Möbius Magic

A bunch of the moms at Sparky's school have started a knitting group and quite delightfully they chose to meet at the coffee house half a block from my house. A dream come true! Last week someone brought a copy of A Treasury of Magical Knitting by Cat Bordhi. In this book and its sequel, she give directions for knitting a möbius strip. She uses this unusual shape in scarves, hats, and some really nice felted bowls.

So I had to try it. For this first attempt I dug around for some yarn I didn't care about, and found some really fat, scratchy green wool. Rug yarn maybe? I didn't follow one of her patterns, just did the amazing and original möbius cast-on. I knit a few (double) rounds, alternating 2 rows of knit and 2 rows of purl. Cat Bordhi recommends a 45" circular needle. I used the longest one in my stash (30") and it was awkward. Don't even think about using anything shorter.

It worked! What you want to notice in this picture is how the circular needle is coiled into two loops, rather than the regular circle. It's definitely one of those knitting projects in which you just have to have faith and follow directions, abandoning any need to make sense of what you're doing.

The basic deal is to use a very long circular needle, cast on stitches, knit once around, then knit around again picking up the other side of those same cast-on stitches. (You do a stranded cast-on, which just becomes another row of knitting.) That maneuver coils the cable of the needle into two loops. You place a marker to show the beginning of a round, but on each round you do two loops. You sort of say "Hi!" to your marker after the first loop, as it's at the bottom edge of your knitting. But then it shows up again on your needles after finishing the second loop (or one full round).

Confused? I did my best to explain that clearly, but it's a non-trivial problem, as we say in computer geek speak.

Your cast on becomes the "spine" of the piece, and on each full round you add a row on either side of that spine. That shows up well when you do a round in a contrasting color. You can see it in my cast-off. I used the suggested I-cord cast-off, in gray yarn.

Both sides of the cast-on will show, so the I-cord is a nice choice since it's the same back & front.

This looks like it might make a nice neck-wrap, but no one wants this scratchy stuff against their skin. I think I'll try one of the felted bowls. I'll pick up stitches from the I-cord (in green), going around only one loop. Then I'll cut across, picking up stitches through the green bit, then along the I-cord and back to my first picked up stitches. This will leave me with a twisted brim for my bowl. I'll knit round and round, decreasing to nothing at the bottom, and then felt it. Stay tuned!

Double Sticky, at last!

I finally found it! I have looked repeatedly for something like a sheet of sticker stock that has no paper at all--a sheet of double-sticky adhesive sandwiched between backing which could be used to make stickers of cool stuff. At the scrapbooking store my question was met with puzzled looks. At a local discount store (known for European foods past their sell-by date) there is a rack of cheapo office supplies, and there it was! Two sheets for 99¢! I bought four packages. But it doesn't have a brand, as if some company just repackaged it.

I played around for a few minutes decorating little gift cards with fabric stickers, and here are the results.

Thump, Thump, Thump

I'm setting up for another bout of dyeing fabric, so today I cut some 30" lengths off of a bolt of muslin I got a few weeks ago. It was a real thrill be the one who goes thump, thump, thump unrolling the bolt like the ladies at the fabric store.

Birthday Thank You Photo

For a few years now I've been including a photo collage like this in Sparky's birthday thank you notes. It requires asking each kid to smile for me, but I find that not so hard when they're holding cupcakes. I crop a square out of each picture and size it to a fixed number of pixels, then collage them all together. It's all done with Photoshop Elements, which came free with our scanner. I have the photo place print it out as a 4x6.

For the second time we did decorate-your-own cupcakes. The kids basically pave their cupcakes with assorted candies. They love it and it requires no fancy culinary creations on my part. Not that I mind creating confections, but I tend to get carried away. For instance...

The Volcano Cake of 2006

It wasn't actually that challenging, since the frosting could be (should be) messy.

The Dumptruck Cake of 2005 was really easy, just a mush of chocolate cake (dirt), chocolate pudding (mud), and crunched up Oreos (gravel). The tricky bit was when I realized I hadn't bought a dump truck yet and it was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. But the gods were smiling and I found this cheap beach-toy truck.


My sister sent the construction cone candles, and we made a ramp so we could drive the cake onto the table.

General Grievous

Somewhat overdue, here is this year's Halloween project. For the third year in a row, Sparky kept to the Star Wars theme. This time it's the arch-villain cyborg, General Grievous. As I put in more and more hours on this, I had to ask myself if I was doing it for him to enjoy, or for me to show off. But he got a lot of pleasure from the abundant attention the costume won him. Young adult males seemed the most often impressed. He even got his picture in the newspaper! During the downtown merchants' trick-or-treating, the owner of the hobby shop said he was so cool that he got TWO pieces of candy, which thrilled him.

I was inspired by a great instructable that I found just after Halloween last year. (Good thing, I wasn't up for a costume project last year.) That one is all done with foam core attached to black clothing, and includes a PVC backpack thing from which the two extra arms pop out! Truly amazing. I copied the foam core idea, but part way through I thought of craft foam. That was definitely the tool for the job for anything but the epaulets and chest plates.

I focused my attention on the helmet. Sparky was thrilled to have a full helmet rather than a simple mask over his face. I was pleased that the design gave him so much peripheral vision. The idea of using brads to attach it all came to me late, and they worked great. They look very cyborg. There is also a lot of white drafting tape and a few straight pins holding it all together.

On the body, the brads worked best when I forced them through the sweatshirt fabric rather than cutting a tiny slit. They do need to be well covered on the inside of the garment, so they don't unfold or poke. The best covering was a pad cut from craft foam held on with packing tape.

The cape was a real stroke of luck. We went to the fabric store, hoping to find gray for the outside of the cape and bright red for the inside. On the remnant counter we found slinky fabric with metallic red on one side and dark gray on the other! As soon as the nice lady cut it, I tied it around Sparky's shoulders and he wore it around the store. It was a lot of fun seeing all the other people buying costume fabric. Three college-age girls, each buying a different color of pastel netting. A couple of very manly man guys buying brown fake fur (caveman costume?).

And I couldn't believe that I found a black sweatshirt at the consignment store four days before Halloween. For $3 I also got a used Clone Commander costume as back up if I ran out of energy.



After it was all done and I'd recovered, I did spend some time making sketches and checking that I had a pattern for each piece. I don't plan to recreate it, but you never know. I'd like to make an instructable for this, for the sake of all the other Star Wars parents out there, but I need to figure out a sensible way to get my pattern pieces on the web.

Getting Loopy

My Dangerous Sister sent me a little sample of this cast-on, with some cryptic directions. I think I've got the basic idea now, but need to work on doing it neatly. Here's the basic idea:

cast on three stitches using a half-hitch
chain three off the last stitch with a crochet hook
set that aside, making a long loop so it won't unravel, and leaving the yarn under and behind the needles
do the same thing with color number two
pick up color number one, bring it under and up, and put the long loop on the needle
just keep doing this, alternating colors

It has a matching cast-off as well. My big question is how elastic it is, but that requires a larger sample. Would it work for the cuff of socks? I have some socks in progress, so I'll keep testing.

Later...

Here's the sock in question, that I've been knitting for Dr. Mavis. (Well, one of two for Dr. Mavis.) It's my excuse to play with the Regia self-striping sock yarn. It's very fun. Making something so colorful without managing loose ends is quite delightful. I'd like to dye my own, but recently realized that it would require reeeeeeeally large skeins. I'll have to find out how to manage them.

To knit the sock, I started from the cuff end, as usual, but the purl rows that I added for a little extra pizazz just looked more and more dorky as I worked toward the toe. So I ripped out the first few inches, picked up the stitches and knit back toward the cuff. Unfortunately, that means I need to replace a cast-on with a cast-off, and the latter is rarely as elastic as the former.

So I tried the loopy cast off, hoping that all those little loops would make it flexible.


They did not.

It was super constricting, so I'm going to rip it out and try a better cast-on. But I had to get this picture first, just for the record. Dangerous Sister's instructions are very scribbled, and I only just noticed that the person she learned it from (on TV) got it from a pair of Turkish socks.

[Post Script: In the end I did a grafted cast-off for single rib, following directions by Denise Powell that I found here. To make it stretchy enough I left the stitches really loose. It looks a little untidy, or lacy depending on your point of view.]

While we're on knitting...


I went exploring in the attic, amid the gritty puffs of paper insulation, and found several batches of useful yarn. I found enough white, worsted-weight yarn for a sweater, perfect for space-dying. I also found this UFO hat, and Sparky says he'd like to wear it! That's a first. The yarn is mohair that my Dangerous Sister brought back from Kenya, of all places. I'll keep going for a beret shape, and find something absolutely itch-free for the brim.

Kanzashi

When I saw Kanazashi in Bloom on I forget whose blog, I knew I was in trouble. I really have a thing for round things, and for radial symmetry. The Yo-Yo Obsession of 2008 made that abundantly clear. The Martha Stewart ribbon rosettes came next. But this is better. Much better. And what a great use for little bits of dyed or otherwise irresistible fabric!

Diane Gilleland's directions are clear, complete, and well illustrated. Her example projects didn't really do it for me, but there's a wide range which gave me some good ideas. I did a little surfing and the clearest tutorial I found was a set of pictures by SpanglySpangle on Flickr and her quick little video (no voiceover). Her craft set has lots of lovely examples. I found an instructable for the pointed petal, but the pictures are a little small. There are a lot of super-amazing Japanese examples here. The individual pictures are big and beautiful and detailed, but I found them a little slow to load.

These are my very first efforts. Kanzashi are made from folded squares of fabric, and are remarkably easy (though I hesitate to say so, in case some of you find them hard). Looking at the book and my own creations, my favorites are the ones with lots of petals. They're like potato chips: I'll just make one more.


Here's a really large one, 6" squares maybe?, using a flower-shaped yo-yo for the center. It's a pointed petal, possibly with an extra fold.


This one is tiny, from 2" squares.

It's sometimes hard to decide which side should be up. Here I used the pleated petal, and for the rear view I squished it into a spiral.


Remarkably, I found a justification for all this. We are giving wreaths to the many grandparents this year, and I hit on the idea of adding giant red kanzashi in place of bows. This is made from 8" squares, folded in a modified pleated petal. I anchored the folds with a few hidden stitches, then folded up the sides one more time. I did most of them watching The Thomas Crown Affair for the umpteenth time, while taking a break from Thanksgiving pie-making, (It was the Pierce Brosnan remake, but some day I'll have to watch the Steve McQueen original.)

That's an extra-large (60 mm) yo-yo in the center. On the others I used a brass button for the center, which looked even better. (Well, really a brass-colored plastic button, but that is better anyway for outdoor use.)

It ended up very suggestive of a poinsettia.



I ran some wire through safety pins on the back, and wired the whole thing to the wreath. I'm hoping the bow can be removed and reused. And get this, Mr. Tea's mom drove up for Thanksgiving, so she could take her own home with her, and deliver two others on the way!

96 Purples

I like to do tests. I like to find good colors. I like to repeat a good color.

But this time, I got a little carried away.


I wanted to find a good purple, so that means trying different proportions of red to blue. And trying the three different blues, and both reds. And I might as well try super-low immersion and regular low immersion, right? And all that dye left in the cups, what if I try a second round? And the two reds are pretty different, so maybe try a combination of the two?

Well 5 different proportions x 3 blues x 2 reds...that's 30 colors. Dye three versions of each and that's 90. And throw in two more colors using a mixed red and do three versions...96 purples!

Here they are:


I can't say I really found my perfect purple, but I discovered some interesting things.

My biggest surprise was seeing what happens the second time I use the same dye bath. Blues stick around much better than reds, and there is a tan that remains in the Fire Red (which is a mixed color). I really like those tans, and the aquas I got from Fire Red & blue. Neutrals being so hard to get, I might try this on purpose some time. Clearly I need to test a second round of each color alone

I was also surprised that the reds are as beefy as they are. I tilted my proportions to include more red, because I expected the blue to overwhelm it. But take a look at the Fuchsia & Turquoise combo. Even with twice as much blue as red, it's a pretty reddish purple. It's also clear that reds just don't travel like blues and yellow. So in super-low immersion, the blue got good penetration but a lot of red must have stayed in the water. (My super-low immersion is 4"x6" of fabric in a 1-ounce container.)

I expected the Fire Red combos to be muddy, but hoped they might be interestingly subtle. They're just muddy. But the combo of Fire Red & Fuchsia shows promise.


That's even amounts of Fuchsia & Fire Red. The proportion of total red to Turquoise is 2:1 (above) and 1:2 (below). Very low immersion on the left, regular in the center, second run on the right. I rather like that pale aqua lower right, and each of the low immersion samples.

By the way, that stripe of pale blue on the lower left sample was the result of a failed experiment. I label my samples in Sharpie along their top edge. If the fabric is dyed a dark color the label can be hard to read. So my clever idea was to put gel glue resist over the label. But being water soluble (duh) the resist rinses away in all but the very low immersion versions.

Of course I did some plain old playing around with the remaining dye. Here's fabric crammed in a container which I squirted with lots of colors. The result is the one on the left.


For no good reason, during the main dyeing I added dry fabric to the cups and let them stand there a few minutes before submerging them. I think I just liked the look of them all standing up like soldiers.


So the dye started wicking up the fabric, different colors moving at different rates.


It created a little streaking, that you can see here. Might be worth doing deliberately some time.

Woolly Woolly

When my husband's brother & family moved to Seattle, I felt a responsibility to show them the sites, and took my sister-in-law to the Northwest's mecca of fiber, The Weaving Works in Seattle's U District. I haven't darkened their door in many years, but am so happy they are there.

I like to spin, but preparing fiber holds no thrill. I find raw wool rather icky. At the Weaving Works, I love the balls and balls of combed top, all clean and free of sticky lanolin, ready to slip right through my fingers into yarn. (I'm like that with bread too: I don't get off on the whole kneading thing, but I love risen dough.)

On this visit I made a new discovery: super-wash wool is available ready to spin! A washable handspun sweater? Could that be possible? It comes only in white, so I'd have to dye it…am I up for that? Since the last move (a decade ago) and having a kiddo, I haven't been near the spinning wheel. But among the many challenges of parenting is to bring back what got shelved during the diaper years.

At home, I dragged out my trusty old Ashford wheel, happy to find was that it was in pretty good shape. I got a quick tune-up from the wonderfully knowledgeable people at Northwest Handspun Yarns here in Bellingham. Another fine surprise was that my old fiber was in good shape, unmolested by moths and other forces of destruction. I spun my test bit of super-wash, and this and that from the old box. It felt nice to spin again, and to knit the new yarn into a hat.


My Portland sister-in-law makes marvelous sculptures from washed fleece and recycled sweaters and would like more colors, so I'd already been considering dyeing wool for her. After getting all my fiber reactive dyes & supplies, I wasn't wild about investing in a full set of acid dyes (dye for wool). Jacquard sells itty-bitty jars of dye, which are pricey per ounce, or big jars which are just plain pricey. Between craigslist and follow-up emails I found Nina at Rockport Rogue Island Farm (Rockportsheep@copper.net) who would sell me 1-ounce jars of dye, for $4/ounce. Perfect!

I was tired and grumpy the day the dye arrived. Next day was much the same, but maybe some art therapy would help? It did!

Lacking a quantity of the superwash top, I tried out what fiber I had, including some smooth butterscotch-colored top. Could I dye it without felting it into unspinnability?

The short answer is…YES!

My first step was to look for my old friend Hands-on Dyeing by Betsy Blumenthal and Kathy Kreider. It was nowhere to be found! I think I must have used the library's copy 18 years ago. Well thank you Bellingham Public Library, because they still have it. (I did find my copy of Hands-on Spinning by Lee Raven. It's of the same vintage, same series, and also outstanding.)

For my first dye run, I used an assortment of wool: some plain washed wool, some locks, some yarn, and some combed top. I soaked 50g of fiber in 400ml water, 100ml vinegar, and 2T salt. More solution would have been better. I was impatient, and this is only a test, so I didn't really wet it out for long enough.

I set up my old steamer with crumpled paper in the bottom of the steamer insert. That might not be necessary, but the holes in the pot look a little rusty.


I pasted up some Marine Blue, Sky Blue, Black, and Pink (Jacquard's color names), using a very approximate 1/8 teaspoon of dye and 25 ml of warm water. I lay the drained fiber on a rack and squirted dye solution from syringes. I mixed colors a bit, diluted now and then, and generally tried to get assorted shades of blue. On the fluffs of downy wool, the dye went on in litle spots, leaving lots of white. Is that the nature of that wool, or was it not really wet? It was easy to saturate the top.


I was impatient with the steaming too. I had to get Sparky to his art class, so I just turned off the burner after 35 minutes and let it sit while I was gone. Once I got home and rinsed the fiber, I was pleased that so very, very little dye rinsed off. Compared to the fiber-reactive dye, this stuff was stuck on with superglue. [Well not really. See below.]

Waiting for it to dry was so hard! I really wanted to know if the top would remain spinnable. I kept kind of poking and turning it, and trying to tell myself that this wasn't a smart thing to do with wet wool. Before bed I set it near a heater, protected from the cats.



Once dry, the top felt pretty good. I really really really wanted to spin it! Unfortunately, one of Sparky's friends recently got too friendly with the spinning wheel and snapped the rubber connector between the treadle and the footman. I called NW Handspun, who can get the part but don't have it in stock.

I placated myself by knitting up the dyed yarn, but that only whetted my desire. So I examined the situation and did a very funky temporary fix on the wheel. I've got a pin stuck into the dangling rubber and many wraps of thread back and forth between the rubber & pin and the screw on the treadle bar. It worked!


The top spun BEAUTIFULLY. It was just as smooth and fluffy as the un-dyed stuff. One thing I noticed is that the color on the top gets more evened out after that gentle pulling one does to fluff the fiber before spinning. Over all, the spun yarn has more consistent color than I was going for, but now I have a benchmark. The yarn looks like blue jeans: just that hue, and varying from dark to faded.

My goal is yarn which has color variation, but doesn't knit up stripey. Narrow diagonal stripes of color on the top might work. I like 3-ply yarn, which homogenizes the color as well.

(Note to me: a yard of that top is about 9g, from which I got 8 yards of 3-ply, approximately worsted weight.)

And here is the yarn all knit up. On the left, dyed yarn, and on the right yarn spun from dyed top.


And about that dye sticking like superglue...I was fooled. Once that dyed top became a knitted sample, look how it ran!


Maybe the dye didn't run before because there wasn't much agitation? I dunno. In the second and third rinses the water was clear. The sample made from dyed yarn didn't run like this.

P.S. I was delayed in posting this because random words started typing themselves on the screen, such as That will When Dwight and what was The are all that only neo. What is this? Some strange virus? Who is Dwight? We ran the full 3-hour virus scan, and all was well. We then noticed a leetle teeny window on the screen, and realized that somehow speech recognition had gotten switched on!

Weighted Color Proportions

When I give a color recipe THE PROPORTIONS ALWAYS REFER TO LIQUID DYE. And my liquid dyes contain different concentrations of powdered dye depending on the color group. By changing the concentrations by color group, I'm less likely to need to use large measures for one color and tiny measures for another when I combine liquid dyes.

Reds are strong; yellows are weak; and it takes a lot of black to make black. I use less dye for the reds and more for the yellows & blacks. The blues are my standard. I add 1 teaspoon red or 2 teaspoons blue or 3 teaspoons yellow (or black) powdered dye to 320 ml (about a cup and a half) of urea water (1 cup urea to 1 quart of water). I might make the concentration stronger on certain occasions.

TO TRANSLATE these weighted proportions to actual proportions of powdered dye...

Leave the red amounts alone.
Multiply each blue amount by 2
Multiply each yellow and black amount by 3.

(You may be able to simplify at this point, for instance 3:6:9 is the same as 1:2:3.)

I use the U.S. system for dry measures and large amounts of liquid, and metric for small amounts of liquid. (Mixed up, I know, but it works for me.) I always mix my liquid dyes to a standard concentration (below), then measure out the liquid according to the proportions in the recipe.

	REDS	BLUES	YELLOWS & BLACKS
1/32 teaspoon	10 ml	5 ml	~ 3 ml
1/16 teaspoon	20 ml	10 ml	~ 7 ml
1/8 teaspoon	40 ml	20 ml	13 ml
1/4 teaspoon	80 ml	40 ml	27 ml
1/2 teaspoon	160 ml	80 ml	53 ml
1 teaspoon	320 ml	160 ml	107 ml
2 teaspoon	640 ml	320 ml	213 ml
1 Tablespoon	960 ml	480 ml	320 ml
4 teaspoons	1280 ml	640 ml	426 ml
5 teaspoons	1600 ml	800 ml	535 ml
2 Tablespoons	1920 ml	960 ml	642 ml

For the tiny amounts I use measuring spoons from a gourmet shop labeled pinch, dash, and smidge, which are 1/8, 1/16, and 1/32 teaspoons. Even so, things aren't very accurate in these amounts, which is usually OK for me. If accuracy matters, I paste up more than I need, and measure the liquid accurately.

Before getting started, I work out how much total dye I need for the amount of fabric and depth of shade I'm going for. Let's say I'm dyeing a quarter yard a dark and even purple, requiring 500 ml of liquid dye. For a color recipe of 3 parts Fuchsia to 7 parts Turquoise, that works out to 150 ml of Fuchsia and 350 ml Turquoise. I look on the chart to find the next larger amount of each color. For Fuchsia I'll mix 1/2 teaspoon powder into 160 ml of urea water. For Turquoise, I would mix up 1 and 1/4 teaspoon powder into 360 ml of urea water. I'll measure out the exact amounts and dye my fabric in it.

Oh How Red will Bleed...

So I get really impatient rinsing out dye. The studio is upstairs at the back of the house, and the washer is downstairs, and for such a small amount of fabric it seems silly to run the washer, right? Wrong.

I know that red is generally the most likely color to run, and I know I'm supposed to rinse until the water looks clear enough to drink. But do I have to? Here's some pretty clear rinse water, next to plain water for comparison.

I took the fabric rinsed in that water and set it, damp, on some white fabric. When a friend washed a red & white quilt my sister had made, she laid it out on a patio table to dry. The bits lying flat didn't bleed, but the parts hanging down over the edge did. So I set my stuff vertical, on a board. Will it bleed?



Uhh, yes.


So my lesson has been learned.

As I rinse and rinse fabric by hand, I have wondered what factors are most effective at really rinsing? What matters most? Very hot water? Lots of water? Many changes of water? Letting it soak? Agitation? Enough synthrapol (detergent for dye)?

I don't know the answer, but my current intuition is that agitation is what you want a lot of, and the washer can do that way more better than I can (or have patience for). My new approach is to:

* pull the fabric from the dye
* rinse it in the sink enough that it won't easily bleed against itself or another piece of fabric
* hang it dry not touching something else
* set it aside until I have a reasonable amount of fabric for the smallest washer load, and run it three times (with synthrapol)

And if I have some fabric that's been machine washed already, I might throw it in the washer with another batch on its second round.

When possible I've been ironing the damp fabric right after taking it out of the washer, just because it looks so BEE-OOOTIFUL all steam pressed. It's one of those magical transformations, like blocking a sweater or fulling some handwoven fabric, or pressing a quilt block.