Dyet Yarns: Adventures in Fiber » selfish

Shameless Self Promotion: Giveaway 1

Nuri — Sat, 05 May 2012 18:52:01 +0000

As some of you already know, I am running a Kickstarter campaign during the month of May. We are currently 14% funded! The beauty of Kickstarter is that if you don’t get enough backing, the project isn’t funded and no one is out any money. That doesn’t mean I’m not gonna try my darndest to get the word out and succeed!

There will be several Giveaways on the blog this month to promote the campaign. This is the first one. It is open to all, including international readers, backers and non-backers alike. (I will pay ordinary shipping costs, but International entrants are responsible for any additional customs fees incurred. Value of prize is $16.)

The Prize:
This 3.9 oz. of 60s Superwash Merino, hand-dyed by me in the “harvest” colorway.

How To Enter:
1. Reply to this post (must reply to original post on DyetYarns.com, not a cross-post) with your favorite non-zodiac constellation, and tell me why it’s your favorite.
2. You may gain additional entries by sharing the link to the Kickstarter project and posting one comment for your shares telling me where you shared (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Blog, etc). ( http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1646672212/written-in-the-stars-a-collection-of-visual-and-fi )
3. Entries close on May 9, 2012.

How A Winner is Chosen:
1. Each comment will be assigned a number according to the order they are posted. (First comment is 1, second is 2, etc.)
2. The Random.org random number generator will be used to pick the winning comment number.
3. The winner will be posted on the Blog and emailed for their shipping address. If the winner does not respond within one week, a new winner will be chosen.

This is shameless self-promotion; you do not have to back my Kickstarter project unless you want to. No pledge or purchase necessary for this Giveaway. Thanks Everyone!

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

Tour de Fleece 2012

Nuri — Tue, 01 May 2012 19:06:58 +0000

It’s coming! Preparations and Team Signups have opened on Ravelry.

The Tour de Fleece is a challenge month for spinners that runs parallel to the Tour de France. The idea is that while they’re spinning their wheels, we’re spinning ours! (Spindles are mini-wheels; they totally count.) Of course I will once again be participating in this lovely tradition, as it marks the anniversary of my introduction to spinning my own yarn. Last year I was quite productive; I finished most of the yarn for two sweaters and learned a new technique.

Here’s my haul from last July:

And a close-up of the yarn from the new technique challenge: corespun!

Corespinning is when you have a “core” yarn that you wrap the fiber around, completely covering the core. It takes a long time, but it produces some gorgeous yarn! If you have awesome, colorful fiber with lots of elements you want to show off, this can be a good method of achieving that. I am planning a video tutorial of my own on this technique towards the end of May to show you how I do it, but there are a few good ones for varying ways of corespinning already out on the web if you want to check them 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.

Rhinebeck!

Nuri — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 14:54:12 +0000

This year I attended Rhinebeck with a couple of lovely ladies from a Rav swap group I participate in. We had a great time checking out the fibery goodness, meeting up with other Ravelers, and seeing the animals.

Yes, I am poor. However, I got a job this semester and I am making enough money to pay for my fiber habit and fill the budget gap. So for Rhinebeck, I set a budget and stuck to it; this round of fiber purchasing was my birthday present to myself and my only real splurge this semester, so I had to make it good. (Okay, I ended up adding a few things from Phat Fiber contributors who weren’t at Rhinebeck to the splurge… but that’s another post.)

Here are the goodies!

First we stopped by the Sanguine Gryphon booth. I *needed* some green Bugga. Even though the line was terrible. We were in the line to check out for more than an hour, but J and T were sweeties and stood in line for me while I went and got a thorough demonstration of the Strauch Petite drum carder from Otto Strauch himself. It’s the one I’m saving up for (it will be at least a year before I can afford it), and he was more than willing to answer all of my questions. He stands behind his work, and everyone gives the Strauch carders such great reviews! Anyway, here are the two skeins of Bugga!:

I also picked up some batts. A 4 oz. bag of textured art batts by Crosspatch Creations:

And a 2 oz. smooth aqua batt from Fairie Mountain Fibers (hee hee, Aquabat) to go with it:

After that we hit up the meetup for our swap group, and then stated the rest of our shopping. While waiting for T at the Briar Rose Fibers booth, I wandered into Creatively Dyed Yarns and found this 8 oz. braid of wool and seacell:

It makes me think of a rose garden. I am thinking I might get some braids or batts in rose colors – yellow, orange, pink – to spin up and ply with it. It will make a significant quantity of yarn, about 4 standard skeins, if I do that. I could even make a sweater. I’ll have to consider projects carefully.

Two other ladies were on my list: Loop and Gale’s Art. Both are members of Phat Fiber, and I have never had a chance to work with their products. Gale had a stunning selection (her colors are always beautiful), and I restrained myself to purchasing two things. Blueface/Silk fiber in Limited Edition:

And Blueface swirl fiber in Velvet Elvis:

At Loop, it was fairly late in the day and the Spontaneous Spinning Batts had been picked over. Pretty much everything left had mohair in it, so I perused the bags of cloud and found a lovely deep red that didn’t have anything to irritate my annoying delicate princess skin. The color is “The Devil Made Me Do It,” and the fiber is scrumptious. This will be turned into a supercoiled yarn:

So there you have it. The haul for the day. I was fortunate enough to get a Rav button at the gathering on the lawn, so now when I go to fiber events I will have an identifying mark! Yay!

I also got asked about the patterns for both my sweater and legwarmers several times, which of course I haven’t actually written yet. So that’s a kick in the pants. I need to get my patterns written, test knitted, and cranked 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.

Sneak Peek of New Cashmere Blend

Nuri — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:39:57 +0000

I’ve been doing a whole lot of dyeing lately; I am moving on July 4, and I have to get rid of my washing machine and dryer before the move. That means I won’t have them in my new apartment, which doesn’t have a hook-up for them. This will make my dyeing a little more difficult, since I don’t currently have a spin-dryer. I will get one when I can afford it. In the meantime, dyeing while I still can do it easily!

In that vein…

I give you Tequila Sunrise, a 55% cashmere 45% wool yarn. It’ll be up in the store soon!

I just LOVE the way cashmere takes up dye. It sucks it right up and the colors are vibrant and mix well. I’m still debating whether to keep some of this yarn for myself!

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

Sock Yarn Success!

Nuri — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:07:52 +0000

I have two things to report on before I go off on a wild convention run this weekend. The first is that I successfully dyed four (FOUR!) batches of recycled yarn that I think will work great for socks. I used two different kinds of base yarns (two sweaters). The first is the one I wrote about in the last post. The light pink sweater that unraveled easily and smoothly ended up in 4 hanks, and I dyed two of them (for me! Yarn for ME!). Here’s how they came out, with a hank of the original pink color for comparison:

The first is a medium blue color with speckles of purple. After dyeing the yarn the base blue color, I dripped some extra dye over the hank and let the colors break on the yarn. It gave me quite a nice effect! I can’t wait to see how it knits up. I dyed this specifically with Wendy D. Johnson’s Rivulets Socks in mind.

The second is a coral-orange semisolid that I love. I haven’t decided what sock pattern to make with it yet. I’m sure I’ll get some inspiration somewhere.

In the mean time, check out what I’ve been doing with the other batch of sock yarn I dyed!

This was just going to be a swatch, but the yarn was so soft and pretty that it just sort of turned into a sock. And…It turned out to be self-striping! I LOVE how this yarn turned out. It is an incredibly soft wool/angora blend, and it has 10% nylon for durability. I have 2 more skeins of this color and 2 skeins in a different colorway (purple and gold). They’ll be up in the Etsy store at some point.

I have decided that 75 g is the perfect amount of sock yarn for me. The sock pictured above took less than 35 g of yarn. I am curious as to how much yarn other people have left over from a 100 g skein when they knit socks. Are we wasting 25 g of yarn when we make regular-sized socks? Obviously cables will use more yarn and lace may use a little less, depending on the pattern.

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

Ahhhh…Dye High

Nuri — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:42:15 +0000

Every now and again I get a craving to dye fiber, and I just don’t feel right until I do it. Lately with all the “disasters” and whatnot going on, the craving starting coming on again. I KNOW I’m supposed to be working on making shirts and jewelry to sell at cons, but it got bad enough that last night I finally broke down and spent some time dying a sweater’s worth of nice recycled 100% Merino wool.

It’s a colorway I’ve been rolling around in my mind for awhile and will likely make again. I’m calling it “Fire in the Sky.” It’s an Orange/Blue/Purple mix on a 6-foot repeat. It’s so very pretty! I love the way it looks hanging up in hanks. I had originally planned to have yellow in there, but in the middle of dyeing it I decided the yellow wouldn’t work with the color combination. It turned out just lovely without it. I’ll have some pictures up soon!

Speaking of pictures, once I get this new yarn skeined up and labeled, I will be loading 2 new colorways into the store, so stay tuned!

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

Every Stitch is like Petting a Kitty

Nuri — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:29:50 +0000

So, I’m doing the thing that everyone says you shouldn’t do. I’m making a sweater out of Alpaca. See the thing is that I love soft, bulky yarn. Alpaca is wonderfully soft. Not terribly elastic, so not great for a sweater with elaborate designs, but this one is plain stockinette with stripes. Of course that means this is a very expensive sweater, but it was my Christmas present to myself. It could stand a little more shaping around the waist, but ultimately it’s designed to be comfortable worn over a T-shirt, so I didn’t want it too tight. I already had to frog it once to fix too-tightness.

The thing is, this is my first sweater. Ever. Well, that I’ve knitted, anyway. I’ve owned plenty of sweaters before, but they were all store-bought. I learned quite a bit along the way. Like the reason why you need to use smaller needles for ribbing. This yarn is really loosely spun (Plymouth Baby Alpaca Grande), so I dropped from US 10.5 for the body to US 6 for the ribbing on the sleeve cuffs. It’s nice and tight right now, though I’m sure it will loosen up with wear.

(It looks much better on me than on the couch, but I can’t divide myself in two at will like Dr. Manhattan.)

All that’s left is to finish the second cuff and do the neck! This brings me great joy, because:

a) I will be able to start my Clapotis when I finish this sweater. YES, I know everyone’s doing/done it. I don’t care. I found a yarn that just screamed “Make me A Clap!” to me and I’ll make it if I want to. So there.

b) I have used EXACTLY the amount of yarn that I bought for this sweater. After the neck, I won’t have any extra balls laying around. There will be small remnants, but I can use those for needle-felting.

Both of these are great for my Yarn Diet! The Clap will be another simple stockinette pattern I can work on when I don’t want to have to think too much, so it’s a great follow-up project to this one.

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

Socks on the Brain

Nuri — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:01:07 +0000

I really want to experiment with different techniques for knitting socks, but summer convention season is coming up. Since I also sell geekery-related items at anime/sci-fi cons, I have to put aside my obsessive knitting for a bit and focus on making stock for the other business. I have a little less than 2 months to stock up for 2 shows, and all my items are handmade. Which is fine…except that I can’t stop looking at sock yarn!

Etsy has some lovely hand-dyed and hand-painted skeins. A lot of the colors I like are pure wool and don’t have nylon in the mix, which makes me sad. However, they’re still super pretty!

The only good thing is that hand-dyed yarn is so expensive that I can easily justify not buying it yet. Especially since I don’t have the time to knit it and I’m on a yarn diet! For now, I will dye my own sock yarn and use that for my experimental learning time. After all, I still have 100 g of bare sock yarn to work with before I go out and buy more. Ah well…a girl can dream!

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

Self-Striping Sock Yarn

Nuri — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:30:47 +0000

I finished a project! The crochet baby blanket I was making for Michelle is finally done. There’s some weirdness going on there with the hood and the (incomplete) edging, but I decided I’m done with it, so I’m done.

You know what that means…according to my Diet, I get to start another project now! This is perfect, because I’ve been yearning to learn how to knit socks. I want to make a pair of plain socks for my first pair; no complicated stitch patterns or lace to mess with me while I’m learning to turn a heel. That means I want some snazzy yarn to make the socks fun. I’ve been thinking for a few days about what color combination to use. I generally wear a lot of blues and greens, but I wanted something different this time. I decided a peach-orange-burgundy-yellow combination would be awesome!

I ordered some blank superwash wool/nylon sock yarn from KnitPicks with my latest order (they had new tools, and I just had to try the modular blocking mats!) in 100 gram hanks. For this project, I doubled up one of the hanks so I would get two identically dyed balls (one for each sock) and then wound the doubled yarn into 5 connected mini skeins.

Well, I didn’t quite get peach (bottom right)…it came out a bit brighter orange than I’d hoped, but hey, it’s cool anyway! Also learned a valuable lesson about using bamboo skewers when dyeing. They’re great for dishing out color and stirring the dye, but don’t use them to handle the yarn! They grab the fibers. I’ll post pictures when I finish the post-processing of the yarn. I absolutely love the copper and burgundy colors. I think I’m going to use those together again soon.

Anyway, first step in sock knitting project complete! Yarn dyed. Now I just have to learn to actually knit the things!

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

Selfish Knitting and Saying No

Nuri — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:41:19 +0000

This weekend I finished reading Knitting: a novel by Anne Bartlett. The novel captivated me at the very beginning with its tactile descriptions of knitting. It made me want to try knitting lace (which I have) and to knit for myself. The book is a great story, and a fairly short read. I picked up my hardback copy from the local Borders for less than $5 (after taxes), so the price was great too! Overall I found the writing enjoyable and was able to immerse myself in the story.

I definitely recommend this as a read for any knitter; non-knitters may be a bit bored with the book at times. The story teaches a great lesson about knowing your limits and taking time to knit for yourself. There is quite a bit of knitting in the story! I would like to offer a word of caution to those who adhere to the Selfish Knitters’ manifesto: This book will irritate the living snot out of you. Seriously. Be prepared for a good read, but understand that you will want to yell at one of the main characters throughout the entire second half of the book. My thoughts below contain a minor plot spoiler, but nothing that will ruin the experience of reading the novel. Read at your own risk.

The book focuses on two characters. Martha is a knitter whose husband died many years ago. Sandra is a textiles scholar who just lost her husband a year before, and is having a hard time coping. (This is all on the book jacket.) They meet and plot ensues. Eventually, Sandra asks Martha to do something that would have made me laugh in her face if I had been asked to do it all by myself, no matter what my skill level.

You see, to me knitting is a labor of love, and it is my personal opinion that it should only be done because you want to do it. If you want to knit things professionally, then go for it…but stop when it becomes stressful and no longer fun. When I try to knit something I don’t want to knit, my fingers feel clumsy and I make tons of mistakes. Eventually it gets so frustrating that I throw it into a drawer and leave it for months (or years). Most of those projects end up being frogged…I just don’t care enough to finish them.

There is a group on Ravelry called Selfish Knitters, and they have some very good points. Everyone deserves love, but some people are greeting-card-love worthy and some people are hand-knit-socks-love worthy. Sandra asked Martha to do something that required her to devote all of her knitting time until the deadline to Sandra’s project. No time to knit for herself, no buffer in case she got sick or needed a break…Sandra just assumed Martha could do it. She had no clue how long things would take or the effort involved. And Martha…Martha didn’t have the willpower to stand up for herself and say no.

Make no mistake; I am mad at Martha, not Sandra. Sandra is not a knitter. Sandra doesn’t know any better. Martha should have had the backbone to stand up for herself and say no! No, I will not knit your entire exhibition for you in that short of a time. Give me more time or get me some help, and I will be happy to contribute. I want you to understand exactly how much work goes into something like this!

Oh Martha, I know you are a fictional character, but when we don’t educate people who think knitting is easy (and cheaper than buying a mass-manufactured equivalent in a store), it is up to us to disabuse them of that notion. Handmade does not mean cheap! Generally handmade items tend to be one-of-a-kind. People put hours of their time into making these things. In America, we have a minimum wage. Do you know what it would cost you to pay me to make you a sweater if I billed you at minimum wage and then added the cost of the yarn? At least two-hundred dollars. That is correct, a store-bought sweater is cheaper. No, I will not lower my price just because of that. If you want something handmade, be prepared to pay for it.

I am a Selfish Knitter. This doesn’t mean I don’t make gifts for other people. What it means is that when I knit for someone, it is because they are knitworthy. They will show appropriate appreciation for the gift and not just chuck it in a drawer and never wear it. They will not belittle the effort I put into it or pick out flaws in an otherwise-beautiful and functional gift. I knit for people I love, and I keep a mental list. Believe me when I say that if I knit for you, you are special to me. I will not complain if you don’t wear my gift, or if you nit-pick about it, but it’s unlikely you will receive anything handmade from me again. If the hat that you asked me to custom-make for you sits on a shelf in your mother’s room for years after I gave it to you, you will likely receive a book for Christmas instead of a handknit gift. It’s not that I don’t love you anymore; if that were the case I wouldn’t bother with a gift at all. But why would I spend my time and effort on a lovely gift for someone who doesn’t want it? I do not make things to be put on a shelf and never used. I encourage every knitter to become a selfish knitter. Appreciate what you can do. Inform those around you, when asked, of just how long it takes to make that lace wrap or textured sweater. Show them how much your beautiful Noro yarn costs! People need to understand that a hand-knit garment is not cheaper, but it can certainly be beautiful and is a one-of-a-kind product. The ones responsible for teaching them are us, the knitters. We cannot simply expect everyone to understand. When asked, we must have the courage to say no if necessary, and if we can, explain why we are saying no.

This is one of the book’s main points, and the ending is suitably transformative. Anyone who has felt pressured in their knitting or unappreciated by a recipient should give this book a read.

If you haven’t learned how to say no yet…now is as good a time as any to start.

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