Final SP 7 present!
And then, because my SP was amazing and wonderful, she sent me a birthday present too! And my birthday wasn’t even during SP, it was two days after it ended.

Art Yarns Supermerino! So luxurious and soft and beautifully coloured. I need to think of something really great to make with it.

And now, the report on my Kool Aid dying experience.

Wound out long skeins around two chairs (the length I needed ended up being exactly the depth of this apartment!), after doing my calculations. I wanted 7 rows orange, 2 rows pink, 3 rows orange, 2 rows pink, repeating. Did my swatch, unravelled it, did the math, re-did the math, and had my numbers: a hank almost 10 meters long, which means my apartment is 5. I had to redo the math because I did all the calculations at work, in the conference I was helping with. I measured my swatch against a piece of paper, then multiplied by 11. Two hours later I realised I’d measured it against the 8 1/2″ side of the paper.
The pink was 2 packets, and the orange 4, because I wanted super-orange and pale pink. Filled up my pasta sauce jars, and made my first big mistake. I set them to warm without the yarn in. By the time I put the yarn in, the water was quite hot. This made the colour take up very quickly, which is fine usually. But not when you put too much water in the orange jar, so the yarn doesn’t fit. I poured some orange off into a glass, and made huge mistake #2: pouring it down the sink. I still say it’s not my fault, there were no other clean glasses, because my roommates insist on putting dishes in the dishwasher when we HAVE NO DISHWASHER POWDER. Poured off another glass, kept that. Stuffed the rest of the yarn in the jar. By this time, the yarn that did get in the jar was VERY orange. The stuff I stuffed in after stayed white or went pale orange. So I’m going to have white stripes too. I’m not too bothered. I used one more package of pink after, to give the white parts at least some colour. I can’t wait to see what it knits up like!
A close up for the colours:

And that was my Project Spectrum project this month.

I had been thinking about getting myself a ball winder as my next crafty purchase, but after seeing those looms earlier today, I can’t decide between pretty yarn cakes or pretty 4×6 mats of yarn….

Categories: ProjectSpectrum_

Well, I’m on Day 8 of 11 straight working days. kinda tired of being here, but that’s ok. I have my internet to distract me every 20 minutes or so. I get stuff done, I just need to look at something else every now and then.

Saw something lovely on my bloglines this morning: handheld looms! It looks like so much fun, and gives you something to do with leftover sock yarn! As I now want to knit socks, and lots of them, I’m going to have ends left over. I can see a crazy patchwork blanket in the works. Also, as I’ve promised myself to only buy superwash sock yarn (hand wash socks? no way!), the blanket would be washable, which is always nice.
I just like how they’re small. Little crafty things are my bag, baby.

In the vein of crafty things…. I dyed yarn a couple nights ago! With Kool-aid! Pictures and more about it tonight, if my internet cooperates. And when I say ‘my’ internet, I mean that which I can scrounge. I’m a bad person. But all I do is check email, blogs, and then stop.

That post will also have my SP7 pics! yay!