I found all three very enjoyable and interesting and would love to know what you think of them as well.
The first two were from the African-American collection:
“The Feet of Judas” by George Marion McClellan is a short 2-minute poem. Although short, it provides much to think about.
”My Escape from Slavery” by Frederick Douglass is a roughly 40-minute narrative perfectly described by the title. One thing that I found very interesting was his disclosure that when he considered running away, he thought about how God may have placed him in slavery for a purpose and because of that should he run away at all?
You can listen to these here
”Pigs is Pigs by Ellis Parker Butler is just a great, funny, light-hearted story about bureaucracy running out of control. I laughed out loud several times. You can listen to that one here.
Come Back, and I Shall Taunt You Again a Second Time
Well, Mr. Greenjeans obviously had a point to prove. He can taunt me whenever he wants! Lamb’s Pride Worsted really grows when wet, so I had one arm of this sweater that is wide enough to be a wing. The sleeves grew about 2 inches in length and the body was really huge for a small sweater. I checked my gauge and it was close enough that it shouldn’t have caused a problem. This pattern just has ample allowances.
I could have sworn I saw my sweater blowing raspberries at me from its blocking surface. I was so mad, I wanted to throw the thing on a bonfire immediately. After some reflection and more calculations, I decided that the extra small should fit and I pulled out my “holy hand grenade” and frogged the entire thing.
Ahhh, that feels better! Now if it would knit itself into an XS sweater for me!
Take No Prisoners
That’s the point I reached sometime last week with all of my hibernating projects. They must. come. off. the. needles.
It was that thinking that finally got Mr. Green jeans finished and blocking on the basement floor. It’s funny. When I make a big boo-boo I don’t mind ripping back and fixing. That is, once I start ripping back. Before I rip back, my project hibernates for a little while, while I anticipate ripping off the band aid. The anticipation is always worse than actually doing it. I find frogging to be a quite liberating experience, and if I could remember that every time I’m faced with a visit to the frog pond, I’d finish a lot faster. 
I learned something about my knitting as I worked on this sweater. My gauge actually changed as I knitted it. So much, that one sleeve is wider than the other by a WHOLE INCH! As if that weren’t enough, I managed to demonstrate my inability to count and had one more cable repeat on the cuff of one sleeve than the other AFTER I’D COUNTED THE REPEATS ON THE FIRST CUFF SEVERAL TIMES. So it sat in the corner of my living room, taunting me from it’s time-out spot. I finally decided to rip back the extra cable repeat since both sleeves were adequately long and to really stretch out the narrower sleeve while blocking to see if that helped. Next will be elastic thread to tighten up the wider sleeve. You can’t taunt me, Mr. Greenjeans!
Be warned, Hawser Sweater, you’re next!
Gardening is Not for Wimps!
Today I did my first planting in my vegetable garden…in the snow!
Nonetheless, it feels good to have a few things planted!
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36 onions
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9 broccoli
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6 cabbage
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more green onions than I can count
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5 spinach
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70 sweet peas
I’m looking forward to enjoying them!
Shopping in My Stash
That’s what I spent the weekend doing. I went through my stash and matching my yarn up with potential projects and then adding them to my queue on Ravelry. I discovered that I have enough yarn to knit 27 projects. I think perhaps I should stop buying yarn for a little while!
Elegant
I took way too long to finish these, but now they’re done!
Pattern: Elegant Gauntlets by Sally Melville
Yarn: Sleeping Dragon fingering weight in Pool
Needles: size 2
I LOVE these! My hands are cold quite often and so I can wear them around the house and still have my fingers free.
And the yarn was just lovely to work with. It’s self-striping, but very subtly. And it pooled in fun and unpredictable ways as I worked in the increases and decreases. I think I need a pair for every day of the week!
Viladelvia
Hello, it’s Bloosbabybro.
I got to see one of my favorite guitarists live on Friday night: Antoine Dufour. Bloosgrl did a post on him when his new album came out about a month ago. My brother met me at the show and we had a good time. My brother had never heard of Antoine, but I think he was a fan within the first few seconds of the first song.
Antoine opened with “Spiritual Groove” then rolled right into “Development” without stopping. As you can see from the videos, those two songs are a great way to start a set.
Probably one of the funniest moments of the night was when Antoine was giving an introduction for “Song for Stephen”, a song he wrote and dedicated to fellow guitarist Stephen Bennett. For those who don’t know, Antoine is from Quebec, so his first language is French. When introducing the song he pronounced the name “Stefen” and went on to explain that he understands it should be pronounced “Steven”, but that would never make sense to him. “Can someone explain that to me? The other night I was trying to get the people in Viladelvia to explain it to me, but no one could.” Brilliant.
Like I said last week – languages are interesting things.
Hooray for DD #1
Last night DD #1 got a phone call from her teacher. It was to let her know that the history fair judges had agreed to allow a third project to go on to the regional competition from her class and that project was hers. Yay!
