Kitty & Klimt

Remember the black/gray/rust yarn? It's not far away in the previous post if you don't. I'm knitting it up into a Mira's Cowl (free on Ravelry). It's soft as a tortoiseshell kitty because the yarn is partly bunnies, not kitties, but I bet it's gonna feel like wrapping a cat around your neck only without the sneezing, swollen eyes, and the claw marks. The pattern's very simple and very adaptable to almost any kind of yarn. The knit purl sequence is 60 stitches long, so you can repeat it as many times as needed for the cowl length you want.

But I've had something else on the go lately, dredged from a different stash. I had a sudden craving for a big change of fiber gears, and dived into a stash of needlepoint kits to start doing this:

 needlepoint designs by Candace Bahouth based on the paintings of Klimt. There are not many needlepoint designs I like. Most of them seem either cutesy or stuffy, dull, and frumpy. Like this, for example. Kaffe Fassett's work is a little better, but it's still rather domestic for my taste. Pictures of flowers and teapots and whatnot. Bahouth's designs are more about pattern than picture, and for Klimt she includes GOLD, just like the original artist did in his paintings. I buy Bahouth kits when I find them on sale and stash them for when the desire strikes me. Needlepointing is more of a no-brainer than knitting, at least if you're doing someone else's design. It's kind of like coloring, only with fiber, and the end product is something useful and quite durable. I have 3 of these Klimt kits. The first is done and I've started #2. When they're all done, they will make up a bench seat cover.

But I'm about to embark on a long trip, and a needlepoint frame is just a bit unwieldy for the airplane seat. There isn't enough work left to do on the kitty cowl to make it worthwhile taking along, so I did swan dive into the yarn stash and came up with this:

A tote bag kit from Knit Picks, fine gauge on small circular needles, just perfect for the elbows-in position in airplane seats. Its unique construction means that I don't need to take the whole pile of different colored balls and a big chart. The bottom and back side of the bag are knitted separately from the picture panel, so there will be plenty to work on while hauling and managing only one yarn ball at a time. When that's all done, the picture panel is worked flat, and then grafted on to the rest of the bag, with top rows worked in the round to finish. Pretty clever, eh?

Another Snowdye Day

Before all the snow melts away, I wanted to try snow dyeing one more time. (Actually, no danger in all of it melting away overnight, but it would be harder to find clean snow.) This time the base yarn was grey rather than, um, snowy white.

KnitPicks Sugar Bunny in Platinum, a beigy-light-grey. Not a particularly exciting color on its own, but a good non-white background for other colors. What I had in mind was adding black and other shades of grey according to the intensity of the dye coming through the snow.  So into the tub go the vinegar-water soaked skeins, laid on racks and ready to go:

Now on goes the snow and sprinkles of the black dye powder:

I also wanted to see what happens when you use a liquid dye solution with the snow, so I mixed some of the same dye up in a squeeze bottle and squirted it across in stripe fashion:

Then on goes the lid, bring tub into the garage, let melt and marinate overnight while the magic works. Upon the morrow, what to my wondering eyes should appear:

RUST! Yikes! Not that the yarn rusted, or that the racks rusted, but the dye came apart into its constituent elements, a major one of which, apparently, is a rusty gingery color.  You don't have to be a vastly experienced dyer to know that there really is no such thing as black dye. Black is achieved with a blend of intense dark colors. If you go back and big up one of the pictures that shows the dye powder on the snow, you'll see wee spots of yellow and blue and purple. That, I thought, would be kind of cool if it came through the snow--little spots of color amid the grey and black. But this is really waaay too much not-black and not-grey. So I grabbed my trusty black squirter and splashed some more of that straight onto the wet yarn:

The hope was to break up the long stretches of rust with more black and grey. Then into the plastic wrap for a half hour steam bath, a rinse, hang to dry overnight, and let's see what we finally got:

 Wow. (automatically bigged up to show color detail) Not at all what I thought of when I set out to do this, but that's the fun and amazing part of DIY (Dyeing It Yourself), and most especially of snow dyeing. Lots of blue tones I didn't expect, and the rust was a total surprise, ratcheted down a little, as hoped, by the black squirts. Y'know that this reminds me of? A tortoiseshell cat's coat. Even more so when it's knitted up. Can't wait to cast on! Here, kitty kitty....