Go forth and fill your libraries with media.
Seriously, thanks to everyone for being so amazing and patient. You are the reason I love Vox.
I was just told that the Amazon Conduit will be fixed by tomorrow. I will post here as soon as I get word that it's back up and running.
I know this has been frustrating and I am sorry there wasn't more I could do to make it less so. I really appreciate your patience though.
Cheers,
Bad news. As many of you have probably noticed, the Amazon Conduit was not fixed in the last week's release. Unfortunately, there was an undetected bug that is preventing the conduit from working.
We are working on this bug fix and hope to have the Conduit back up and running this week.
I will keep you posted.
Thank you for being so patient.
Blog Action Day is every October 15th, when blogger are asked to post something about a single issue to show our strength and conviction as an online community. It's a great way to feel connected to the greater good, and the participation of so many bloggers to support the world's leading non-profit organizations is something you can do to help, right now. By blogging today, you're supporting some of the world's leading non-profits and sharing your voice for change.
This year's topic is climate change, and we'd love to read your thoughts on the topic. If you participate, leave us a link to your post in the comments, so we know to check out your post!
Go to www.blogactionday.org to learn more, get a badge for your blog showing your participation, and see some ideas for your post on climate change.
Can't wait to read your posts!
~ daisy
A while back M. and I did some experimentation with yarn dying with kool-aid. I tell you what, if you are wanting to kick a kool-aid habit, dying yarn with it should do it for you. It's kind of creepy how well it dyes the yarn. Kind of makes you wonder what it does to our insides. We started off with Knit Picks Bare Merino Wool Fingering weight yarn.
We did a couple of skeins of just solid. One with pink lemonade kool-aid for M. and one with black cherry kool-aid for me.
Then we branched out into multi-colored yarns. We tried two, three, and four colors:
I got the idea of hanging the yarn into the quart jars of kool-aid from a tutorial on the web. I thought the yarn above the jars would absorb the color, but it didn't, so I ended up with sections of undyed yarn in the multi-colored skeins. Here is the finished yarn from the first dying. It's hanging to dry outside on our patio.
I like the white sections in some of the color combos, but not all of them. Also, some of them turned out a little brighter/more pastel than I wanted, so I overdyed a few skeins a couple of weeks ago.
The skein on the left was originally dyed with orange and black cherry and then I overdyed it with a mixture of both orange and black cherry. The skein in the middle was originally dyed with tropical punch, grape, and lemonade and then overdyed with blue raspberry. The skein on the right was dyed with black cherry and then overdyed with grape. I'm pleased with how the over dyed skeins have come out. I have one more skein that I might overdye, but I haven't gotten it done yet.
I've started knitting with one of our dyed yarns. M. requested a pair of socks out of the pink lemonade dyed skein. This was specifically her skein.
This was the first skein that we dyed and I sort of messed it up, but it ended up being a happy accident. I had the kool-aid too concentrated and not enough water in the bowl to fully emerse the yarn, which meant that the color wasn't evenly distributed and there were some paler and even white spots. I was really upset with myself for messing up M.'s yarn, but it actually turned out really neat.
Just based on the kool-aid experience, I don't think I'll ever become a serious yarn dyer. It was a fun experiment, but not anything that I would want to do too much of. Plus there are so many fabulous indy dyed yarns out there for sale, that I'm not lacking for yarn!
This has already been a crazy fall and it's going to get crazier as it goes on. On the school/career front, I have started collecting data for my dissertation. This has eaten up a huge chunk of my time and has created a constant stream of things that I need to do each day. I should be done by the end of this week and I'll be relieved when it's over. I will then move directly into doing job interviews. We do everything way in advance in the accounting field, so I'll be interviewing for faculty positions that will start next fall. I've done one already and have more over the coming weeks. These interviews are all day affairs with research and sometimes teaching presentations and two days of travel to get there and then home again, so they are both fun and exhausting. Plus sometime in there I have to analyze the dissertation data and get it written up.
On to a more fun topic... knitting! I have finished up a number of projects that I haven't had time to blog about, so I'll just give quick details and pictures on each. The first up is the Wisp.
Over the summer, just about everyone my LYS made this out of the pattern yarn (Rowan Kidsilk Haze) and I just didn't like it. I think I just don't like that yarn because at some point someone made one out of malabrigo lace and I just loved it. After several false starts on other patterns with my Azul Profundo Malabrigo lace weight, I decided to jump on the Wisp band wagon. I knitted this on size 8 needles. I used the square circular needles which were kind of neat to knit with. The malabrigo is smaller gauged than the kidsilk haze, so it ended up a lot narrower, which was ok with me since what I really wanted was a scarf. I did 24 pattern repeats to get enough length on it.
The second project that I finished up was a pair of crazy, striped socks:
I made these out of two colorways of Noro Silk Garden Sock. One colorway was #252 and I lost the yarn band on the other colorway, so I'm not sure what it was. I think it was the same colorway that I made my very first scarf and hat out of. I used a basic sock pattern with just 12 rows of ribbing at the top and then the rest stockinette stitch. I alternated the colorways every 4 rounds on leg and foot of the sock and every 2 rows on the heel. I did the entire heel turn and toe in the non-#252 colorway. These turned out great. They are extremely warm and dense though, so I haven't gotten to wear them yet. I look forward to wearing them on some dreary day this winter when my dissertation and job search has me stressed and depressed, because really how can one not be happy when wearing crazy striped socks.
The next project was a quick little hat. I joined a Halloween Vampire swap on Ravelry. It's been fun. It's kind of like secret santa except that it's for Halloween and it's supposed to have a vampire theme. My spoilee for the swap appears to be a big Twilight fan, so I knitted her on of the patterns that were designed to replicate the hat that Bella wore in the movie on the beach at La Push.
I actually didn't care for the hat in the movie, but I've decided it's just the way the actress is wearing it. I had M. model the hat it looks adorable on her. I think I'm going to knit her one now. The hat knits up fast, but it's a killer on the hands. It's moss stitch, knitted in bulky yarn on size 7 needles.
The final project that I've finished up is what I have dubbed my "Vampire Scarf":
This is actually the Montego Bay Scarf pattern. I love this pattern and tried to knit it out of a different yarn a while back, but that yarn just wasn't right for this pattern. This time, I've knitted it in the much coveted Wollmeise Sockenwolle 100% Superwash yarn in the Rosenrot colorway. I call this my vampire scarf because I started knitting it only while watching True Blood this summer and then finished up while watching the Twilight movie and The Vampire Diaries. I love the scarf. I think my favorite part is the fringe, which is the only modification I made. The fringe was supposed to be braided with five strands folded double and I didn't like how thick the braids were, so I made them with three strands folded over.
M. and I did some kool-aid dying of yarn a while back and I overdyed some of it just recently, but I'm going to put those pictures in another post.
The Amazon Conduit will be working again on October 15, 2009. Thank you to everyone for your patience.
Have a great weekend,
daisy, Team Vox
Behold, my "Blanket of Insanity", a work in progress. When I was looking at quilt patterns and quilting material for the quilt that my grandmother made me, I fell in love with scrap quilts. I have tried three different times to learn to sew, once as a child, once a teenager, and once as an adult, and it has never stuck, so there is no way I will ever become a quilter or make myself a scrap quilt. Then I heard about sock yarn blankets, which seem to be the knitters equivalent to scrap quilts. These are blankets knit out of leftover sock yarn. I favorited a bunch of these on Ravelry, but never found a pattern that I just fell for. They all seemed so complicated that I felt like I would need to knit it all at once or else forget how to do it. Then I found the Zig Zag Pram Blanket pattern. I love zig zagged stripes as evidenced by the quilt I did have my grandmother make me and it's a simple enough pattern that I don't think I'll forget what I'm doing if I don't knit on it for a while. The pattern was for a small baby blanket, but I wanted a larger blanket, so I cast on 361 stitches instead of the stitch count called for by the pattern. I was hoping this would give me 5' wide blanket. I measured today and it's 56" wide, so not quite 5', but close. I also decided that it would drive me nuts to try to put a solid border around it as I go, so I decided to just skip the border.
I bought a set of size 7 circular needles with something like a six foot cable on them that I could just dedicate to this project. The plan was to knit up all of the sock yarn scraps that I currently have and then just put the blanket aside and knit in the leftovers each time I finish a pair of socks or any other project that uses sock weight yarn. I now have all of my scraps on hand knit in and the blanket is about 19" long. The yarns included so far are (from bottom of blanket up to the needles):
· Knit Picks Essential Sock Yarn Navy – used for garter stitch bottom border, never knit with before.
· Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock Medium weight Lemongrass – leftover from chevron scarf.
· Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock Medium weight Rolling Stone – left over from chevron scarf.
· Colinette Jitterbug Toscana – left over from first pair of simple socks.
· Brown Sheep Wildfoote Luxury Socks Brown Sugar – left over from second pair of simple socks (Wasn’t knitting up well with the size 7 needles, only knit a partial row with it and then switched to a different yarn).
· Claudia Handpaints Yarn Fingering Dessert Dusk – left over from the Dickerson Park Monkey socks.
· Claudia Handpaints Yarn Fingering Hokies – left over from the Hokie walker socks. This is the yarn that I traded S. for that turned our fingers orange.
· Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock Medium weight Farmhouse – leftover from second chevron scarf.
· Collinete Jitterbug Velvet Leaf – left over from second chevron scarf.
· Shubui Knits Socks 5001 – left over from nutkins socks.
· Claudia Handpaints Yarn Fingering Hokies – left over from Hokie socks for M.
· Misty Mountain Farms Jubilee Evergreen – left over from Broadripple socks.
· Pagewood Farms Alyeska Fabulous Fall – left over from Fawkes Sawkes.
My initial estimate was that this blanket might take me 20 years to finish, but I'm saved by the fact that I knit short socks and thus generally have a lot of yarn left over. Now I'm thinking that it might only take me 5 years to finish. I've also been weaving the ends in as I go so that I don't have hours worth of ends to weave in once I'm done.
I'll keep you updated on this one as I go. The only bad thing about these blanket is that now that I have all of my scraps knit in, I almost hate to finish the socks that I currently have on the needles, because that means more scraps!
I feel in love with the Wicked Sweater a while ago. According to the pattern, the short sleeved version in my size could be made with three skeins of Malabrigo. Spring before last, thats right, Spring of 2008, when my LYS first really started carrying Malabrigo, I bought three skeins of the beautiful Azul Profundo colorway to make the sweater.
The Malabrigo laid idle in my stash while I spent the rest of 2008 knitting Christmas gifts and then spent the first part of 2009 catching up on the other projects in my queue while at the same time getting distracted by new exciting projects. A few weeks ago I found these great striped long-sleeved shirts at Old Navy that I thought would look fantastic under the Wicked. I bought 4 different colors of the shirts and finally busted out the yarn and pattern for the Wicked. The first thing that I do now when I start a new project is go to Ravelry and see if anyone has made the pattern in the same yarn to get an idea on how gauge ran with that yarn and how the fit was and that sort of thing. I immediately started getting nervous when I discovered that many of the people who made the sweater in the two sizes I was contemplating used more than 3 skeins of Malabrigo. Many of these folks had skipped the kangaroo pocket, but had made the sweater longer, so I was holding out hope that I would be ok.
I had a hard time deciding what size to make this sweater. My bust size hit right at the break between the medium and the large. Several folks noted that this sweater was a good fit with zero or negative ease and since I was worried about the amount of yarn I had, I went with the medium. I knit this on size 8 needles although I think now that I probably should have gone up to 9's as I was a little small on gauge. The sweater is definitely fitted. I was a little worried that it was a bit too fitted, but several friends have assured me that it looks good.
As you can see, I also skipped the kangaroo pocket. I was worried about the amount of yarn I had and I thought it was going to hit me in an awkward and unflattering spot. I wish I would have made it a little longer and even though I was tight on yarn, I would have had enough to make it a tad longer. Unfortunately at the point that I made the length decision, I still had to finish up the arms and didn't know how much yarn that would take.
In the original pattern the bottom band of the sweater is supposed to be knit in seed stitch to mirror the seed stitch border around the kangaroo pocket, but since I skipped the kangaroo pocket, I just did the bottom in the same rib as the neckline. I of course managed to screw this rib up. You are supposed to alternate the set of knit stitches that you do the crossover stitch on, so that you have a 4 row repeat in the rib, but I misread the pattern and did the crossover on the same set of knit stitches every time so that I have alternating knit stitches with the crossover and straight knit stitches in the rib. I didn't discover the error until the neckline was almost done and someone at my LYS said she thought it gave the sweater more visual interest anyway, so I just kept on knitting! I just made sure to repeat the same mistake on the rib around the bottom of the sweater and arms.
I'm not as excited about the finished product here as I was about the pattern before I knit it, but I think it will be a warm little sweater for casual weekend wear. I'm just worried that I won't ever be able to get over the fear that it's too fitted and won't be comfortable wearing it out in public.
In my last Team Vox post, I let you know that we're aware that the Amazon conduit is broken and that we're working to fix it. Many of you want to know when it's going to be fixed and I'm so sorry I haven't gotten back to you about that sooner.
Unfortunately, I don't have an exact date to give you, but rest assured, the Amazon conduit will be fixed in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, I'm about to finish my latest book and I could use a few suggestions as to what to read next, so... if you don't mind, let me know in the comments what's on your nightstand and/or what book you think I absolutely must read next.
Thanks! :)
