Hints of spring

Finally, we've had some weather which has allowed for the snow to start melting.   This leaves the snow, especially the snow banks dirty and grey.   I love this because I see it as a symbol of hope of the incoming spring.   

The ground is still frozen though, so the melting snow is running off into the lowest areas.  Luckily we have some drainage in the farm land around here which helps those areas.  It hasn't been warm enough for the frozen water in the ditches to melt though, so the snow melt is running over the frozen ground, making for a very muddy top inch of soil and grass.   It won't last though, because a few more mild days are forecast which should help a lot.  Right now though, much of this water is running right into the barn, making parts of it a frozen mess.

I've made some more of the comfort dolls.  A friend and I took a field trip to a yarn store in a nearby town, which was highly discounting sock yarn.  It was $.97 a 100 g skein!  There were limited colours available but I still purchased a good few skeins.  What there weren't though were solid colours.   My friend dug down and found some of this pink, which she passed one skein on to me to make more comfort dolls.  I thought it might be good skin tone, but it's very pink.  Instead I managed to make a pig girl.   I didn't have a crochet hook small enough, so making the hair was not fun at all.  Still, I'm hoping someone will love her.

I've almost finished spinning up the cashmere merino singles.  There is only a handful of roving left, but my bobbins were full.  Not having access to the deck and table where I usually do my dyeing, I tried a different technique in a roasting pan.   It was not a huge success.   I managed to label my black dye as brown.  I wanted brown.  I also should have diluted the dye a lot more.

I soaked the yarn for several hours.   I chose not to add vinegar to acidify the water, which I would do next time.   I lay the skeins in a roasting pan, and squirted and dabbed dye on the yarn, in what should have been short runs of colour.   I then added the vinegar and water to do a low water dye on what I hoped to be similar to a painted skein.

Nope, the dye ran, and the black which should have been brown, dyed all the white spaces I left.   Because I didn't dilute the dye enough, it's much darker than I'd anticipated or hoped for.

Look at the lovely blue sky though! And the snow is melting.  You can see the grass in spots!   I don't feel bad about the dye experiment because there are hints of spring today and it is glorious!

 

A stormy week of projects

 We've had 3 major snow storms in the past week.  While I know other areas of the province have loads more snow, we've had more snow than we've had in years.   We've had so much wind this year, which keeps the Great Lakes from freezing.  This in turn causes lake effect snow, on top of whatever system works its way up or across to us.   Then with the wind, even when we don't have snow, we get blowing snow, like today with blowing snow warnings because it's affecting  roads and visibility.   I'm really looking forward to spring and getting back to some sort of routine that includes something other than staying home because hubby took my car to work since it's better on the icky roads.

But while stuck at home, I've started spinning the merino/cashmere/silk rovings.   It's easier to spin the rovings processed and dizzed off the drum card thicker than the commercially processed rovings which are much easier to spin very thin.   

It' been interesting because I'd been spinning cotton for demos and to finish up my stash for ages now, and have had to rethink my spinning technique to slow down and be more mindful of not over-spinning the wool blends and wools.    I have one bobbin full and started on the second one.  I plied a sample, and didn't like the results.  I think instead I'll spin it all as singles.  I'll dye it as singles and then weave a scarf with it.   Otherwise I'll end up making mittens and it's almost spring and unless I manage to lose all 3 pairs that I still haven't lost yet, I won't need another pair of mittens this year, no matter how soft and yummy they'd be.

I've been busy using up some scrap sock and fingering weight yarn on the CSM.   There is a spring
crank-in which gathers up requested items for donations.  Last year it was comfort dolls that went to the Provincial Police to give out to children in trauma situations.   The group donated 80 of them and they had given almost all of them out during the next 6 months and have asked for more.   So I started making a couple for my donation.   I'm running out of sock yarn scraps though.  I thought I had more, because I'd saved up a bunch from many of the years when I'd knit socks by hand, but having used a lot last year, there aren't many left.   I'll make what I can even if it's not as many as last year.  

 Last year I had a skein of  generic browny fleshtone which worked well for people dolls of no specific race.  This year, I've not found any skin tones, and only had a bit of leftover greys.  I've used the greys to make a couple of bears or cats, because I can't tell what they actually are.  I had a couple of leftovers in a bit larger amount so have made some very colourful bunnies.  They seem to work better in crazy colours than the bear/cats.

I made a bear snake today which had 3 bears in it.   It's called a snake because it's a long tube of projects.  You can make sock snakes too, which are socks knit one after another and not separated until you are finishing them.  There are 3 bear project in between a double section of waster yarn, with a ravel cord in between each bear, so it's waste yarn, ravel cord, waste yarn, bear legs, shirt, head, waste yarn ravel cord - and so on..  It means you only have to set up the CSM once for multiple projects.

 That is the last of the grey in my stash, which I'd been using for fur colours.  I'm not sure what I'm going to do next.  There is no cheap yarn locally, and what yarn there is, if it's remotely affordable for charity work, it's in vivid, bright colour mixtures, which I don't think I can turn into bears.

Please note- that ginormous bag of stuffing I bought last year, is almost empty.  There is a good chance I'll need to buy more!  Yikes!

   

Simple dolls and the start of spring colours.

We had some glorious weather in early March and the crocuses started to bloom.  Not these ones though, but some others.   They were sort of small and pale in colour,  but very early due to the weather.   Lots of us were worried that we'd have another of those years when the fruit trees bloomed very early due to unseasonable weather and then the normal frosty weather returned and killed the flowers resulting in little fruit that year.   So the crocuses bloomed and then of course the weather turned cold and snowy.  I thought that was it for my spring flowers.  However a few more patches of crocuses have bloomed and they are quite beautiful.  

This is a doll snake.  Knit on the CSM, it's 5 simple dolls and a cat toy.  They are linked together with waste yarn and knit in a tube.  My ravel cord was being unhappy and breaking, so I ended up using cheap waste yarn and cutting it off instead of reusing it. I'm not happy about that but I was less happy about continuous breakage and tangling.

These are small, simple dolls with no moveable parts.  I almost did some with safety eyes so that I didn't have to embroider them on, but I don't think the knit material is really strong enough to keep them on without pulling out.   Because I want these to be safe for young children, I'll bite the bullet and embroidery wonky faces on them.

The doll on the left is with the instructions I was given.   It makes a doll about 5 inches tall and I think it looks oddly proportioned.  After I made a few of these, I just sort of made up the pattern as I went along and changed the proportions.  After I sewed them up and stuffed them, I realized I like my proportions better.   It as difficult to know until they were finished because it's hard to tell what they'll look like while still in the tube.

It's faster to knit them all together because you don't have to set up the machine each time you make one, just knit them with the waste yarn between them.   This set of dolls will be for gifts.  

  If I can find some more pumpkin coloured yarns, I'll make more pumpkins for Westfield this year.  Finding inexpensive yarns of a suitable weight and colour can be difficult though and as they are donations, I'd rather be able to make more of the items than less for the same dollar amount.   I did get a new bag of stuffing though.   Prices were odd -  relatively expensive for the 8 oz or 16 oz bag, but larger bags were dramatically less per pound.    I could only find 1 bag available though, so ended up with a 64 oz bag for double the price of the 8 oz bag.  How does that make any sense at all?

I'm also trying a new ravel cord.  I got some braided fishing line and will try it.  I'm hoping it doesn't cut the yarn when I pull it out.  It's very strong  and doesn't like my scissors for cutting it, so fingers are crossed.  The ravel cord separates the knitted waste yarns so that you can just zip off the items.   Some people cut their waste yarn but I've not found how to do that particular trick yet and just end up with a useless pile of tiny bits, trying to get the doll, sock etc, off the waste yarn.   It's one of those they're both right answers and you just use the one that works for you.