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April has been a busy month for the blog. This is mainly due to my small skeins and small knitting projects. There has been a lack of thoughtful written content, just "here's a skein I spun" or "here's another baby hat..." It use to be that I'd have a huge project with a whole fleece or something and you wouldn't hear from me for weeks. Well, here I go again...

These two skeins were made from some roving that I dyed a while back. One hank of roving was dyed blue, red and GREEN---which was a horrible mistake. Red and Green, really? That would ply up into a huge mess. So I pulled out all of the green and spun the red and blues together. Then I took the leftover green and added it to some teal scrap roving. In the end I had two skeins that I liked.

Talk to you in May.

A Small Pink Skein

This BFL top was dyed with jacquard acid dyes. After applying red, orange, and purple, I thought it looked horrible and squeezed out the dye within a few minutes. I was thinking that I'd redye or over-dye it at first, but after seeing the shade that it turned out, I went ahead and processed it with heat.
I spun it into a 2-ply yarn. Now I'm working on (another!) baby hat. Good thing I know a lot of babies, because I can't stop knitting baby hats.

Was it Shetland?

I'm notorious for not labeling any of my fiber materials. I know I dyed this, but I have no idea what it is. It might have been Shetland roving. Either way, I spun it up and plied it into a 2-ply yarn. The white spots don't look right. Now that I've done some dying of roving, I realize that you either have to leave a lot of the natural color (white) or dye over all of it. If you leave just a little bit, then you get the random white spot that looks out of place.

More Yarn from the Weekend

This week is passing quickly. Here's another skein from last weekend. This is Merino top that I spaced dyed with lots of bright yellow, some teal green and some lime green.

Weekend Spinning

Last weekend I got some spinning done. Mostly I was spinning roving that I had dyed a while back. Sunday was sunny and gorgeous so I took this photo outside in the bright light.

A Few More Baby Caps

I made a few more baby hats. They are fun to make because they take less than 2 hours and they use up my hand spun scraps. This idea was inspired by Cosymakes. Her designs have that look of the exposed stitches (purl rows) like in the baby sweaters that she makes. After I made my Baby Caps, I saw the Tahoe Hat in Spin-off. I'm not too fond of the way that they photographed the Tahoe Hats in the magazine. You can't really tell what they look like. At first I thought they were Berets. I'm mentioning this because it's another example of using up hand spun for little projects like my baby caps.

More Baby Caps

Here's the recipe: Cast on a number of stitches divisible by 11 (Some hats I cast on 55, others 66). Connect and (Row 1)knit in the round. I use dpns. Row 2:purl, Row 3:knit, Row 4:purl, Row 5:knit, Row 6 change color if desired and purl. Then knit in the round until you want to make a purl stripe. If you are using a second color, work that in the purl round so that it creates that contrasting stitch look. When I felt like adding a purl row, I did. At the top, when you are ready to reduce: Row 1: k9, k2tog, repeat to the end
Row 2: k8, k2tog, repeat to the end
Row 3: k7, k2tog, repeat to the end
Row 4: k6, k2tog, repeat to the end
Row 5: k5, k2tog, repeat to the end
Row 6: k4, k2tog, repeat to the end
Row 7: k3, k2tog, repeat to the end
Row 8: k2, k2tog, repeat to the end
Row 9: k1, k2tog, repeat to the end
Row10: k2tog to the end. Leave a 10" tail and break the yarn. With a needle on the yarn, slip it through the remaining stitches and pull in through the inside of the hat and weave in the end. Weave in any other ends.