Dyet Yarns: reuse, recycle, reinvent!

Well, I’m back from the vacation of pain (it was a good vacation at the beach, but my body hates me) and working on regaining my shoulder strength. I can spin very, very gently for a very short period of time or knit a few rows on something. I can type a little bit with both hands instead of using only my right hand. Yay for progress!

School is starting up soon. There are lots of things coming up on the horizon! In September I will be starting a shawl with which to assassinate my Shawl Wars target (a little game in a Rav group). It’s a small shawl, made with one skein of sock yarn, so it shouldn’t be too taxing. It’ll certainly be easier on my hands than tiny sock needles! Plus, lace is cool and I have yet to knit a shawl. Check out the lovely skein I dyed up for it:

I’m so very excited to start knitting with this yarn! I have only one other skein dyed in this color, and that skein is the Sockolate Mousse base. I think I might put it up for sale once my target has been killed…but not before. The colorway name kinda gives away who my target is, and that’s sooper sekrit!

Dyet Yarns blog posts by Adrian "Nuri" Steinhauer are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Tags: dyeing, lace, pain, Ravelry, recovery, sick, spinning, vacation

Going to the Doctor is sort of an ordeal for me. As a student with basically zero income, I despise paying someone money to tell me what I already know. Because of this, I generally only go when there is something the Doc can do that I cannot – like prescribe painkillers.

My rotator cuff has been inflamed and complaining since I was stupid and spindled for a few days straight. No, I do not mean I spindled a little each day. Hours each day, with no breaks for stretches of 4 or more hours… you can see why my shoulder hurts. Doing anything that uses repetitive motions for that long without breaks is a terrible idea. Don’t do it.

For about a week, my shoulder has been hurting, I have been wearing a sling or ace bandage, and ibuprofen has been a welcome visitor in my diet. Monday morning I realized it wasn’t getting better. The pain was, in fact, getting worse. As was my grumbling and ability to do much of anything. Of course, I knew the doc would say it needed rest and ibuprofen, so why go pay money for that advice?

Finally, P cannot stand it any longer.

I explained to him for the umpteenth time why I was not going to see a doctor. They always tell me what I already know, and if I don’t know the problem then they usually can’t figure it out either. They do like to do lots of expensive tests, but they have not once diagnosed any of my mystery problems. When I caught Mono, became gluten-intolerant, had a pinched sciatic nerve… all of those problems made the doctors scratch their heads (or flat out argue against my mother), and then the tests all turned out positive. Way to go, medical profession.

I explained to P exactly what would happen if I went to urgent care.

Now, I am not some homeopathic, hippie quack. I like science, I like medicine, and I like competent doctors. I’ve just had lousy luck trying to find a competent doctor, and I don’t want to pay a gajillion dollars to bad docs in order to find a good one. Plus, I am a stubborn git who is broke.

P is equally stubborn and tired of my whining, so he comes up with the cleverest of clever plans.

…and that is how I ended up at urgent care today.

Dyet Yarns blog posts by Adrian "Nuri" Steinhauer are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Tags: broken, doctor, Knitting, rsi, shoulder, spinning, tour de fleece

As I suspected, it is probably an injured rotator cuff. The doctors juiced me up on painkillers, and boy is that good stuff. So here are some socks!

Tippy toes of my Labyrinth socks from SG Traveler (mmmmmm)

Feet (yay heels!) of my On Hold socks with DiC Smooshy

And last my plain ol’ sunset socks with some bizarre CTH Sockittome (fun socks!)

Sweater update coming up later this week!

Dyet Yarns blog posts by Adrian "Nuri" Steinhauer are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Tags: cherry tree hill, dream in color, projects, sanguine gryphon, socks, UFO

Thank you, everyone who commented! Especially for the compliments on the yarn. I hope to be able to do more lovely color combinations, and might be overdyeing some of the current store colorways in the future. I would love to hear what you look for in a sock yarn colorway if you care to share!

Given a range of 1-26, which includes bonus entries, the RNG has chosen lucky number 8!

And that is…
laurie, also known as marlib7 on Ravelry! I’ll be sending you an email, so keep an eye out!

Dyet Yarns blog posts by Adrian "Nuri" Steinhauer are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Tags: giveaway, roses, sock, yarn

Knitting with one hand is hard. Over the course of the Tour de Fleece, a spinning personal challenge that runs parallel to the Tour de France, I seem to have injured my left rotator cuff with overzealous spindling. This whole cycle of obsession and injury is alarmingly common in my life, and it really needs to be worked on. Right, self?

I made it through the heels of two On Hold socks (I knit socks 2-at-a-time so they both are the same) before succumbing to the orders to immobilize the arm and let the injury heel. Wendy Johnson is one of my absolute favorite designers; I just love the way her lace looks. I was feeling an urgent need to turn the heels of those socks and get the complicated part out of the way. Now it’s all easy knitting and I can wait to finish it until my shoulder heals.

I was also a little bit bad. I recently acquired a skein of Cherry Tree Hill Sockittome in Champlain Sunset, which is a rockin’ crazy colorway! These are convention socks for sure. Or “Oh frack it’s COLD” socks.

I will be getting pictures of all three of my in-progress socks once I can figure out how to do good photos with one arm. I’m sure I’ll think of something. In the meantime, I am going crazy not being able to knit or spin or anything! Argh!

Dyet Yarns blog posts by Adrian "Nuri" Steinhauer are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Tags: gimp, injury, lace, projects, socks, toe up, yarn

There is a Dyet Yarns Ravelry group now. Shop updates and new giveaways will be announced there, so you Ravelers can keep track. Check it out!

If you don’t know about/aren’t on Ravelry, it’s a social network and database community for fiber fiends of all kinds. There are forums and groups as well as a huge database of patterns, yarns, and other things as well. Each user has their own notebook section; you can keep track of your yarn/fiber stash, projects, media, hooks and needles, etc, as well as share them with groups. There are even some groups for swapping if you have some things in your stash you want to trade for other new, shiny things.

Ravelry is how I find ALL of my knitting patterns. It’s just so much easier to search for what you want and look through pictures of a bunch of patterns that are gathered in one place than scour the internet for patterns. Plus, most of the patterns available online (and also through hard copy publication) are in Rav’s database.

Finally, Ravelry is an awesome place to get help or feedback on your projects. If you are having a problem with knitting, dyeing, spinning, or whatever, there is a forum on Rav where you can ask and get an answer (or read the answer to someone else who asked the same question.) Check it out; if you’re a fiber fiend like me, you won’t be disappointed!

Dyet Yarns blog posts by Adrian "Nuri" Steinhauer are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

After spinning some nice, fine merino on my spindle, I had two long bobbins of tiny singles. I started plying the two of them together as a 2-ply, and the yarn was just SO TINY that I decided I needed another method. I wanted a nice, smooshy yarn, so I decided to try making a 6-ply yarn by double Navajo plying it.

Navajo plying is basically making a long crochet chain with your singles and then letting the twist run up your chain. Generally you do a very large loop and hold the tail together with the loop for a 3-ply yarn. When the twist gets almost up to the top of the loop, you pull the tail through to make another big loop.

On a spindle, I find the park and spin method to be the easiest, since the plying takes two hands to set up. I set up my loop to be as long as I can while still holding the spindle off the floor. Then I pull a little bit of the tail through the top of the loop to make a tiny starter loop for the next one. Holding the top of the big loop together with my starter loop, I then twist the spindle and let it twist until it stops on its own (the works for a bulky yarn because the yarn has enough resistance to stop the spindle when it’s balanced. Smaller yarns you will have to watch so they don’t overtwist.) Then I roll up the plied yarn, park the spindle, and pull the starter loop into a new big loop. Repeat until all of your singles are gone! I can put up a photo tutorial on this next time I ply. Most of the videos of N-plying online are for a spinning wheel, but it’s the same idea.

Basically, I Navajo-plied both singles together at the same time. The result is a very bulky yarn that is super soft and squishy. I’m hoping I have enough to make a little hat out of; I might combine it with something else to get a full project out of it. Anyway, here is the TARDIS-colored result of my 3rd effort at handspinning yarn:

Pretty!

(PS, don’t forget to enter the Giveaway this week!)

Dyet Yarns blog posts by Adrian "Nuri" Steinhauer are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

From time to time I have little leftovers from my shop, or I find a bargain that’s just too good to pass up. Since everyone is being thrifty these days (and as a shameless way to get feedback), I’m going to offer some of these goodies to you guys!

Here’s how the Giveaways will work:
I post with the yarn (or other goodies) that are available. I tell you how to get your name into the drawing pool and when the drawing will happen. Everyone’s name goes into a numbered list. You can be on the list multiple times if you get bonus entries. I will randomly select a winner using a random number generator and announce the winner in a new post. Winner emails me their mailing address and I mail the yarn to them! (Because I’m paying for postage, I can only extend this offer to US and Canada residents.) Simple, right?

So let’s see how well it works. Here’s the first one:

60 grams of hand painted Creme de Luxe yarn in the color “A Rose By Any Other Name.” This yarn is sport weight and 50% Alpaca, 30% Fine Merino Wool, and 20% Silk.

Isn’t it pretty? To enter your name, comment on this post telling me how you found my blog/store. (ON THE BLOG, LJ cross-post readers. YOU MUST COMMENT ON THE BLOG SITE.) You get a bonus entry for anyone who found this site through you, so make sure they mention your name in their comment! (If you have a common name, please include an initial or use an alias.) Also please read the Rules!

Winner will be selected Tuesday, July 27, one week from the date of this post as long as there is at least one entry!

Dyet Yarns blog posts by Adrian "Nuri" Steinhauer are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

This weekend we cleaned all the things. Well, almost all of them. We didn’t get to the bedroom because we ran out of time, but that part of the apartment is the easiest anyway; it’s air conditioned. The rest of the apartment is not, so the nice weather this weekend presented a pressing need to do some cleaning while it was actually livable in the rest of the place.

The kitchen (dishes, stove, floors) was standard cleaning, but the major obstacle this weekend was the Walk-In Closet of Hoardy DOOM. There a nice, big closet that has been filled with half-full boxes of Stuff (mostly junk, Warhammer bits, and miscellaneous Things) that needed to be sorted and consolidated.

With that goal in mind, we hit the stores in search of wire cubby cube thingies. We finally found them at Target in the college section. (I may have also used this trip as an excuse to buy a plastic tub for hand-painting fibers. Don’t judge me.) Hooray! We bought enough to make 12 cubic cubbies, which definitely came in handy.

Here is everything we pulled out of the closet (plus the chairs from the kitchen while floor-mopping was happening):

CRAZY! It looks like a lot, but what you can’t see is that half of those things are empty, and half of the non-empty ones are half-full. It only really took us Sunday afternoon/evening to go through everything. Now the yarn is well-organized inside zippy bags on the shelves, and so are the media, bits for miniature gaming, and our SCA garb.

The kitchen is also nice and clean, with a mopped floor and a whole lot of clean dishes!

But most importantly, check this out: You can actually see (and walk on) the floor in our closet! Woo HOO!

One nice thing was that we left time on Saturday after shopping to do some projects for ourselves. P got to brew a new batch of beer, and I got to dye some Corriedale top I’m itching to spin as well as a special batch of sock yarn that is a prize reserved for a Shawl Wars game I’ll be playing on Ravelry this fall. Here are the fruits!

These are both hand painted, which was blessedly easier now that I have the plastic tub. I got one of those shallow under-the-bed rubbermaid bins that’s nice and long, and that way I don’t have to worry about dye running off onto the floor or things like that.

Overall it was a super-productive weekend! I even have some Creme de Luxe and some girly sock yarn to list on Etsy this week; I’m also going to do my first Giveaway (a bit of that Creme de Luxe!) this week, so keep an eye out for free yarn!

Dyet Yarns blog posts by Adrian "Nuri" Steinhauer are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

I dyed the last of my BFL top that I got earlier this summer. Or at least, I tried to; I was using food coloring, and trying to avoid over-acidifying the reds so they would actually stay in the fiber. Of course, this meant the dye mostly ran off the fiber and didn’t set! Grr! It was supposed to be dark chocolate browns and caramels, and it turned into Autumn leaf colors!

Luckily, I like those colors, so it’s all good; I just wasted some dye. Since I’m in the process of switching over to Jacquard dyes anyway, no biggie. Next batch of fiber will be more acidic!

New yarn turned out gorgeous anyway; this is my second attempt at spindle spinning. The plies are much more even than the first batch, though there are still some thick/thin bits. I’m going to make a hat!

Dyet Yarns blog posts by Adrian "Nuri" Steinhauer are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.