Rescuing the Mistakes and other news

OK, the yarn I dyed that I mentioned in the last post?  Problems, problems, problems!

The eight skeins of Mardi Gras were all wrong.  I didn’t have any more plum, so I mixed up what I’d hoped would be right.  Wrong!  It came out kind of reddish brown.  And then the green ran into the yellow on about 3 skeins.  And then it turned out that what the gal wanted was the brighter colors (not the subtle ones I’d come up with first.)  So, I overdyed all of the Mardi Gras skeins with Gaywool indigo in a kettle on the store.  It took about 2 hours.  They’re good.  The yellow parts came out dark green, the reddish brown parts came out a deep violet with reddish parts, and the rest is a lovely dark blue.  There are a couple of odd spots where the dye didn’t take, but it’s all salvageable and I’ll be knitting a pullover from it.

The 2 skeins of sock wool and the 4 skeins of cotton/silk yarn dyed in blue would never rinse clear.  I tried soaking them in Dharma Trading’s new substitute for Synthrapol (less expensive and better for the environment), but that didn’t work.  Then I soaked them anew in a vinegar bath for about 15 – 20 minutes (completely submerged this time, too) and that did the trick.  No more running blue water.  It just needed a much longer bath and better soaking than I’d done the first time.

I finished up the “secret socks” and submitted the pattern to Knitty yesterday.  In the meantime, I’ve been slogging away at the socks for my SIL Joan.

I’ve also been having major “start-itis” problems.”  I’d been given a bag of some leftover balls of Rowan wool which I’d started knitting into a feather-and-fan pattern.  I screwed up the pattern on about the 12^th row.  And I’d already knit like 5 colors!  So, I pulled it all out and started crocheting it into a basket weave pattern that is so far going well (and easier to fix if you make a mistake in the pattern).  Then I started crocheting a doily from a silk lace-weight yarn (“Black Walnut” by Claudia Handpaints), but I screwed up that right at the start and needed to rip it all out.  Luckily, I hadn’t gotten too far on it.  Last night I tried casing on a simple top-down pullover, but I pulled it all out after 6 rows because I didn’t like the yarn I was using for that size of a needle.  So, I gave up and started sorting out all of my needles (again).  Oh, and that doesn’t count trying to make a scarf in the pattern of a Japanese tea shawl (found in Folk Shawls).  I got the garter rows all done then learned on the first row of the pattern stitch that I’d cast on about 3 stitches too many.  Yuck.

The dyeing mojo seems to be working.  I’ll concentrate on that and keep knitting my SIL’s socks until the creative knitting mojo comes back.