Hexipuffs

These little guys are my newest yarn crack. Inspired by Tiny Owl Knits Beekeeper Quilt, I fiddled around with my worsted weight yarn scraps till I came up with a serviceable recipe for my own hexipuff.  If you want the real deal, buy Tiny Owl's pattern, it is only $5.50 and I'm sure it is worth every penny!  I might do that someday when I develop the patience to work with sock yarn.  But I looked at the pictures and decided I could figure it out on my own, and so I did.

You have to use DPNs for this, although I suppose you could do it with the Magic Loop method (but I like DPNs better).  These little guys are knit seamlessly in the round, and I don't know how you could do that on a pair of straight needles.

 

• On a size 7 Double Pointed Needle (or one or two sizes smaller than you usually use for your choice yarn) cast on 16 stitches.  I used the long tail cast on, but I think any one would work, and there are probably several different ways to do it. 
• Place those stitches on two dpns.  The first stitch goes on one needle, then the second stitch goes on the second needle, then the third stitch goes on the first needle, and the fourth stitch on the second needle and so on, till you have 8 stitches on each needle.  Alternately, if you have some kind of figure 8 cast on or somesuch that you use for knitting toe-up socks, that would work too.
• Knit around once, putting 4 stitches on each of four needles.  
• You could use a stitch marker to mark the beginning of the round, but the yarn tail from the cast on is the only thing you really need to be able to see.  Once you've worked back around to it, you know you have completed a round!
• On the second round, increase once at the beginning of the first needle (I do m1l and then k4, but you could do kfb or another increase you like).  For the second needle the increase goes at the end (k4, m1r). On the third needle, the increase goes first again, and on the fourth needle, it goes last.
• After every round of increases, knit one round without any increases.
• Repeat this process till there are 8 stitches on each needle. Make sure to do a round of plain knitting after the round where you increase to 8 stitches per needle.
• Start decreasing. ssk, k6 on the first needle, k6, k2tog on the second and so on around.
• Knit one round plain after each decrease round.
• When you get back down to 4 stitches on each needle (the last round you knit should be plain, with no decreases) you are ready to stuff your puff.  I use poly-fill, but you could use yarn scraps or cut up t-shirts or whatever you have lying around, although I cannot recommend using dryer lint, because it comes right out when you wash it the first time.
• Put the stitches from needles 1 and 2 onto one needle, and put the stitches from needles 3 and 4 on another needle.  Now you should have two parallel dpns with your live stitches all ready to finish off.  I use the kitchener stitch to sew up, but you could do a 3 needle bind off if you don't like grafting.  However, I thing the grafted edge looks super sweet and it is a really good way to learn the skill, doing it over and over again on tons of little puffs.

I bet you could make these bigger and they would be swell, just cast on more stitches and keep increasing till the length of one side is the same as the bottom.

I don't have enough puffs to start joining them together, but when I do you'll hear about it.

To Dye For

Last week I spent my Tuesday evening playing with yarn. It had been a grey weekend, and I badly needed some color in my life. I had recently purchased a fat lot of naked Fishermen's Wool from Michaels when it was on sale, and set about to dye up a bunch samples, in preparation for a project I've had brewing in my yarn brain for a while.

This yarn comes in a pretty big ball, 8 ounces worth, or 465 yards. I had read that you could use one packet of Kool Aid to dye one ounce of yarn, so I had to figure out how to measure out 8 hanks from each ball without any kind of yarn meter. Some household measuring and some simple math problems led me to the discovery that if I wrapped the yarn around the leaf of my dining room table 26 times, I would end up with approximately one ounce of yarn! Yay! So then there was a lot of winding and tying into hanks.

I've been collecting Kool Aid now for a while too, sussing out which "flavors" are available at which stores, and buying bunches of it on sale. I think I went through something like 50 packets on Tuesday. But that's OK, because I can always get more! It's not like I have to order it over the internet, or get any kind of mordant. The citric acid in the Kool Aid is all you really need to set the color in wool. Bonus, the whole process is food safe, so when I wanted to do more hanks at one time I just busted out a regular old stainless steel saucepan and went to town, not worried that I would have to relegate it to the craft cabinet as no longer food safe.

There are a ton of great tutorials all over the internet about how to do this on your stovetop. If you understand what happens to yarn to make it felt, you can use that knowledge to avoid it. Basically don't shock your yarn with rapid temperature transitions, and don't agitate it much while it is dyeing. A bit of stirring is ok.
You can tell when it is done because the yarn will exhaust the dyebath. When your water is clear, you are good to go. In all my experimenting, I used up to 5 packets of Kool Aid to one ounce of yarn and had no color left behind in the water.

Each hank was cooled and rinsed and hung to dry in my bathtub. I let them dry overnight with a fan on, and in the morning just twisted them up all nice to protect them from the cats. I made little tags for the blended colors, hopefully I will find some way to match the recipe to the right yarn before my mind disconnects that information. Now, if only I had a ball winder! It took me one night to dye all this yarn, it is going to take me 2 weeks to ball it up so I can knit with it!

Making Stuff

For her birthday Delia got this sweet jewelry model/stand, and since she's in bed I figure it is ok if I use it to display the cool necklaces I made tonight after supper. Way back when we went to the Gem and Mineral show, I spent a silly little bit of fun money on some spectacular beads. Specifically a $15 dollar string of what the bead guy called Spiderweb Agate. It was the only one of it's kind on the table, and I was absolutely smitten. I walked past it about 4 times before I bought it, and also a couple of teardrop agate pendants and another string of rather less exotic beads. So it has been something like 6 weeks since then, and tonight I finally got around to making some necklaces.
Delia was kind enough to loan me her tool kit and some stringing wire and findings (which of course I bought for her with the money I make slaving away in the bread mines, but from her point of view once things leave my hands they are altogether hers. At least she shares with me. :) The one at the top of the post is the Spiderweb Agate, interspersed with some nondescript little black beads from Michaels arts and crafts. They had a ridiculous sale there a couple of weeks ago, and Delia and I had a blast picking out beads and Halloween decorations and random stuff at 50% off.
This agate teardrop came from the Gem and Mineral Show, but all the rest of the beads came from Michaels. You wouldn't think stringing beads would be very difficult, but you would be wrong. I can sit here for three hours at a stretch and knit complicated cable patterns, but this string of beads had me fiddling around at my wit's end. Luckily Keith opened a bottle of Winking Owl Cabernet Sauvignon, and things got considerably easier. Truth be told, I am not much of a wine drinker, but for $2.69 a bottle I can afford to get a little practice in.

It was a hoot to get out of Knit Mode for an evening and play around in another crafty medium. I dug my old beading stuff out of the attic and my daughter was quite impressed, she had NO IDEA that I had any jewelry making experience. I think she will find something to do with the box of gemstone beads that have been sitting around since, oh, she was born! So I give her the iolite and moonstone and she gives me another three uninterrupted hours to work on Pippa's One Year Sweater. I think it will be a good trade.

Cool Color Yarn Dye

This was my second try dyeing yarn with Kool Aid. It came out really pleasing to me.

The yarn started out an oatmeal color, it came from the stash of Bemidji yarn I used before. I mixed up cups of lemon-lime, blue raspberry lemonade, and grape (although the photo shows Blastin' Berry Cherry because it was in a purple package and I am easily confused).

This is me painting the yarn with a turkey baster. Kool Aid will stain your countertops, so do lay down some plastic to protect them.

Here is a shot of the yarn after I wound it into a ball. And after I went to the store and foolishly left it out on the table. When I got home it wasn't on the table anymore, and after a moment of frantic searching I found it chewed, snaggled and partially unwound in a corner under the table. Thanks Rohn!


I fixed it.

Oughta be Knitting, But...

So I signed up to teach this knitting class. I can't lie, after the first session I was a little dispirited. It is one thing to teach your kid how to knit over a period of several years. It is quite another to teach ten (mostly) strangers to knit in two hours (which was supposed to only be one hour). It didn't turn out quite like I hoped. Still, they invited me back the next week to give it another go, and so I have been trying to find a different approach to teaching the class (one that actually helps the students learn how to knit). Friday I go back to try again, keep your fingers crossed for us all! I feel like if I can surmount this first hurdle, I can share all the cool knitting tricks I have picked up over the years.


Yesterday I felt like I needed to do something really creative and spontaneous. Trying to pick apart the mental processes of knitting so I can teach them to other people... it is just kind of hard for me (which is why I am doing all this in the first place, honestly.). I was reworking my lesson plans, my approach to teaching the knit stitch, and every time I wrote something different down the internal critic sliced at me. A step back, a different perspective, a diversion, was just what I needed, and so I decided to dye some yarn.

I have been reading about dyeing yarn for a year or more. It is one of the knitting peripherals I have been avoiding on purpose. Like my Dad, I have a tendency to get really into something and then about halfway to mastery, get seduced by something else. I didn't want to have to make an investment in dyes and tanks and dedicated equipment, and moreover I didn't want anything to take me away from the knitting I am working on - sweaters for Keith and Delia, gifts for loved ones, my fruit and veggie projects... Oh well, too late now!

It took about an hour, not including the trip to Krogers for my dye. Hello Kool-Aide! I followed, more or less, this tutorial from Knitty, all the while thinking about the hand dyed skeins I have met and loved. The flavors I used on this hank were Black Cherry, Lemon and Orange. I already have at least two more colorways floating around in my brain, and with Kool-Aide coming in at about twenty cents a packet, I think I can even pull it off before my next paycheck comes in!

The yarn I dyed was Homespun Yarn from Bemidji Woolen Mills in Bemidji Minnesota, purchased several years ago from the Needlecraft Barn in Morgantown. It weighed in at almost 3 oz. AND IT STILL SMELLS LIKE FRUIT! Rohn actually ate about 4 inches out of the top of the ball after the photo shoot before I could stop him. He loves yarn as much as I do, but in a slightly different way.

Have Felt, Will Decorate

Delia and I decided this year to forgo the crepe paper streamers and instead make some decorations for her birthday that could be reused. These banners are the result of our first night's work. The big one is made from triangles we measured and cut out of a length of felt. Each is 5 inches wide at the top. They are machine stitched along with a piece of black ric-rac. Super simple, mega cute. I wanted to cut the felt triangles with pinking shears so they would have zig-zaggy edges to kind of echo the ric-rac, but alas, my Grandma's pinkers are plenty old and not as sharp as they used to be (much like me). They wouldn't cut the felt, so the edges of these pennants are just straight.
These little guys are made from scraps I had left over. They came out pretty awesome, for being all kinds of random. I did sort the triangles generally by size, and then stacked them so the littlest ones would be closest to the ends. Just overlap the triangles a little bit as you feed them through the machine and they come out strung together. I made little loop hangers for the ends out of pieces of felt, and stitched them onto the end triangles.
You could make the little doorway garlands from the notebook paper sized pieces of felt you can get at the craft store. I bought a little more than 2 yards of felt from JoAnns when it was on sale. About 6 dollars invested in it, tonight we used up less than 1/4 of my felt stash.

I am jazzed by how easy this little project was, once I brought my sewing machine down from the attic and got it all set up on the dining room table. Now that it is ready to go, I might have to round up some more colors of felt and make decorations for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Blogs I Read

Here it is, the first Snow Day of the New Year! What am I doing with my delicious free time? Surfing the Web, of course. As I was discussing with some ladyfriends around the Disco Ball on New Year's Eve, I read blogs like my sister watches TV shows. For Entertainment. So without further ado, here is my list of blogs I read in 2009.

Dooce Heather Armstrong is My Favorite Blogger Ever. She is Crazy, has a cute Husband, and some cute Daughters, and a mouth like a sailor, and she does not appear to give a rat's ass whether you like her or not. Which is why I like her.

mimismartypants This mimi woman remains pretty much anonymous in the bloggy world, and she has no advertisers on her site. Just funny observations about life. She also has an hilarious kid.

SouleMama Amanda Blake Soule blogs about life in New England, making things, writing, and raising four kids. She is not acerbic, she is not even particularly funny, but she seems to love life in the world and I really need a little bit of that every once in a while. She takes lovely pictures. When I die and get reborn on a farm in Maine with a husband who wants to have four kids, I will be ready, because I have read this blog.

TECHknitting I include this blog for any knitters out there, because it is my favorite blog on the subject. I have learned so many things from this woman's careful instructions, I feel like I owe her money! And the best thing is, this one time I made a hat from one of her patterns and put it up on Ravelry (which is not a blog but like Facebook for knitters) and she totally wrote me a nice note about it and it made my day.

Broadsheet is the feminist blog on Salon.com. It always provides me with something to get all het up over, or laugh at, or roll my eyes about. There are some sharp, funny women writing for this blog.

If you have a favorite blog, post it in the comments and I will check it out!

This is my first attempt at mask making. My friend John gave me a bag of leather scraps he'd saved from when he was working at the upholstry shop. I looked up a few webpages about making leather masks, and this little gem was born. It was so gratifying to just spend a couple of hours working on something purely for fun. It is too small for my face, but it fits Delia. She didn't want me to put the photo on the internet, but I finally talked her into it.