Stash Enhancement Sunday

It's highly unlikely you'll be reading this on Sunday -- it's 11:43 p.m. as I'm typing -- but I'm aiming to have this posted on Sunday. So there.

I figure Sunday is a good day for posting the week's stash enhancement, so I think this will be the first of a regular feature. Let's face it: the week where Piggy doesn't obtain new yarn is a rare one indeed.

So, quick and dirty this go 'round, since I'm short on time. Here are last week's additions to the stash chez Piggy:

British Blue Faced Leicester 4-ply/sock from The Natural Dye Studio
Don't you just love the label with the noble-looking BFL? This came to me from Susan in Scotland, who offered it in the Completely Pointless and Arbitrary Swap Group. Many thanks, Susan, I love it.

Mission Falls 136 Merino Superwash in Basil and Squash
Picked up today at Three Bags Full, at 30% off. And -- wait for it -- I have an actual plan for this.

Wollmeise Twin We're Different -- no colourway given, but I'm pretty sure it's Dunkle Kirsche
This came from a Rav destash. The plan was to have a skein I didn't really love, so I could trade it on Rav for another colourway I preferred. Not going to happen -- I adore it. Which is a good thing, as I totally buggered up the label after taking this shot, to see what it was intended to be!

So...what's new in your stash?

A pot of many colours

Twenty-five, to be precise.

I had a fabulous time in my natural dyeing workshop, 25 Natural Colours, at the Gibsons Landing Fibre Arts Festival on Saturday. The instructor, Birgit Rasmussen, was great; the 11 other participants were friendly; I learned some new things; and, as a bonus, the nature of class meant there were plenty of breaks throughout the day, meaning plenty of extra time to shop in the merchant mall!

My previous forays into natural dyeing have all been done using food-based (coffee, turmeric, black beans, avocado pits/peels) dyestuffs; alum and cream of tartar as mordants; and vinegar and ammonia as modifiers. I was excited to see how different mordants and modifiers worked.

We started with 25 mini skeins of bare wool, tied together in groups of five. The first set were left unmordanted; the second and third were mordanted in class using alum and copper, respectively; and the fourth and fifth had been pre-mordanted by Birgit, using iron and rhubarb leaf.

The dye: ground madder root, at a concentration of 95%. Into which went all 25 skeins in one batch.

Red! It worked!
After bringing the dye back up to 145F and letting the yarn cook for an hour, we removed the yarns and re-organized them into five new groups of five, each group containing an unmordanted skein, as well as one skein mordanted with alum, copper, iron and rhubarb leaf.

One set was left alone (save a quick wash and rinse), while each of the others was treated with one of four modifiers: vinegar, ammonia, copper and iron.

Birgit checking to see if the magic has happened
Then we (well, a few of the more helpful among us) separated the skeins again and laid them all in a neat row.

Yep, 25 different colours
Before we snipped them all up and put them on a sample card to take home with us for reference.

Purdy, eh?

I was so pleased with the results, I asked Birgit if I could pop a skein of pre-mordanted alpaca into the dye bath, which still had plenty of colour in it. I haven't taken a picture of it, but I'll do so soon.

This workshop was definitely the best time I've ever had in a high school chem lab. :-)

Piggy + paycheque + fibre festival = a seriously S.A.F.E.R.* stash

...and cereal for dinner for the rest of the month! This is going to be a long one, piggies.

I was on the sunny Sunshine Coast this past weekend for the Gibsons Landing Fibre Arts Festival. When I wasn't in a fabulous workshop (more on that in my next post) or admiring the beautiful work of knitters, crocheters, spinners, weavers, quilters, woodworkers and other fibre artists in the juried exhibit, I was in the merchant mall. Where considerable damage was done to my rather puny bank balance.

Following the premise that confession is good for the soul, I give you the results of the weekend's stash enhancement activities...

First up was a visit to the always-insanely energetic Shannon of Unwind Yarns and Gems, where I picked up four gorgeous skeins:

Unwind Yarns Soave Fingering
Mmmmm, cashmere for my tootsies (assuming I actually finish a pair of socks, of course)! Soave is an 80-10-10 blend of superwash merino, cashmere and nylon. I'm usually drawn to darker shades, but this one, Blazer, really called out to me.

Unwind Yarns Moonshine – handspun Blue-Faced Leicester
Shannon's commercially spun yarns are all named for wine varietals -- Soave, Merlot, Shiraz, Zinfandel, etc. -- so what better name for her handspun than Moonshine? These are in the lovely Ocean Cove colourway.

Shannon was also helping out a fellow Vancouver-area indie dyer, Kirsten from Yummy Yarn, by selling her rovings at the Unwind Yarns booth. Check out this little number:

Yummy Yarns Rambouillet
Erm...no, I still can't spin. That didn't stop me from crossing the aisle to the Knitopia booth, where, after much fondling, I finally decided on these:

West Coast Fibre Works Blue-Faced Leicester
Isn't is gorgeous? One of my fellow workshop participants was spinning some of it up in the booth; it is truly nommy.

I still have the BFL fibre I bought from Knitopia at last year's festival in my stash...so I'm really going to have to apply myself next month at the World Wide Spinning in Public Day meetup, where several spinning friends have promised to beat it into  help me learn. Fingers crossed, piglets.

My final festival purchase was also the richest:

100% Canadian cashmere fingering from Spruce Haven Farms
Hooray for Alberta cashmere goats! This stuff is indescribably soft. It will definitely be used for some kind of cowl. Mine, all mine! :-)

Of course, I didn't actually stop there. The festival ended on Saturday, and on Sunday, I paid a visit to Unwind Knit and Fibre Lounge, where Kim and her mother were unpacking from their festival booth. I scooped up a few skeins before they even made it back to the shelves:

SweetGeorgia Tough Love Sock - Summer Dusk

Malabrigo Twist

Here's the weekend's haul, all together:


They're a bit hard to spot, but there are two skeins of black Briggs and Little Heritage (that's 430 yards for $10, piggies!) picked up from Penelope Fibre Arts up there in the top right, alongside a lovely little niddy noddy (perfect for sample handspun -- I'm being optimistic, here) from Don George (no website).

I bought more than I should have, but boy, was it fun.


* Stash Adequate For Eternal Reincarnation

FO: Milo #2

Given my usual rate of completion (i.e. almost on par with the appearance of Halley's Comet), you'd think I'd waste no time engaging in a rather gauche public display of self-congratulation immediately upon a project's cast off. Especially of a project I enjoyed. And yet it's been more than three weeks since I finished Milo #2.

I completely forgot about it. Until a woman in the bus queue last week asked me if I'd 'finished that red vest yet'.

After picking my jaw up from the pavement (just what I need -- random strangers nagging me for FOs), I confirmed I had, indeed, completed it.

Milo #2
I'm afraid I don't have a nicer photo of this one; I can't post pics of my friends' daughter wearing it. So you'll just have to believe me when I tell you this turned out well. Except for the two places I joined a new skein, that is.

My usual method for joining yarns of the same colour is to just knit three or four stitches with both yarns, before dropping the old one. I did it with Milo #1, for example, and I defy you to spot the join. Turns out it doesn't work so well with the Sublime Soya Cotton used for Milo #2. You don't exactly have to strain your eyes to see the two places I joined yarns (once for a new skein, once because a section of yarn was frayed beyond repair, necessitating a cut).

Apparently what I should have done was simply drop the first yarn, start with the new yarn, and come back later to weave the two ends in -- in opposite directions. Oh well, you live and learn, eh?

Project Details (Ravelled):

Pattern: Milo, by Georgie Hallam (on Ravelry)
Yarn: Sublime Yarns Soya Cotton DK (colourway: Pomegranate), 2.3 skeins
Needles: 3.75 mm/US 5, 40 cm/16” circular
Size: 3 yrs
Started: July 15
Finished: July 31
Modifications: After measuring my 20-month-old victim, whose chest measurement was bang-on the 2-year-old size, I decided to knit the 3-year size, using a smaller needle. I knit the pattern as written, other than casting off about three centimetres early. I ended up with a short, snug tunic. Were I to do it over again, I would have stuck with the 4 mm/US 6 needle.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: this is a lovely pattern. I'm already well into a third:

Milo #3
Once I finish the never-ending Noro-Whoro Scarf – hopefully tonight or tomorrow – it’ll be back to Milo #3, this one in the 3-month size, for a co-worker’s baby-to-be.

Relationship status: it's complicated

Don't get all excited. I'm talking about yarn.

Right. So that other purchase I made last weekend was unexpected, to say the least.

Noro Silk Garden, 258
It seems I'm down with the K1P1 virus again. And this time, it's the nasty Noro Whoro strain.

I know, I know. I said I'd never knit with Noro again. I'm blaming my shopping companion, the Queen of the Noro Whoros herself. She'll deny it, of course, but that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

So, on Sunday evening, using one of the skeins above and one of a pair of skeins I bought a while ago, in another moment of temporary insanity, I cast on for the Noro Whoro scarf. And for the first little bit, I was enjoying it. I've always said Mr. Noro is very clever with his colours, and his yarn is very pretty. That's not my issue. I can even live with the occasional gaping 'vegetable matter' wound sustained while knitting.

This is what really bothers me about Noro:






Now, I understand the yarn isn't as heavily processed as other yarns, and therefore I should expect to find the weapons of mass abrasion vegetable matter, as well as the odd bit of not-entirely-uniform weight.

Fair enough. And I can even live with the occasional knot; Noro is, after all, quite easy to spit splice. But to go from worsted to super-bulky to fingering weight in a matter of a metre or two is asking a bit much of Piggy's patience. If it were gorgeously soft, maybe. But it just isn't.

(One Whoro at knit night on Monday actually attempted to convince me Silk Garden was softer than Malabrigo. She did this with a straight face, too, the nutter. Sometimes I think the Whoros really are soft in the head, bless them. I mean, really. You don't have to like Malabrigo to accept the plain empirical fact it is softer than Silk Garden.)

Then there's the randomness of the colour changes, which makes the Noro Whoro Scarf a tricky proposition. The two colourways I'm using contain an almost identical shade of green. So a little cutting and spit-splicing was done to prevent a big blur in the fabric, and I had this on Tuesday:


I was worried. I wasn't loving this. At all. After weighing my options, I decided to press on. I wanted to get all of the Noro out of my stash as quickly as possible, and that meant finishing this scarf a.s.a.p. (Frogging and handing the yarn over to a Whoro would have been quicker, of course, but the stubborn side of Piggy refused to quit.)

And here is where it gets truly exasperating. I kept knitting, and now...


...I love it again.

Sigh.

Too much is never enough

Anyone visiting chez Piggy at the beginning of August might be forgiven for having contemplated a phone call to the producers of Hoarders. There wasn’t exactly a whole lot of room to manoeuvre.

But really, there was no cause for concern; not in terms of fire hazards or filth, anyway. I was, you see, reorganizing my stash. I started by dumping it all out on the floor…


...then arranged everything by weight, rather than the aesthetically-pleasing-but-not-particularly-practical method of sorting by colour.

Inspired by Plae's recent cleaning-up-the-apartment videos, I shot a craptastically grainy one of my own at about 1 a.m. after I finished the job.


The end result: an unnecessary confirmation that I could stash for Canada. Although it’s really much worse than that: at my rate of production, I think I’m well beyond S.A.B.L.E.* status. Forget life expectancy; we’re talking S.A.F.E.R. status – Stash Adequate For Eternal Reincarnation.

Of course, this unsettling realization did nothing to prevent me from accumulating yet more yarn last weekend:

Wollmeise 100% Merino, in Happy Birthday Kristina & Petit Poison Nr. 5 Dark
These beauties came from wenat's stash; inexplicably, she wanted to be rid of them. I volunteered to buy the Happy Birthday Kristina, and when we met on Friday for the exchange, Gladys surprised me by making the Petit Poison Nr. 5 a gift. I think my jaw might have hit the floor, and rested there a wee while. My mum didn't raise a complete monster, so I did protest once or twice, but really, there's only so many times one can refuse Wollmeise, right? Many thanks again, Gladys!

Handmaiden Lace Silk in Smoke
Now this little number – 900 metres (984 yards) of 100 per cent silk – was a surprise, too. I was debating between a skein of this in a gorgeous purple shade and four skeins of Mochi Plus in pretty purples and greens. My shopping mates, MrsQuimby and beentsy, weren’t much help: they didn’t agree, meaning I needed to break the tie, which just put me back to the beginning again.

I was about to walk away with nothing, when I practically threw this skein at the cash. I had admired it earlier, and although I tend to avoid neutral colours, something about this one won me over.

I made another yarn purchase on Saturday, but more on that next time.

Never give in. Never, never, never...

How did it get to be Wednesday night already? I think I've slept most of the last couple of days away. I'm currently down with a head cold of a rather obnoxious variety -- lots of coughing, plus sinuses more stuffed than Piggy's basket at a yarn sale.

Did somebody say yarn? Um, yeah, that would be me. Moving on...

This afternoon, after an eight-hour nap, I went to the post office to send Duncks the Wollmeise Lace. Now, normally I'd be upset about sending Wollmeise Lace away, but after hearing what Dunckie plans to do with it, I'm totally over the loss. Well, 98% anyway.

She is, you see, going to use it for her wedding shawl. All together now: awwwwwwwwwwwwww! And not just any shawl, but my absolute favourite shawl design: Irtfa'a, by Anne Hanson. Which happens to be the pattern Dunckie suggested for the contest; it failed to make the short list only because I knew I wasn't ready for it.

Anyway. I'd like to announce that in a classic example of the triumph of hope over experience, I will be attempting Spring Leaves once again. I'll be frogging those five rows and starting all over in September. I'm now calling it my Festivus Leaves stole, which I think makes more sense anyway, given the yarn I'm using is the Mistelzweig (Mistletoe) colourway.

Ok, before I pass out from the cold meds, here are the two latest additions to my stash:

Socks That Rock Mediumweight, in Lucky
I picked this up in an auction in the LSG RAK group; proceeds went to a member of the group for her medical expenses. (I cannot tell you how happy I am to live in Canada. /postjack) Isn't that mini emergency skein adorable?


SweetGeorgia Tough Love Sock, in Rusted
I am hoping this will be my first pair of completed socks. Stop laughing; it could happen. They'll be for a male friend of mine, hence the rather conservative, although beautiful, colourway. Anyone have a pattern suggestion for them?

No, this will not be a contest involving Wollmeise prizes. The meds aren't that strong!

Goodnight, y'all.

So...remember that little contest I had a while back?

Yeah. So, I didn't finish Spring Leaves. Not even close. In fact, I barely started it. This shouldn't come as a huge surprise. I'm disappointed in myself. Because I failed to finish it, of course, but much more so because now, per my own contest rules, I have to relinquish one of the most prized skeins in my stash:


That's a skein of Wollmeise Lace, piggies. It's a "We're Different" skein of the Dunkle Kirsche colourway, and it's gorgeous. Much nicer than the picture indicates.

So I've just plugged the names of everyone who entered a shawl suggestion into a fun random name generator, which picked...drumroll please...


Funckie Dunckie! Congratulations, Amy!