Dyeing my own yarn.

In an earlier post I mentioned that Knit Picks was discontinuing the Felici yarn I loved so much. This was quite frustrating because most self striping yarns come in 100g skein and cost a ton of $$$$ (at least for me). Felici came in 50g skeins which work perfectly for my non-sock knitting ways. A while ago I checked a book out from the library called Hand Dyeing Yarn and Fleece by Gail Callahan. This was a total game changer for me. Towards the beginning of the book are instructions for dyeing with food coloring, in rainbow colors. I was instantly intrigued. I have a thing for rainbow yarns. I find the color transitions fascinating.

I had a rather large skein of Fisherman's Wool left from my dryer ball experiments. I wound that off into 20 yd. mini skeins. I soaked them in warm soapy water (I used Dawn) overnight, then the next day for 30 minutes in a vinegar water solution. I also had some skeins reserved for playing with Kool Aid. Those I didn't soak in vinegar because the powder mix is already acidic. After that I followed Gail's instructions in the "Dying your own "Color Wheel"" section. All the supplies I used were yarn (has to be a protein fiber), Dawn dishsoap, white vinegar, mason jars, food coloring from the cupboard, water and the microwave. Best part is, everything was food safe so I wasn't risking ruining any dishes. Unless I broke a jar, which I didn't.

The pile on the top left is my rainbow yarns. I didn't get a good picture of them while they were drying. The pile on the right are my Kool Aid yarns and the bottom left was what I did with the leftover yarn and dye stock.

Oh! and the speckled yarn in the pile of rainbow yarns was me trying to make a polka dot yarn. I put drops of food coloring directly on the yarn that had been soaking in vinegar.

I might have gotten bored in the middle of the night and put this in my mom's purse to find the next day. I have impulse control issues.

This was my second attempt at the food coloring expirement. I used a fingering weight yarn out of Peruvian Highland Yarn. This is the same type of yarn that I use when I do colorwork. It took the dye beautifully!! Those mini balls of yarn were my first experiment, just wound up.

This has opened so many possibilities for me, I'm pretty sure part of my brain exploded from excitement.

A couple of items knit crocheted by my mom using my hand dyed yarn. She's such a good sport!

BRAINS!!!!!

While Basil was sitting in the naughty corner (see previous post) I discovered another great pattern. Voodoo You Love Me? by Susan Claudino. It was love at first sight. I started making it with some sock yarn I had randomly bought. (I have quite a bit of yarn I've acquired from impulse buys). I wasn't completely in love with the redness of the yarn, but the doll was turning out so cute! My coworkers saw what I was working on and they fell in love with the pattern as well. I decided to name mine zombies instead of voodoo dolls....because I like zombies more...and you can have more fun with them. You'll see what I mean.

My first zombie ended up pinned to a cubicle wall at work while he awaited the completion of his legs. Problem was 1. I'd lost the yarn and 2. We were having fun with him being pinned to the wall, so it took about a month for those two little legs to get done. He did end up rather snazzy though.

Once he was done I immediately cast on for another version. This time it was purple. Because that's what his future owner requested. This poor thing gets picked on a lot at work when we get bored. Fortunately he's a lot tougher than I though he would be. If you squish his head right it looks like an onion.

Next I decided to see what would happen if you used SPARKLE yarn. I had originally bought this yarn to teach my sister how to knit with. After using it I've realized that this is not the easiest yarn to work with. It really hurts your hands after a while. That may be me holding the yarn too tight though. Anywho, the last of the first bunch ended up with shorter and skinnier arms because I wanted to see how it would look with icord arms. I had to make them half as long as the other dolls because it just looked weird with it longer.

I think she's pretty spiffy.

After this was all done I had another co-worker ask me to make her a doll too. Except instead of fingering weight (which I'd been using up to that point) she wanted me to use worsted weight.

You can't really tell but this guy is HUGE compared to the other ones. Easily twice the size. I'm awfully fond of the stitched eyebrow.

Apparently, her kids fell in love with the doll. This lead to two more dolls.

(There's a Kleenex box behind them, so you get an idea of how big they are).

I don't know if it was intentional or not, but I love how these yarns look together. Not matchy, but not clashy either.



I mentioned at the beginning that you can have more fun with zombies. Whilst I was in the middle of all these projects I had a coworker request a doll, like several other had before her. I was expecting to make one very similar to the ones I had made before.

Then she handed me neon yarn....

And a bunch of gears to use for the eyes.....

Could I make it have an exposed brain?.....

And I was welcome to keep those gears and use them for WHATEVER I wanted.....

This is what she ended up with.

I have to say, one of the funnest toys I've made yet. Who knew that kitchen cotton made such great brains!!!

Wow it's been a while

I didn't realize how long it's been since I posted on here. I'll have to take this in bits and pieces. First off I have discovered the joys of making toys. It's just so much fun!!! The pattern that lured me onto this path of awesomeness was Sherman, The Square Dancing Stegosaurus. I didn't feel an overwhelming need to deal with durnig the stripes manually, so I used Felici self striping yarn. I fell in love with this yarn doing this project. Which is really sad, because Knit Picks is discontinuing the yarn. Rude faces.

As you can see, Sherman is adorable. The spikes were kind of obnoxious. Especially since my furry little troublemaker helper liked to steal them. I lost three of the smaller ones. I found them under my bed with her stash of socks a couple of months later.

She has a history of trying to "help". My nephew loved Sherman so much I told him I'd make him his own dinosaur. After looking at the Dancing Dinosaur patterns, he picked out Terence the Tap Dancing T-Rex. I cheated again and used self striping yarn.

This little guy is ADORABLE and I love how the limbs ended up. Naturally, I had to finish the set and so I started on Basil, The Boogie Woogie Brontosaurus. Sadly, I ran into some issues.

Once I got to this part using double pointed needles became very cumbersome. So I switched to a really long circular needle to use the magic loop method. Problem? The needle I switched to was a size smaller and I didn't think it'd be an issue until I saw the size of the head.

The small head annoyed me, so he got put in the naughty corner until I got over it. I did have a slightly morbid/bored moment and came up with a rather epic tale of Basil and Terence getting in a ferocious battle. Basil won, but at a cost. Sadly, he's missing a leg and part of his tale. Fortunately, my nephew didn't really question it when I gave it to him. These dinosaurs were designed by the fabulous Rebecca Danger. So many monsters, so little time. I also made a couple of her bunny nuggets. Tragically, their pictures seem to have been eaten by zombies. More on that subject next time. ;)

Mystery Block of the Month

Last post of the night. I joined a mystery block of the month club through Fat Quarter Shop. The squares end up being 12 inches big and I get 1 square a month. I have 5 squares so far and have put together 2. I do have the others cut out though. These are the 2 I have done so far.

Monster Wreath

Pretty sure I should post as I go, instead of doing it all at once. Anyways, on Pinterest I found this little fellow.

So I bought a straw wreath, since it was $2 and foam was $8 (blech), and 2 foam balls. I found the foam for the teeth and the tulle in our sewing room and came up with this.

His teeth are sparkly and I realized after I hung it that the tulle was poofing in the wrong direction, but I love it.

Chandelier

I have a thing for chandeliers and recently decided that I wanted one for my room. I have a really low ceiling so it would have to be a small chandelier. I scoured KSL and Ebay for one that would work, but they were all to big. Finally I went to George's Salvage up in Salt Lake. That place was really cool. It was a little house packed with building materials, and I mean PACKED. The garage was packed, the yard was packed and a barn in the back was packed. There was all sorts of stuff I wanted to get for recycling projects but I limited myself to this....

Cleaned up fairly well.

I taped it and hung it up in the garage so I could spray paint it. Pretty sure Mickey, our senile old cat that lives in the garage, wanted to get high because she kept trying to sit under the chandelier as I sprayed it. Stupid cat.

I also got a lamp from DI for $5 and spray painted it to.

I even got a medallion to install with the chandelier that I really liked.

Then I got bored waiting for it all to dry.

I think it looks better than the green did. After it all dried I went to Joanns and bought fake pearls, silver jump rings (to hand the crystals it came with), paper and ribbon. I wrapped the center pole with ribbon. I used paper to cover the "candles" and wrapped those in ribbon too.

Haven't hung it yet, but I think it's aweseome.

Salem's Epic Quilt

Behold the epic alphabet quilt.

This started with my mom saying "We should make Salem an alphabet quilt that has pictures for all the letters" Naturally, I inundated her with pictures of other alphabet quilts I had seen. I finally decided on doing a 30 square framed quilt, with 4 extra squares to do what I wanted with. I bought an egg blue layer cake because I can't cut straight lines. I also found a jelly roll I had bought over a year ago on sale I had completely forgotten about.I pulled out the weird flower based strips that I didn't like and used those for the binding later. I also pulled out the blue based strips. I cut the remaining strips into ten inch strips for the right of the block and 12 inch strips for the bottom of the block. I then scrounged around in my remnants and found the fabric for the letters. I also cut the border out of fabric that Bree had left in the sewing room. I precut the borer into 12 and 16 (for the corners) inch strips that were 4 inches wide and sewed them onto the blocks before I assembled the whole quilt because I knew by the time I finished that I wouldn't want to put a border on. The border ended up being a little wavy but it worked.

The letters I cut out with my Cricut machine. I starched the fabric and put heat n bond on the back of them, then cut them out 5 inches high using the Winnie the Pooh font cartridge. I put it on the slowest setting with the highest pressure. Other than when the blade went close to the edge, it worked very well. If the blade gets too close to the edge it pulls the edge up and is a pain in the butt. After that I started finding pictures to go with each letter. I put on pictures of Grandma and Grandpa and the Aunts, Uncles, Cousin and his Mom and Dad. I also printed out "Salem's Quilt" "The End" and a picture of him with his grandparents and him with his parents for the corner squares. Salem is a huge Sonic fan so I found this picture online and used as many as these characters as possible. Made it so much easier.

I also used Disney and Spongebob whenever possible. I printed all those out, trimmed and heat pressed them. After that I ironed the Letters onto the squares and sewed those down. I started with a satin stitch, but it kept skipping stitches, so I went to a buttonhole stitch, that skipped stitches too, so I tried a zigzag stitch. Surprisingly, that skipped too. So I ended up doing a blind hemstitch which worked very well. Unfortunately, I can't sew in a straight line either, so the stitching around the lines is a little wobbly, but it worked.

For A you have Amy Alex and Amy (from sonic). For D you have Dad, DJ, dog and dalmation. For E you have Eggman, Eva and Espio.

For B you have Bree, Brian, Big the Cat and Buzz. For C you have Cream, Charmy, and Cat in the Hat. For F you have Fish, Fox in Sox and Flute (for Shelly). For G you have Grandma, Grandpa and Gamma. For H you have Horton, Hippo and Hudson Hornet.

For I you have ice cream cone and Iron Man. For J you have Jet, jaguar and Jeff. For N you have Nemo and Newt. For O you have octopus, Omega and Owl.

For K you have Kaylee and King. For L you have Lindsay and Leo (unintentionally upside down, oops) and Lightning Mcqueen. For P you have penguins, polar bear and Patrick. For Q you have Queen of Hearts, quail and quilt.

For M you have Mom and Mater. For R you have Rouge and Red (the firetruck)and a rhino.

For S you have Salem and Sonic, Shadow and Spongebob. For T you have Teddy Roosevelt, Tails, Tikal and Tigger. For X you have X-ray and Xylophone.

For U you have undies, umbrella and the LAST unicorn. For V you have violin and Vector. For Y you have Yak and Yo-Yo. For Z you have Zebra and Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz (thank you Dr. Seuss)

For W you have Wave and Woody. I stuck Knuckles on the end because I couldn't decide where to put him because he sounds like N but starts with K. Confusing for little ones. The back was flannel we had in the sewing room and the yarn was left over from a different project.

All I can say about this quilt is NEVER AGAIN.