Back!

okay, I'm back for a bit. Busy weekend finishing up a play in KC. I have the knitted sample for Vancouver 2010 done. I just need to reskein it and take pictures. I should have it up some time tomorrow.
I'm in the middle of the knitted sample for Simba. Should be up by Wednesday.
Currently working on the facebook fan page. Looking to bring in more traffic and hopefully some sales.
I have 2 more blank yarns to dye. Hopefully some inspiration will come. I'm thinking of doing a solid Zelda Pink and a solid dark green for Link. That is, if I can recreate Zelda Pink. We'll see...
okay, off to reskein Vancouver 2010 and do a couple of other things! More later!

Knitted items

So, I've been thinking for awhile about this. I have some extra American Idiocy from my personal stash. I think I'll make some punky little boy flip top mittens. I know it's toward the end of the season, but I think they'd make great mittens. I'm trying to think of other items to make and what I'd like to pull from stock to make them. I'll probably pull one of my 2 Giselle yarns for something... I don't know... any ideas?
I've been on my computer all day. I was going to write more, but I'm just not feeling it now that I'm a few sentences in.
Currently working on knitted samples for Vancouver and Simba. I should have them up early next week.

Tweedy fun

Sorry for the lack of updates, I'm on run crew for a play, so I've been pre-occupied over the weekends. I got Sully up and listed last night. I love this yarn, but I'm not happy with the pictures. The purple is showing up as more of a dark blue or a blue violet. I tried changing the lighting a couple of times, but nothing worked. I think it's supposed to warm up next week, so maybe I'll get a chance to try it under natural light without having to worry about the wet and the snow.
Anyway, I've never done a spotted pattern when painting. I thought it would just be fun and wouldn't translate to spotting up when knitted. Guess I was wrong! It really does look like Sully, huh?



I just finished up dying 2 new colors on the "tweed" base yarn. They are completely new color ways and I think people will be pleased. One is based on the color theme for the Vancouver Olympics (blues and greens) and the other is based on a specific scene in The Lion King. If you want to see exactly what scene, it's during "I Just Can't Wait to be King" when Nala and Simba are on the ostriches running away from Zazu. It's yellow, orange, red, and purple.
I'm off to rinse the Lion King yarn out and then I have a show. I'll get pictures up of the new yarns when I have them!

Sully

I just finished dying my first Wool2Dye4 Tweed yarn. I chose a color combination inspired by Sully from Monsters Inc. It's currently steaming, so we'll see how it actually looks, but once the dye started setting in, it started looking really cool. The strand of super wash merino carries the dye further than the 3 strands of regular merino. There are some cool spots were there is a strand of purple twisted in with the blue. I can't wait to see it finished. The yarn was painted like Sully looks- mainly blue with big purple spots through out. So that should add even more texture to the yarn.

I'm trying to decide what else I want to do on this base. I was inspired by a great color combo in The Lion King. I may be doing it, but I want to see what the yarn looks like dried first. If you have any ideas, feel free to comment with them!

How Do You Know?

I just updated and renewed the listing for How Do You Know? Fingering. I wanted to shorten the length of the listing by not going in depth on how the color came about in the description. I am putting it on here for anyone who is curious.

How Do You Know?: The Backstory



How Do You Know? was originally supposed to be a variation on Giselle. Actually, let me go back a little further on this one. ORIGINALLY, I had intended for Giselle to be it's pretty blue color with spots of white and pink. Giselle was only the second color that I made, the first being American Idiocy, and I hadn't played around enough with the dyes to know that I would get a good pink from the Cherry Red. So I nixed the pink part of that design and used more blue than I had originally planned.
ANYWAY, back to How Do You Know?...
I eventually realized how to make pink and decided to try again. There were many happy accidents that made this color. Keep in mind, I intended it to be Giselle with more white and some pink.

The Happy Accidents:

1) The Green Color: This one took me a while to figure out. I wrote down the ratio of blue to yellow for Giselle Blue wrong. It had been a few weeks since I did the dying of Giselle, so when it looked a little darker and green when I applied the dye, I figured that Giselle was that color at first as well. Turns out I was wrong. I didn't realize the ratio problem until after I made the BFL Aran How Do You Know? I will tell the full story of the ratio problem when I give the deeper story on Giselle.

2) The yellow spots: So to add to my color woes with the blue/green dye, some undissolved yellow pigment had settled at the bottom of the pour cup and escaped with the last of the dye. At this point, I had realized that this color may be more green than I wanted, so I did my best to clean it up, but excepted that there would probably be a yellow spot. I avoided the escape of yellow for the BFL Aran version because I thought that maybe the escaping yellow had something to do with the green color. When I turned out to be wrong, then I realized the ratio was off.

3) The light blue spots: I'm not sure what causes this, but I've noticed it with the turquoise dye. It seems to spread more than the yellow, so blue borders the green every time it starts up again.

4) The lavender spots: I'm not sure why the blue escaped and not the yellow, but there are spots where the blue mixed with the pink and created a lavender color. There's no orange (pink and yellow) and no brown (pink and green), so I can only assume that the blue was the only rouge color.

There you go, that is how I ended up with the colors of How Do You Know?
Really, the only parts of the fingering that I seemed to have intended were the pink and the spacing. The rest was all a happy accident. Therefore, it is my Happy Accident Yarn.
Don't get me wrong. I like the coloring and think it is a great addition to my line... it just wasn't an intended addition.


Hope you liked my story. It is one of the more involved tales There are some details behind other colors in an older posts, but I will blog some more about them in the future.

My first treasury!

I am currently being featured in a treasury called Dear Summer by leoandjunie. This is my first ever treasury! I'm excited and I hope it brings in some good traffic to my site!
I will be working all day tomorrow, but I should have some new yarns later in the week. My first planned one is based on Sully from Monsters Inc.

Under the Sea

So just a little story about this. After doing my first couple of yarns in acid dye, I decided to experiment with the hot pour technique using food coloring. I did 2 yarns, Under the Sea (muted) and International Superyarns (the oops edition). If you can't tell from the titles, they didn't turn out how I wanted.
FYI, International Superyarn was pulled after I tried to reskein it from the tiny skeins that American Idiocy and Giselle Fingering are in and it got all tangled. I had to cut it to get it into a ball.
Anyway, I've been going back and forth about over dying Under the Sea (muted) with acid dye since it dried. After finishing up my latest batch of yarn, I decided that it didn't fit in at all and started to hate it. I had plenty of left over purple, pink, orange, green, blue, and teal from the other yarns. These were the original intended colors, so I figured I might as well take advantage of the extra dye.
It over dyed really well. I think that the original dye job would peek through more, but that's not the case!

So here you go, the before and after pictures, enjoy!

Before



After

Awesome Day!

So, I've had a pretty sweet day. But first- Yes, I'm still working on Under the Sea. It's in a ball and being knitted, I just keep getting distracted by the forums and pictures and phone calls and How I Met Your Mother on DVD... but I promise, tomorrow!
Anyway, I've had really great feed back on the forums over the past few days! Thanks to all the other etsians for all their great advice!
One amazing thing to come to me from the thread in the forum is that I just got a "good karma" custom banner from Nikki at R'eal Life Empire! Check it out! Also, I'm really grateful for her doing that for me, the least I could do is provide a link to her shop.



Finally, I got accepted to Handmade Highway today! If you haven't heard of it, it's a super sweet blog that helps get handmade sellers names out there.

Just wanted to share all the good news! I'm off to do some work and eat now!

~Caitlin

PS I am still waiting on the new yarn in case you are wondering.

Treasury and other stuff

First things first. FINALLY got a treasury made! It's all turquoise items! It'll be down on Thursday night, so check it out when you can.

okay...so I got Under the Sea redyed and left it to dry and that's as far as I got. Damn you etsy forums and my need for feedback! However, I have gotten a lot of great feedback today and since I am trading comments for comments, I've discovered some sweet new shops and helped other people out. I'll Under the Sea done soon though...

I just finished knitting up the sample for American Idiocy fingering. Pictures are taken, I just need to pick out the best one and edit the entire listing (it's the only one that hasn't been revamped). I'll be doing that after I finish this post.

I also lowered some prices to see if that helps with sales. I'm getting tired of waiting!!!!

Still waiting on the Tweed yarn from Wool2Dye4. Once it comes I'll be dying more. I had a brain blast thinking I could do a Dwight Shrute themed yarn, but then I realized how awful the Mustard Yellow/Brown color combo would look on a yarn. (If you don't get it, just think on that for a sec.)

So yes, I'm bad. New pictures of Under the Sea will be up tomorrow...

Under the Sea- Deactivated

After much thought, I have decided to deactivate Under the Sea for re-dyeing in brighter colors. It should be back up sometime tomorrow. I feel that it doesn't fit in with the rest of my line and it is so dull that it won't really sell.
Still waiting on my new base yarn. So more to come!

I'm Back

Sorry I've been away. I got called onto a show and have been in tech for the past week. I have ordered some new yarn, and it should be here in the next few days. It's Wool2Dye4 tweed aran wool. I had ordered some new sock yarn as well, but it was out of stock.
Doing some renewing and updating today to try and get some more views. I knitted up How Do You Know Aran and Christian's Inferno. How Do You Know has been updated already.
I'm mulling over what to make with my tweed yarns. I'm thinking a Monster's Inc. Yarn... I'm at a little bit of a road block. Any other suggestions for colors are welcome!
More soon!