Star Trek Scarf

As I've mentioned before, I've been thinking about adding a line of knitted items to my store. I've been stuck on what to make because of restrictions on selling items made from published patterns. While I've been knitting for 5 years, I've relied on patterns for almost everything I've made. My knitting fever tends to go in waves, so I haven't gotten around to successfully making anything other than scarves until recently. I don't know many different stitch patterns. So making my own pattern seems a little daunting.
On top of that, I don't have spare fundage right now, and need to pull from my stash, which I'm perfectly okay with. I just couldn't figure out exactly what I wanted to make from the excessive amount of yarn in my stash to come up with something from my brain.
Then I realized, since Christmas I've been slowly working on a Star Trek scarf for my best friend. The pattern is completely my own other than a chart I found online for the TNG insignia. It occurred to me, surly Mike can't be the only one who is dorky enough to want a Star Trek scarf.
Once I finish this one, I'll be posting a listing for it on Etsy. The only reason it has taken me so long to finish this one is because I got so burnt out on Christmas knitting that I needed a break, and I knew I had until the end of March, when he comes to visit, to finish it. That and I started dying again and opened up my shop. Plus, it uses 3 & 4 balls of yarn for 2/3 of each side, so it doesn't travel well. In reality, I think it's really a week long project tops.
My plan is to offer it in 3 color choices- Red & Black with a gold insignia, Blue & Black with a gold insignia, and Yellow & Black with a black or grey insignia.
The one I'm knitting is in red, which is the uniform color for command in TNG. I'm thinking I may revamp it to do a TOS version as well and maybe a 2009 movie version. Of course, the insinias for the movie are a little more complicated, but they're pretty sweet.
I'm excited about this new prospect and I hope people will actually like it. While I can't really use any of my dyed yarns for this, I think it will defiantly get me more exposure and hopefully help find some great homes for my yarns. :-)
Hopefully I'll be done with Mike's scarf by this weekend, so keep an eye out for pictures and a link to the listing.
Off to watch some more Dexter and continue knitting!

Narissa

This yarn perplexes me. I finally got around to knitting up the sample for it today and apparently it has changed in the 6 weeks since I reskeined it and did my original gauging. It went from 13 wraps per inch to 16 wraps per inch, which is what the other Less Thank DK (fingering) yarns are.
I should explain why it was different in the first place. Narissa soaked up A LOT of excess dye. So much so, that I was able create Zelda Pink from the run off into the steaming water. Anyway, I guess I had to wash it out a lot more than I did with the 4 Less Than DK yarns that I had dyed before it because it felted up pretty badly. Actually, it felted so bad that I wasn't sure it would be salvageable.
Turns out I just got a little paranoid about it and the yarn came apart pretty easily. It broke twice and has 2 knots, but this doesn't break the flow of the colors.
Since it felted, I assume that it shrunk a little and don't want to list it as the full 220 yards. I listed it as 210 just to be safe.

Okay, so that explains the physical part of the yarn. Now I'll talk about the colors.

One night shortly after deciding that I would sell my hand dyed yarns on etsy, I was working on finishing up a Christmas present while watching Enchanted. I pulled several color inspirations from that movie, but one of the first was the coloring of Narissa. Originally, I was just going to take the colors of her animated outfit, but then I saw Susan Sarandon in the real life costume and knew I had to attempt it. I had only ordered the cold and warm primary colors and black for this first batch of yarn, so I had to mix the green and purple. (On a related note, mixing your own purple is a pain, I recommend just ordering it). Anyway, the purple turned out pretty dark, almost black, but it works really well to give the same feel as the costume.

Wow, that was a lot of stuff for this yarn. Here's some pretty pictures.

Simba

Okay, as I promised, here's some stuff on Simba. Sorry that it's late.

I've been thinking about doing a Lion King themed yarn for awhile, it was just a matter of rewatching the movie to really get an idea for colors. It wasn't until they started singing "I Just Can't Wait to be King" that inspiration really hit. I got a couple of ideas for color schemes, but the one that stuck with me the most was a color combo in a background plate used when Simba and Nala are on the backs of the ostriches. I snapped a picture of it so that I could better remember the colors. Granted, pictures of something on TV don't really show the true coloring, but it did help. After it was dyed, the colors really reminded me of Simba.

Of course, it also makes me think of Gobstoppers candy and my 14 year old brother thought it was Harry Potter. What does it make you think of?

Here's the inspiration pic followed by the yarn.





Well, I've been putting off finishing up my knitted samples. I'm going to work on getting 1 or 2 done before I babysit tonight. Still hoping that this weekend will generate my first sale.

Vancouver 2010

Brand New Yarn!
Vancouver 2010 is based on the colors used for...well every thing in the Olympic venues and such. Bright blues and greens on my Merino Tweed. I think it fits the tweed yarn very well. This is the first time I've used green dye instead of mixing a green. Technically I made 2 different greens, but the yellow didn't seem to effect the green much. So it really looks like a lot of one color green unless it is fading into the blues, but I still like it. Should make a great bright and happy handmade item!

ENJOY!

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.

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

Mosby and knitting

Starting to feel a little better. I just listed Mosby, which is based on Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother. I LOVE LOVE LOVE these colors. Brown and Turquoise- great combo! I just started watching the HIMYM seasons on DVD from netflix. I noticed that Ted wears A LOT of blues with brown, but it was the episode where he picks out this awful shirt that he suddenly decides looks good. The only thing that looks good on that shirt is the coloring. I wish I could find a picture of that shirt for comparison...



I've decided to start knitting up samples of each of my yarns to give customers a better idea of how yarns will look. Hoping it will help with sales.
Also, I'm waiting for yarn to come in from my supplier, but once I can order, I will have some more.

New Day, New colors

So after I got home last night, I started work on more yarn to get into my shop and out into the world. I ended up dying not 2, not 3, but 4 new yarns for purchase! All are on the BFL Aran yarn, which sadly kills my current supply of it. Needless to say, I will be ordering more of that in the near future. I don't have any pictures right now, partially because I'm babysitting again and partially because they are still a little too damp to re-skein. However, I felt the need to post about them here before putting them up on Etsy. So without further ado, here are my new BFL Aran color ways:

1) Giselle (x2) : I've received multiple complements on the forums over this yarn and it has 4 hearts, so I figured I'd take one last go at recreating the color. 2 attempts later, I finally came up with the right yellow:blue ratio again. Turns out I wrote it down wrong in my notebook... Anyway, I also figured it would not only be a good color way to recreate on the BFL line, but also a good one to try out the whole making multiples thing on. First off, I need to remember to mix more than my standard 1/2 cup of this color when I do it. I usually can get 2 batches out of each 1/2 cup when I'm doing multiple colors, but when using 1 color on a yarn...well, it runs out faster. The 2nd skein matches up pretty well, but it's not exact. Also, I wanted to steam both of them at once, so I let the first one sit while I painted the second one to save some time. The color spread out on the first one while it was sitting so the color ratio isn't the same anymore. Both are pretty and match and would work up well if alternated, but you wouldn't be able to work one skein and then the other. However, now I know the ratio so I can recreate the color and I've learned some other important lessons on that one. I'll put up some pics once I get home with comparisons of the 2.

2) The Emerald City : Remember the 2 batches it took to recreate the correct ratio? Well, I didn't want to be wasteful, so I put them to good use. From my experience with the 'How Do You Know' color way, I knew that these 2 dyes would be more emerald green than robin's egg blue. It also helped that I was listening to Wicked while I was dying the yarn. So I mixed up a 3rd shade of the green color to give it some nice range and voila!
It is inspired by one of my childhood favorites, The Wizard of Oz, and probably one of the most fantastic musicals I've ever seen, Wicked, "The Emerald City" is a wonderful variegated green yarn with some white. Why the white? Because it's all fake. Everything is shades of white and your emerald color glasses make it appear green. (Yes, I also pulled in from the original book).
I'm not sure where to categorize it. It's more inspired by the book/ Wicked, so I may just create a whole new section for Theatre Inspired or book inspired or there just may be a catch all/other section, which will make more sense when I explain the next color way.
This will also be a recreate-able color way. So if people seem to like it, I'll make more of it.

3) Unnamed steam pot pink dye/ooak purple skein : Okay, so here's the story behind this one. When I was steaming the Narissa yarn last weekend, a bunch of color leaked out into the steam pot's water (meaning I had WAY too much dye in the first place). I figured it would just be some nasty purply/brown color so I started to pour it out, but instead it was this really nice berry color. There was a lot of it and it seem that it was pretty well balanced in the dye:water ratio, so I put it in a large container and set it aside to experiment with later. Last night, I figured, what the hell, I have 1 more yarn, I can do 2 to a steaming session, why not make 2 different colors instead of 2 Emerald City skeins and see what comes of it. After all, if it didn't stick or came out really light I could always over dye it. Wanting to add a second color into the mix, I added some water to the VERY dark purple I had mixed for Narissa (I couldn't remember the ratio of red:blue that had made that color anyway) and decided I would do a couple of limited edition, truly one of a kind skeins from those 2 colors.
It turned out REALLY variegated for both colors and really pretty looking. I don't know if I'll be able to recreate the results on another skein because it is so variegated, but it looks really sweet. I'll probably use it to do a bulky tonight or tomorrow and if I have any dye left, I'll use it on my next shipment of yarn. I can't wait to put this one up, it'll definitely be the last one posted, because I'm still working on a name. I'm thinking Disney Princess... but that's not quite the right name. It reminds me of some movie or TV character, but I just can't place it. I was also thinking I'd just have a Wicked line and name it Glinda. Meh, it'll come to me.
I'll post some pictures later for anyone who actually reads this to give me ideas.

Now, to end this VERY long post, here's what I am planning for the remaining 4 Bulky yarns:
Under the Sea (with acid dye this time)
Whatever I name #3
International Superyarn
and 1 undecided color way.

I'm trying to decide if I want to shell out more money for more yarn before I even make my first sale. I have plenty of dye and supplies, so I might as well. More to come on what to expect as far as lines of yarn.

Starting up again

So, I decided not to keep up on this whole blogging thing after my first post because I discovered Ravelry and that fulfilled my need to 'scrapbook' my projects and more. (Seriously, if you are a knitter and you aren't of Ravelry you need to be.) Anyway, I finished my christmas knitting...well, for the most part, I still have my dad's scarf to finish. I was burnt out on knitting and needed something new to fill my jobless life that may actually make me money until my gig in May. So I decided to start dying yarn.

I had been looking for something in the color scheme of Green Day's American Idiot. So I began with an American Idiocy yarn for myself and one for my shop. Then I started just pulling colors from all the movies I had been watching during my Christmas knitfest.

I'm pretty happy with the colors so far. I was disappointed at first that the yarn I ordered was apparently fingering and not DK, like it was advertised, but it's still nice yarn to start on and a good discount for only having to skein every ball first. And really, I was only disappointed because I wanted something a little thicker for the project I had in mind for my American Idiocy yarn.

So, in short, I'm restarting for my customers to give longer stories behind my yarns and an idea of what I have planned. Most of all to get feedback on ideas I may not be sure about.

I'm going back to skeining yarn and watching tv. I'll post some of my planned colorways tomorrow and info about my newest base yarns. Keep a look out for 2 new yarns on my shop within the next few hours.