Time's up!

I’ve got fifty pairs of cotton socks still curing that will need their triple-wash tomorrow, but other than that…it’s done. Over. Finished. What isn’t already tucked into the big old plastic totes and ready to go, ain’t going with me to Witchapalooza this weekend.

In a word? Whew.

It was a fun challenge and it got me going, but I don’t want to operate like that again pretty much ever. It’s hard to keep your colors fresh and different when you’re doing twenty or fifty of them in a single session!

Also, ohmygah, but is my house ever a wreck. Mind you I’m hardly held up at a paragon of housecleaning virtue in the first place, but I’m thinking a fire hose might be in order for what has resulted from me being busy with dye pots and ironing boards all week.

I knew I was perilously close to burnout when I found myself thinking that I could hardly wait for next week, when I could spend some time doing housework. Help, I think I’ve been abducted by aliens! My thoughts, they are not my own anymore! Who IS this stranger inside my head?!

In addition to the yarn that I haven’t relisted on Etsy yet (I’m holding off on listing all of this stuff until after the show – I don’t want to list things then have to un-list them because I sold them at the show) (or worse, sell the same thing TWICE – no two of these are exactly alike), I’ve got stuff like this.


Silk circles scarf

This one was fun to make. A little fiddly (each circle was, of course, hand-tied before dyeing), but it turned out neat. Which makes all the fiddly worth doing. This is a short scarf, the kind that hugs your shoulders.


Silk wrap

This is probably my favorite of all the things I did this week. My favoritism is partly driven by the fact that it did exactly what I wanted it to do: Big center swirl, smaller swirls at the ends, ‘starburst’ pattern between the three.

Not everything was so obliging.


Oodles and gobs of silk hankies, over 140 of them

Usually, you see this kind of thing in a fancy department store (or a wanna-be-fancy one) in the men’s department – they’re the kind you fold up and tuck into that top pocket on a man’s suit.

They’re just plain beautiful (if I do say so myself, and I do). They’re done with acid-wash dyes (the ‘acid’ is vinegar, by the way…I don’t do super-heavy-duty chemicals around here) – a process that requires “cooking” and all that groovy jazz. The colors are rich, and the way the silk takes the dye is just…well. It has a sheen and drape and grace that is hard to describe even with pictures. When you hold one of these in your hand, it just feels good. Light like cobwebs, but strong at the same time.

And the colors, when seen by a human eyeball in person rather than in a picture taken by a pretty inexpensive digital camera, have shimmering layers of depth in them.

And you know what else? If you’ve got a long-running cold and your nose is sore? That silk feels like a dream.

Of course, it’s easy for me to be all “you should totally use silk if you’ve got a cold, it feels good.” I have a front-loading washer that can handle the cleanup afterward for me (along with my bras and those frilly little dresses the girls are so fond of which I totally don’t get because even as a child I pretty much wore jeans, jeans and nothing but the jeans so help me God) and clotheslines not only in the backyard, but one I can string across my upstairs bathroom as well in less than thirty seconds when I need it.

I imagine if I had to hand-wash them in my bathroom sink and drip dry them over the towel rack (while my towels went…uh…hmmm…on the floor, I guess?), I might be a little less enthusiastic about them as a daily-use hankie.

Whiiiiich brings me to the workhorses of the group: The cotton handkerchiefs. These are nice BIG kerchiefs, which has the added bonus of giving me lots of room to play.


Classic…


Classic, with a twist…


The ‘you know what would be kewl? If I folded it HERE and THERE and then did THIS’ model…


This one makes me think of a rocket trail through space.

There are 186 more of these, so, uh, let’s just stop with the pictures now, ‘kay?

Now, the other thing I’ve got on offer are socks. I started dyeing plain white machine-made cotton socks because the Denizens wanted these fancy expensive tie-dyed socks (five bucks a pair) they saw at Gottschalk’s (before they went out of business, wah!) and I was all, “HAHAHAHAHA, yeah right!”

Not because I didn’t think the socks were cool or that they weren’t worth the five bucks – it was that my Denizens are about the worst little humans on the planet when it comes to Sock Abuse. They stuff them under seats, wear them outside without shoes in the rain, leave one at Grandma’s and the other at the park…it’s horrible, what those kids do to sock.

So I buy them plain white ones in 50-pair packages at Big Box R Us and growl at them whenever they complain about how boring they are.

But then I thought, you know, just for giggles…I could try dyeing some of them. And lo, it was fun and kewl and funky and the kids loved them and after all, who doesn’t need yet another addiction in their life?

Tune in next week, when Tama decides to go ahead and take up quilting! Because she obviously doesn’t have ENOUGH crafty things going on around here…

Ahem. Anyway. I’m afraid the best examples are still in the dryer (all the actual tie-dye ones, for example), but here are a couple I kind of like.

I like these because they’re sweet.


These are done by doing the spots first, then basically dipping the sock in plain water and SQUEEZING the colors together into a watercolor ‘wash’.

And I like these because they are fugly.


I made crisp black and yellow stripes, then thought, “YA KNOW, if I did that squeezy-thing on this, I’d get, what, kind of greenish-yellow stripes? Ewwwww, that would be so…ZOMBIE…HAHAHAHAHA, OK, now I HAVE to do it…!!!” and sure enough – ZOMBIE SOCKS!!!!! Don’t they look like they were dipped in radioactive waste?!?!

Tomorrow is all about last-second errands and figuring out how best to load up the van. And then two days of playing working incredibly hard at a festival, and then hopefully coming home with some extra cash. (I know. I set my sights way too high.)

It feels really weird to be in this saddle again. Back in the day, I did a lot of fairs and festivals in all kinds of capacities; sometimes I was a performer, sometimes I was a vendor, sometimes I was just involved in setting up or breaking down the stages.

I’m sure things will go wrong, and I won’t be happy with my booth (because I have never been 100% happy with any booth setup, my own or anybody else’s for that matter), and I’ll spend a lot of time in the artist purgatory, wondering if my stuff is “good enough” and picking it apart and thinking of all the ways I could have made this one better or that one less ugly or why did I even bother doing that one, again?!

But I have to say…it feels pretty natural, too.

I can’t wait to find out what I’m going to forget to bring with me.

Because there’s always something, some small yet important thing that I just clean forgot to load up and bring with…

Hello I have lost my mind and how are you today?

Well. I did…a rather foolish thing.

I mean, it’s a great thing and I’m glad I did (am doing, will do) it, and I’m excited and thrilled and all like that…but it was also kind of…well, foolish.

SEE, my Original Brilliant Plan was like this: I was going to spend most of October and the first half of November building up inventory in the things I like to do. Dye some cotton and silk handkerchiefs and scarves, make some hand warmers and other small-ish knitted projects, make some soap and candles, and then take those things on the near-to-home road for some local craft fairs.

This is part of the ‘household endeavors paying for household needs’ thing, see. We need soap, but I make five pounds instead of one and sell the other four. We need candles, but instead of just two tapers I make fourteen and a few votives and as long as I’ve got the wax melted maybe a couple bigger pillar candles too.

We need cotton handkerchiefs, so I dye 2,000, keep 20 and sell the other 1,980.

OK, I’m exaggerating. But also, I am loving the tie-dyed cotton handkerchiefs to a point where I think my husband may be getting jealous. It’s just so…magical, the way you can fold and crease and tie or band, then dunk or spray or squirt dye all over it…then you have to waaaaaaaaaait for it [24 hour cure time], and then, breathless (and gloveless, if you are an idiot like me), you get to take off the bindings and unfold and these colors just leap out at you and it’s just so…funky-cool-cute-fresh.

And each one can be washed hundreds of times, replacing who knows how many boxes of Kleenex.

And they’re blissfully inexpensive to boot. I think the final retail price on them will be around two bucks each. I mean, seriously…environmentally friendly, fun to dye, cheerful to use, each one unique even if it was tied and dyed exactly the same way as five other ones, and inexpensive?!

Dudes. Look, they won’t replace knitting in my heart, but they are perilously close to being more fun to dye than yarn. (Don’t tell the Merino I said that, ‘kay?) (Yes. I am fickle. Tune in later this week for swooning about the joys of marbling silk.)

But I digress.

The Original Brilliant Plan would have seen me puttering around the kitchen and garage dyeing, cooking soap, dipping candles, knitting wrist-warmers and other smallish things until right before Thanksgiving – and then the frenzied rush of craft-fairs-every-weekend until right before Christmas and then I’d be taking a small wad of cash to the mall for Christmas presents.

And then a couple months sort of “off” (with “just” the Etsy shop going), and then a new kind of push through spring and summer for farmer’s markets (if we’re allowed – there are some technicalities we’d have to deal with first) and craft fairs.

Instead, well, I sort of got invited to think about applying for a fair next weekend. NEXT. WEEKEND.

And I applied. And was accepted. And I’m all excited and happy because the cold weather is starting to happen and it has been pointed out to me (repeatedly) that the Denizens need new “real” jackets.

Darn kids, always with the growing thing…so hopefully, I’ll be able to net enough profits from this earlier fair to pay for their jackets and perhaps to get Eldest into pants that cover her ankles for once and our little experiment will finally be fully underway, right? Right!

Besides, it’s awesome! It’ll be a fun venue and a great way for me to get my feet wet again on the whole fair-booth-doing-thing.

It’s been a lot of years. My skilz, they are rusty. And hey, let’s do an inventory check, shall we? Hmm, OK, well, I’ve got…uh…well, pretty much, I’ve got nothing at this point. A few of these a little of that and none of the other.

Ahem. Well. OK.

Fortunately, what I did have was a massive box of blanks ready to be dyed. And the dye, and the soda ash, vinegar, pots and pans and jars and measuring cups to get it done.

Unfortunately, they were all still in the box – they hadn’t been prepped at all for dyeing.

It’s been a frantic week around here, but the rubber is finally hitting the road. Things are happening. Final Products are being rolled off the line – the clothing line, which is the last step for them. unless they need ironing. In which case, yeah, the clothing line is still often the last step because I’m WAY too lazy to iron 200 cotton handkerchiefs, what are ya, mental?! I prefer to stick with Truth In Advertising, and after all – 100% cotton will come out of the dryer a bit wrinkled and I wouldn’t want to have my customers thinking they will stay just like this even after being washed, right?

I am so noble, I scare myself. (Ahem.)

Anyway. I actually have the wild fantasy that I will not only get all the dyeing done, but will also have time to produce a few hot method soaps (still from-scratch-with-lye soaps, but ‘cooked’ during the process so they can be used right away, unlike cold method which must cure for a good three weeks before use) and maybe even a set or three of mold candles.

It won’t happen, of course. I’ll be lucky – insanely lucky – to get done just the dyeing I’ve got on my plate right now.

In other news, my hands are turning all kind of ugly colors. I have gloves, but I have a problem with them: The ones that are long enough to actually protect my forearms and keep the dye from simply slipping neatly past my wrist down into my palm contain latex which, as it turns out, is a rash-inducer for me.

The latex-free gloves I have are wee tiny short gloves that end right at the wrist – hence, dye spillage down into the glove itself is frequent. They’re also thinner than the latex gloves and tear very easily – hence, Red thumb! Red thumb!!

But the way I figure it, push come to shove, nobody will be walking up to my little booth at Witchapalooza and saying, “Waitasecond…I don’t think YOU actually dyed ANY of this!!”

Because these hands? Are the hands of a dyer, my friends.

In related news, hey! Guess what! If you have a little tiny cut on, say, your index finger? And then you try to use ReDuRan on it?

Only thing that hurts more is pouring Krazy Glue into it.

Please don’t ask me how I know that.

…so…embarrassing…

ANYWAY, SO! If you don’t hear from me for, like, a week? It’s because I’m up to my neck in dye and promising that I will never, ever do anything like this to myself again. EVER. And this time, I really mean it! And furthermore, once this fair is over, I am going to take two days completely off to reprioritize my philosophy around What Really Matters and hey look, a squirrel!!!! …is that a fair application in it’s teeth? KEWL! Sign me up, I’m ready to do another one…!!!!

…just let me place an order for more inventory and yeah, better pay for priority shipping on this bad boy…

I have a theory on why I keep doing this to myself. The truth is, I was just sitting on all that inventory and ideas. I was fiddling around with knitting projects going nowhere, and doodling around with stuff instead of doing stuff. Then an opportunity floats by at just the right moment and in grabbing at it I slap an irrational deadline on myself and WHAM!

I’m energized, moving, thinking fast and sharp thoughts.

Suddenly, I’m fully engaged in my life – my actual life, what it really is in the here and now. I appreciate my family more, when I’m in this kind of crazy mode. I see their beauty, appreciate their putting up with me support more, become more aware of just how important they are to me.

Without these occasional spurts of self-inflicted insanity, I tend to drift and dream, but never do.

Every so often, I need to pull off something Crazy Big to keep myself rooted.

That’s my theory, anyway. I have to have some reason, because I do it to myself again and again and again.

Sometimes it ends up good; sometimes bad; sometimes indifferent.

But always, there has been some forward movement - whether it got the results I’d hoped for or not, that part is always good.

Red Thumb!! Red Thumb!!

Oh, OK. It’s not nearly as dramatic as ‘red rum.’

But still.

I have a very red thumb. And a slightly blue ring finger on the same hand. And a speck of red that looks exactly like an open sore on my wrist, and a lovely splotch of black that looks for all the world like a nasty bruise.

Lovely.

Boo Bug noticed before she even got in the van after school today.

“Mommy! Your hand! It looks wiiiiiiiicked!” she exclaimed. (They are buttering me up, because Career Day is coming and they reaaaaaaaly want their mother to show up with vats of dye and maybe t-shirts and then they would be the Most Popular Kids At School Ever.) (Not gonna happen, but statistics mean nothing to them so they keep trying.)

And then Eldest did a double take as she got in. “Did you hurt yourself? You’ve got blood on your…oh…wait…is that dye?”

I’ve thought of many things I could say to explain these things when they are noticed by the uninitiated – by, say, a new childcare provider who has no idea just how insane these people truly are but is already slightly alarmed by the milling Chaos of the house because the Denizens have all pretty much just gotten home and are in that ohmygah, I haven’t seen you for, like, A FEW WHOLE HOURS! mode.

Running, yelling, ‘mommy guess what else’…it’s noisy and bustling and I find myself saying things like, “No, there’s ‘only’ four of them…” a lot.

In other news, I don’t think that poor lady will be back. She actually melted the rubber off her tennis shoes, this is how fast she beat a retreat.

I don’t blame her. I’d run too, if I had the option.

ANYWAY. Ever since I shook her hand with a bright red thumb and then felt obligated to explain what actually happened, I’ve been coming up with Better Stories.

I thought about saying that I had recently voted for a new President of the Super Secret Society, and then whispering, “Oh no, I’ve said too much! Quickly, out the back! I’ll call the Protectionators! They must hide you, you’re in terrible danger, oh! Me and my big fat mouth!!”

Or yelling, “Curses! I told Gerbbelfleck these holographic disguises would never work!” And then I’d start slapping my chest and saying, “Star Command! Come in, Star Command! The emperor has no clothes repeat! The. Emperor. Has. No. Clothes! Why don’t they answer?!”

Or I could adopt a mysterious accent (a hybrid sort of thing that wanders all over Europe, maybe) and say, “Deees thumb, deeees one? I kill a man in Reno once, wid deeees thumb! Whhhhhhhhhisssss-kah!!! Like DAT!”

Or, I could keep it simple: Hold up the thumb, waggle it at the inquisitive one and chant, “Red thumb! Red thumb!” in a creepy voice.

None of these things could possible get stranger looks than the simple truth, which goes like this: I was dyeing some cotton handkerchiefs today (strange looks begin right there – you were doing what with which now?!), and as I was mixing up the turquoise dye I noticed that my right ring finger felt wet, which it shouldn’t because I was wearing gloves.

There was a hole in the glove. Well, drat…but no problem, I have plenty of those little latex-free (because guess who is allergic to latex as it turns out? oh yeah. Guess who kinda-sorta knew that already but hadn’t had a big problem with it because she never remembers to wear gloves in the first place, except that she decided recently that she was tired of her hands being drier than the Mojave so she decided to really try to remember the gloves so she wore them for half an hour while doing dishes and then got a MASSIVE ugly rash all over the backs of her hands and up her forearms that was not only ugly, but itchy to boot?) (also, guess who is striving to maintain her status as a Champion Too Long Sentence Writer?) gloves, so I’ll just grab a new glove out of the bag!

And I’ll mix up the red dye! Which never, ever comes off anything it touches! Ever!

Then as I’m cheerfully mashing away at the stuff, my thumb started to feel a little warm.

Noooooooooo, I said to myself. Can’t be. Brand new glove. Can’t have a hole in it.

I actually resisted looking. I told myself I was being silly. Please. What are the chances, anyway? It’s not like moths would have been attracted to the not-latex gloves, right…?

Sure enough, there was a hole in the new glove as well.

And now I have a bright red thumb. And while the blue more-or-less scrubbed off with some Reduran, the red…is probably going to go with me to the grave.

Naturally, this would happen on the day a new babysitter was coming over for an interview. She walks into a madhouse, with the Denizens all talking at once and they sort of mobbed her because naturally they want to see what they’re up against the nice lady who might be watching them once in a while and then Captain Adventure got super-hyper and not only proceeded to run like a mad thing around the Den, but even grabbed an extra-large Ziploc-style bag and put it over his head.

You know, exactly like the warning on the box says NOT to do?!

Sigh. So she’s sitting there watching me slapping some reins on the Chaos and I could tell she was thinking something like, “This woman is crazy. She barks orders like a commando’s DI. There are definitely more than four children in this house. I think there are twelve of them. And I can’t pronounce anybody’s name around here. And her hands look really weird, and I’m not convinced that’s dye on there. And who the heck dyes handkerchiefs, anyway? Who even uses handkerchiefs?! And why do they have miniature fields in their backyard?!?! That’s it, I’m outta here…!”

I think chanting ‘red thumb’ at her would have been less alarming.

And it was just cotton handkerchiefs, too. We didn’t get into the silk versions, or the scarves, or the yarn, or the ‘blank’ socks piled up everywhere waiting for dye, or…

Oh well. At least she didn’t ask about my peas. Because they’re mine, mine I tell you, allllll miiiiiiiiine…

(I’ll have pictures of this stuff soon, I promise. The first ‘wave’ is curing right now, and should be washed [several times, actually] tomorrow. I’ll try to get some pictures over the weekend. I think they’re fun, and anything that gets the word ‘fun’ injected into the subject of having to blow your nose [which is seldom fun at all] can’t be all bad, right?)

Just to prove I still know how

Hey look, some finished knitting!

This is the Blackrose pattern from Knitty, and guess what? One skein of my sock yarn was plenty to make both socks and the wrist warmers. Which I kind of figured seeing as how, you know, I'm in charge of the yardage and such on them – but still. There's being pretty sure it has that kind of legs in it, and then actually having enough to finish them both.

I think if I were going to do these socks again, I would do two things: I'd use a darker variegated (or solid) (you know, like the designer recommends, ahem), and I'd throw in an extra repeat or two of the pattern on the leg. But that's because I like longer socks, and now I know I'd have enough yarn to do it, if I had yarn that was on the "generous" side of the yardage scale.

This was another good pattern – not too hard, not mind-numbingly simple (like the men's socks I'm making right now for my husband, with the straight stockinette for approximately eighteen feet around and around and arounzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…). It has a great combination of "pretty detail" and "letting the variegated do its thing," which was what I really wanted for these.

My knitting has been full of stops and starts lately. The ripping-out fates have been against me. Or with me. Hmm. Well, whichever it is when it seems like all you ever do is knit a swatch, and tear it out, and knit a swatch, and tear it out too, and knit a third and then, weeping and gnashing your teeth in rage, return it likewise unto the ball from which it came. Hence finally casting on a simple men's sock in size Orangutan – it's boring, but at least I'm not too likely to find myself tearing it out because the gauge isn't right or the color is pooling funny or it doesn't look at all like a bird, it looks like a vomiting bat…(I'm trying to design my own lace. It still isn't going particularly well. Possibly I am a little too stuck on what I want it to look like, and thus am being entirely too persnickety and it serves me right that I keep thinking my birds look like vomiting bats and my horses look like a very young child's drawing of a bloated sheep. Whatever! I refuse to actually give up! Because if there is any advantage to never learning, it is that you have no memory of why you probably should just give up.)

It’s a very BRIGHT sock, isn’t it…

I had been pondering what to do with my skein of Lorikeet. Torn, really. On the one hand, I wanted to do something “interesting,” pattern-wise. On the other hand, I also wanted to see what the yarn looked like when knit kind of plain.

And then Bells showed off her sexy Blackrose socks, and after I got done saying, “Wow, those surely are sexy!” I thought…hey!

Because the Blackrose pattern is both interesting and plain. And there’s a pattern for wrist warmers, too…I have high hopes that the skein will actually be large enough to do both socks and a pair of wrist warmers.

Because, see, then I’d have it on MINE ARM, which would amuse me because, uh, I’m easily amused.

Ahem. Anyway…check it out:



That’s the front, with the little lacy bit. (It looks better when I put it over my hand, but I’m not coordinated enough to do that AND take a picture.) (I tried. It didn’t work.)



And there’s the back – plain knitting.

Now, my girls each have different tastes when it comes to clothes. Eldest tends to favor dark, rich colors and somewhat classic styles. Danger Mouse is an anything-goes layering specialist – she often looks like she’s going for the Japanese street fashion look (warning: picture-heavy site). And Boo Bug loves anything with flowers, and bright colors.

So last night while I was knitting and watching the news, Eldest hung over the back of my chair regarding the socks with what might be called great skepticism. Boo Bug was swooning on the sofa, and Danger Mouse was curled up glassy-eyed in the other chair waiting for the news to finally, finally! be over so we could switch to something good.

I finally asked for it what Eldest thought of them.

“Well, I really like the colors,” she said diplomatically. {long pause} “I’m just not sure about it being socks.” {another long pause} “It’s a very bright sock, isn’t it?”

“That’s kind of the point of this yarn,” I advised her loftily.

She grimaced, shrugged and said, “Well, I wouldn’t wear them.”

“I would!” Danger Mouse chirped up.

“Me too!” Boo Bug announced.

“That’s three against one, Eldest,” I said smugly.

“Ya, but Daddy wouldn’t wear them, and neither would Captain Adventure,” she shot back. “So you’ve actually only got…uh {a look of extreme concentration flitted across her little face}…fifty percent approval on them!”

And then I died laughing, the end.

In other news…

I just uploaded a bunch more stuff to my Etsy shop .

Finally.

…geesh, it takes longer to do all that re-skeining, documenting, photographing (re-photographing, re-photographing, ARGH! WHY won’t this red look RED?! RE-PHOTOGRAPHING!!!), and uploading than it does to dye the yarn!!

The brightness of birds, now with the convenience of yarn!

Last week, Captain Adventure’s class had a fieldtrip to the Micke Grove park in Lodi. In a rare departure from what passes for normal around here, parents were not only openly invited to attend (usually we have to go through a “lottery” process, where they say “we have room for 3 parents” and then all fifty of us put in our names and the same three people get “randomly” drawn every stinkin’ time) (but I’m not at all suspicious of how “random” the “random” “drawing” “is”) but were even allowed to provide their own transportation there and back again.

Which is nice, because ordinarily the parent volunteers are not allowed to drive their own relatively quiet vehicles through every Starbucks drive-thru between Point A and Point B to and from fieldtrips – we must take the bus.

With the kids.

All seventeen thousand of them.

And no drive-thrus, coffee-oriented or otherwise.

Which, you know…meh.

So, since I had a Starbucks card burning a hole in my pocket an open slot on my calendar that day, I drove through the nearest Starbucks drive-thru…and the next-but-one nearest Starbucks drive-thru… my beloved son, whose education, amusement and enlightenment were my only focus, over hill and dale (and more hill, and more dale…and a little more dale…and another hill…) to Lodi and the Micke Grove park...where there was gaiety and frolicking and fun, first in the playground and then…the zoo!

The headliners at Micke Grove right now are lorikeets. These are little parrot-like birds that are friendly to the point of being obnoxious. They are hyperactive little beggars, full of vinegar, beautiful, charming, pushy, bratty…and this zoo has got about forty of them in an interactive aviary.

There are several varieties, but the ones that really caught my attention were the Rainbow Lorikeets. Their coloring is so insanely bright you’d swear somebody had artificially dyed their feathers…and also, they were the biggest clowns in the lot.

You can pay a dollar for a cup of nectar, and they will not only fly right onto you but will practically bring their furniture and move into your house because they are very much extremely chummy.

We were both utterly charmed by these little birds. I was entranced by their coloring, and Captain Adventure was nearly in hysterics over their antics. They are absolute professionals when it comes to working a crowd.

I asked if he wanted to go inside their house and see them closer. He said yes. (Actually, he said “yeh-t” because that is how he says ‘yes’ because he has some curious mental block around the ‘s’ sound, but really that’s neither here nor there.)

On our way in I paid the dollar for a cup of nectar to attract one to us…so it was no surprise to me when a so-brightly-colored-you’d-swear-it-was-fake lorikeet promptly fluttered down, landed on his shoulder and loudly declared, “Chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp-chrrrrrrrrrrrrrippp!rip-rip-rip-chrrrrrrrrip!chirp!!”

But for Captain Adventure…it was a huge surprise. Practically life altering. In his experience, birds don’t land on you. They fly away from you. They are tiny, terrified little creatures that flee before his mighty four-year-old bluster.

Not this little lorikeet dude. Counter to all known bird behavior, he not only approached our intrepid Captain, he landed on him and stuck there. When Captain Adventure shrugged to try and get him off, he only shifted his little feet to get a better grip on his jacket and peered amiably up into his face. When Captain Adventure tentatively brushed at him, he bobbed his head as if to say, “Oh yes, isn’t it a lovely rainy day? So! Got any nectar on ya? Two sips per head pat is the usual, mate…”

Captain Adventure turned to me, eyes wide, and said, “Mommy, git bird OFF’N me!”

I showed our feathery rainbow the cup of nectar in my hand. ‘Nuff said! He cheerfully jumped from my son to me and buried his head in the cup.

The boy’s eyes were round as saucers. Lion taming had nothing on this, let-me-tell-you. Mommy = Fearless! (Yeah, right…having been nipped more than a few times by sharp beaks in my day, I was far from fearless on this deal…but having survived more than a few nips, well, they rank as extremely aggravating but not life threatening in my book.)

It was one of the friendliest birds I’ve ever encountered. They had said they were “acclimated” to people, but this went beyond “acclimated”…I’ve known hand-fed-from-the-egg-on pet parakeets that were less pet-like than this little guy. (In fact, one of the worst nips I ever got was from a friend’s pet parakeet, right after she got done telling me she never nipped anyone.) (I should have known better. She also told me she had house trained the bird, and that she never just pooped randomly in her apartment. HAHAHAHAHAHA. Yeah. Bird droppings on every surface…) (…also? ew!…)

The colors were all the more fascinating because of the range. Electric blue head, bright green wings with some dull green at the tips, insolent little epaulettes of yellow at the shoulders, bright orange fading to dusty orange – and where the blue met the orange, brown.

Just like what happens if you squish orange and blue dyes together.

Hmmmmmmmmmmm…

As I listened to Captain Adventure tell the story of the bird that landed ON MINE ARM over and over again on the way home, the colors kept coming up again and again. He had-him BWOO on him HEAD, an’ ELL-OW on him ARM, an’ OH-RANGE on him BEW-WEE, an’ GWEEN! On him ODDER ARM!

(By this time, he had utterly forgotten any apprehensive moments and insisted that he liked it when the bird landed on mine ARM!)

So Monday afternoon after I’d done a few other things yarn-wise, I sat down with pots of color, measuring implements, a few plain white coffee filters and a picture in my mind of my little lorikeet dude. A bunch of mixing, muttering, and getting dye all over my hands and jeans (again) (I swear, I get more dye on myself than on the yarn), I had the colors I wanted.

And then there was painting, sponging, patting, blotting, squinting, splotching, and more dye-getting-on-things-other-than-the-yarn.

My hands looked like I had some weird flesh-eating disease.

Because I am an idiot and never remember to wear gloves until I’ve already stained them, and then I think Eh, no matter, I’ll just scrub them good with Reduran when I’m done, and then I spend the next several days with funky-colored hands that these days make people recoil in horror and scream, “OH MY GAWD, SWINE FLU!!!!!” when they see them.

They also scream that if you sniffle. Which I do frequently right now because Hello, Allergy Season, back so soon? Because I didn’t have time to miss you one little bit!

The next day, I had three of these hanging on the line to dry:



They made all the other skeins look rather tame, even the hot pink ones. They’re so outrageous, they make me giggle – just like that crazy little bird and his friends.

I can’t wait to see how a pair of socks knits up out of this stuff.

Hee!

(If it is illegal to have this much fun, please don’t tell me. I’ll need some defense if I end up in court. So also don’t tell me about how ignorance of the law is no excuse in the eyes of same, because then I will lack complete deniability, which is this phrase I heard somewhere that makes so little sense it must hold up in court.)

Great, something ELSE I don’t have time for

Holy smokes. Norah Gaughan. Intricate stag bag.



OK, I really need someone to invent a time machine. I need to have approximately 427 hours per day, thank you please?

Which reminds me. You wanna see the difference between “crock pot lazy” and “lots of stirring and tending and cackling over a cauldron” dyeing?

This is the purply-blue I made with the crock pot.



You see how it is kind of streaky? “Mostly” purple, but with random blue shots? That was kind of what I was hoping for, so it’s all good…but when Boo Bug asked for green yarn, I wanted it to be more even.

And by ‘more,’ I mean ‘completely.’

Which is what I got, thank goodness:



It’s super-even in color. It took a lot more fiddling around with to do, but I think it came out about perfect. (And thus does Tama beg for a major smackdown…go ahead, boast about ‘perfect’ results, and let’s just see what happens the next time you drop wool into a dye pot…)

For this go-round, I soaked the yarn for a full hour with half a teaspoon of Synthrapol detergent. Meanwhile, I mixed up a quarter teaspoon each of blue and yellow Jacquard acid dye powder – first with just a little water to get it started, then adding enough boiling water to make eight ounces. It also sat there thinking things over for an hour. (I cleaned the kitchen while they were resting.)

When I was ready to get the party started, I filled up my big pot with tepid water (barely warm to the hand), added the dye and stirred thoroughly. Then I tossed in 1-1/2 tablespoons of salt and a quarter cup of vinegar, and stirred thoroughly again.

Then I drained the soaking yarn, gently squeezing the excess water out of it, and added it to the pot. More stirring. More stirring. More stirring. Lots of stirring. Stir-stir-stir. Stirring maniac.

Then, I turned on the burner to medium and began the long, slow process of heating it up. Again, it’s wool and I don’t want to disturb its delicate sensibilities, so it took a good half hour to get it to that ‘just below boiling’ point. I was stirring, lifting and otherwise futzing with the yarn about every five minutes the whole time.

Once it achieved that temperature, I turned the heat down to the point where it maintained the temperature, but didn’t push it over into boiling. Gas ranges can be awesome for this kind of fiddly stuff – sometimes your electric range will refuse to be that precise. It wants to be ‘warm, medium, or hot’ – not ‘a little more medium than warm but not actually medium.’

Then, I sat nearby knitting for an hour. It was a rough afternoon, but in the name of Science, I will bear all manner of burdens. Each time I finished a round on the sweater, I’d get up and stir / flip / gently agitate the yarn…that worked out to about every ten minutes.

The dye bath had exhausted by that point, as evidenced by a spoonful of the stuff in a white measuring spoon. So I turned off the heat, manhandled the pot to the back of the stove, and ignored it overnight.

The next morning, I drained the yarn, washed it in tepid water with some more Synthrapol until the water was clear (there was a little green in there at first), then rinsed thoroughly, gently squeezed the excess out, and took it out into the backyard to hang on the line because folks, it was downright toasty out here yesterday afternoon! Bright, warm sunshine already…it almost feels sinful, to be honest.

And when it had dried…well, this is what I had. Two skeins of Boo Bug Green sock yarn, 75% superwash Merino, 25% nylon. The color is about perfect on the even-scale, which tickles me no end. It’s like, ohmygawd, I totally followed directions for once, and ohmygawd, it like totally worked!

Boo Bug was pleased.

But Danger Mouse now wants some blue. And Eldest thinks Ocean would be nice. You know, kind of blue-green but not too green and absolutely not too much blue so really more of a greenish-blue might be better.

I have created a monster, friends.

But fortunately, it’s rather fun to feed.

At least it’s cheaper than heroin

Let’s review, shall we?

I am a…

1. knitter
   
2. spinner
   
3. harpist
   
4. pianist
   
5. guitarist
   
6. nature-enthusiast
   
7. car-lover
   
8. animal-lover (big and small)
   
9. needlepointer (which apparently isn’t a word but y’all know what I mean, right?)
   baker
   
10. writer blogger (I suspect to be a ‘writer’, one needs better grammar and punctuation skills than I possess bother with)
    
11. candle maker
    
12. soap maker
    
13. potpourri maker
    
14. rose gardener
    
15. wanna-be vegetable gardener (but needs to learn not to ‘forget’ about the garden; roses forgive you the occasional lapse of attention, watermelons not so much) (ask me how I know…sigh…just call me the Slayer of Watermelons, Sunflowers and Carrots…) (pathetic…)
    
16. mother of four (so, kid enthusiast / collector) (which explains how I keep finding myself with six or seven kids around the table at dinner time, saying, “Hi Mrs. {Eldest, Danger Mouse, Boo Bug}’s mom! Are you going to make cookies after dinner, just wondering?”)
    

Yeah, so, I’d say that pretty much, when it comes to the hobbies and things, I’m covered. Which is why I’m resisting adding archery back to the list. And dancing. And Renaissance fairs. And…well. The list, it goes on. And on, and on, and on, and on.

So yesterday, I found myself staring at a wad of undyed lace weight yarn (and a few of its cousins) I’d just pulled out from under the bed while looking for something else and thinking, yawn.

Boring. White. Meh. I wanted enough Plain White for one (1) shawl, but I did that thing where you forget what you already have and I bought enough Plain White for one (1) shawl…about twelve times over the last year and a half. Gah.

And then I thought…well, I thought adding some color would be nice. I’ve never dyed yarn before. I’ve dyed fabric plenty of times (a great way to dress up a sadly faded but still awesome shirt or dress from the thrift store is to over-dye it), but never yarn.

This is mostly because there are so many others who pretty much keep my need for fascinating colors covered.

But what the heck, I thought. Better than shoving this stuff back under the bed for another lengthy stay in the darkness. I’d make enough for one full-sized lacy shawl, I said, because Lord knows I don’t have enough projects on my list and adding a futzy-fiddly lace shawl would be just the thing to keep my life interesting. (Shut up.)

This is possibly the laziest yarn-dyeing method ever. First I soaked the yarn in tepid water for a while, while I was cleaning the kitchen and finding my dyes. Then I mixed boiling water with my powdered dye (Jacquard acid dyes, if you’re curious) (old, old Jacquard), with a quarter teaspoon of this and a half teaspoon of that with the goal of being “mostly purple.”

Set the mixed up dye aside to think about things (what does dye think about while ‘resting’ I wonder…also, what has it got to rest from, exactly? Does it wonder how this idiot is planning to misuse it? Or does it excitedly plan a life for itself where it will be added to boring white laceweight yarn and become something glamorous and be worn to the White House to meet the First Lady, who will swoon over it and then it will live in the White House because its owner will be made Chief Dyer of Glamorous Laceweight to the First Lady and the Denizens will get to play on the new swingset with the Obama girls who I totally think would be a good influence on my Denizens because hello, they are not afraid of Weather?) while I got out the ‘crock pot of dubious lineage’ for dyeing.

This is the same crock pot I use to melt the glycerin when I’m making soap, and to melt the wax when I’m dipping candles.

Because LORD KNOWS I can’t just go to the store like a normal person when I need soap or candles. HAHAHAHAHA, ‘tis to laugh! No! That would be simple and possibly even inexpensive! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Why do things the easy and cheap way, when you can spend hundreds on supplies to make them yourself with the hours and hours and hours of leisure time you don’t have because PLEASE SEE LENGTHY LIST OF HOBBIES, ABOVE!

(And note that the word ‘housework’ does not appear anywhere on that list. Lord, how I wish I could suddenly develop a creative passion for cleaning bathrooms…it would make my quality of life sooooo much better…)

ANYWAY. That lengthy digression out of the way, then I poured the dreaming, well-rested dye into the crock pot, added cool water to make a tepid dye bath of the same temperature as the soak water (no shocking the yarn, please, that will come later when I wear the shawl over jeans, the incongruity of which would shock anybody let alone delicate hand-dyed Merino laceweight yarn that had White House aspirations), added white vinegar for my acid (to set color) and left out the salt (which levels the color) because I am a rebel that way and had high hopes of getting something like that Mahogany I got from Lisa at Stitches, with the various ‘layers’ that made up the final color coming through here and there.

And then I did the laziest dye job, ever. Turned the crock pot to ‘high’ and walked away. Worked an hour, came downstairs and turned the yarn, worked another hour, turned the yarn, worked two more hours, collected Captain Adventure from the bus, noted the dye was exhausted (e.g., the water was clear), turned off the crock pot and ignored it overnight.

This morning after the kids went to school, I removed it from the now-tepid water, rinsed it with tepid water, washed it with tepid water, had no problem with the whole ‘do that until the water runs clear’ part because it ran clear from the get-go, and then I rolled it in a towel and then I hung it up to dry and then I fell in love with it so I’m divorcing my husband so I can marry these two skeins because they are…so…

Purply-bluey-sweet-smelling-baby-butt-soft-cool-multi-shadedly-awesome.





About the point infatuation was really setting in (and I was contemplating larger dyeing vats and whether or not I could dye enough to make a whole sweater all in one go for dye-lot compatibility), I thought…oh crap.

Because you know, seriously…this I need. Another obsessive hobby. Which undoubtedly has tools I will discover I can’t live without because this always happens. I’ll probably need…scales. And special thermometers. They’ll probably make a special pot with climate controlled everything where you can get a precise result so that if you wanted you could get a black-black-and-nothing-but-black dye lot of yarn.

Gah. Why don’t I just go ahead and cut to the chase. Buy myself a yarn mill with dye vats the size of pickup trucks and get into the international wool market?! Send out an email to all the sheep farmers in California: Buying wool! Buying wool! Send me all 3,000 pounds, I’m that obsessive about it!!

Sigh.

Oh well. All kidding aside, in terms of spending your life buzzing from one high to the next? I could be making worse choices. Sniffing freshly washed hand-dyed wool never got someone pulled over for being under the influence; riding a cuddle-high never put anybody in prison; hand-dipped candles aren’t illegal in any state that I know of, and of course, nobody is going to call the police because of the racket from my harp.

Unless I hooked it and my microphone up to the old amplifier and started blasting Danny Boy at the top of my lungs for a couple hours in honor of St Patrick’s Day.

I mean, there are limits.