The Heathen Housewife

As usual, I have so much in my head to report – let’s see if I can get it all down in the blog without boring y’all to tears. First, I just have to gloat. There are 143 comments on the contest post right now, and my e-mail keeps dinging to tell me another has come in. What a riot! Thanks everyone who is playing along so far.

I think maybe I should answer a few questions from those comments right away, since I’m mentioning them. The yarn I’m giving away is Baruffa FaRe, and it is a 100 gram skein, about 1350 meters. It is gorgeous and soft. My SP9 pal gave it to me, and it is one of THREE skeins I have from her. One is plenty to knit a stole or shawl, so I think I can afford to share one with a lucky winner.

I do have some hesitation about dyeing this wool, because I use food dyes, which are rumored to be less permanently colorfast than the “professional” dyes. I’m doing some experiments right now to test this out myself, but I’m not too worried about the problem when it comes to sock yarn – they’re socks. They’re going to wear out before the color fades, in all likelihood.

A shawl, on the other hand – a lot of work goes into knitting a shawl, and it could be an heirloom item. If it’s going to be a certain color, it should plan on staying that color indefinitely, and I worry a bit about someone knitting some gorgeous shawl, then leaving it laying on the back of a couch or chair as decoration and maybe the sun hits it and suddenly it’s faded and ugly in a matter of weeks. That would be devastating. Something to think about for the winner, and I wouldn’t be offended if they just want the white yarn. It’s also turning out that some of the colors are more stable than others, and I’ll try to post about that later this week.

Oh, and someone asked what I plan to knit out of the book. To be honest, I don’t have any immediate plans to knit anything out of it. It is a gorgeous book with so many amazingly beautiful designs in it, I value it as sheer eye candy – plus there is a lot of great lace knitting information there. Some day I will probably pick out a design, but there is way too much on my plate right now to add a new lace project to the mix. Those who’ve been around long enough may remember the lace scarf I was working on last winter. I was using it as my in-the-car project for when one or both girls fell asleep in the car and I was able to steal some quality knitting time without moving them into the house and waking them up. The last time I posted about this scarf was on February 28, and it looked like this:

I haven’t worked on it much since then, so I still have a long way to go. I’m not giving up on it – I love the pattern and the yarn – I just got sidetracked by the lace socks I had to knit up as samples for a class I was planning to teach. I imagine when it gets cold out again, I’ll remember how badly I need a new scarf and pick it backup. This pattern is from an old Piecework magazine. All that to say – no new shawls in the near future, and really before I do another shawl I’d like to knit a lace sweater. Maybe more about that later in the post. Still, I can pull out my Victorian Lace Today every now and then and dream.

Moving on to some of the other things I’ve been doing in the last day or so that keep me from knitting 24/7…

Yesterday we went to the park with our friends from across the street, and it was very hot. When we came home everyone needed a bit of refreshment, so I pulled out the homemade grape juice popsicles. They were a big hit, although Sophie had a hard time figuring out which end to hold.

I tried several times to turn it around and get her to hold the handle, but she kept grabbing the ice and trying to chew on the handle instead. After a couple of minutes, her hands got super cold and she cried for a minute then held on to the handle and ate the ice. It was really sweet. Julie had no trouble with hers – except that she really would have liked two or three more!

Today we had a play date in the morning, lunch and a short nap, a splash in the pool with the neighbors, another attempt at napping that failed utterly, a few walks around the block, and then finally, when I still had an hour to kill before Joe came home, I pulled out the bubbles. I have a love-hate relationship with bubbles. They are lots of fun. The kids love them. But they always make a huge mess, and I hate the feel of slimy-sticky bubble liquid on my hands.

Still, Sophie enjoyed them…

And Julie enjoyed them…

And we passed the time and it was good. I hosed them and the table off before we went in, and Joe still had to put them in the tub while I fixed dinner.

Backing up to last night, I did get to go to the Harry Potter movie, and it was good. I’m not going to give a detailed review – I had some thoughts both good and bad, but mostly I just enjoyed the experience of sitting in a theater away from my responsibilities with a bag of popcorn in my lap. I also had some knitting with me for after the popcorn ran out…

That’s one ugly piece of knitting, I know! I’m knitting up a sample swatch of all the yarns we dyed up the other night. Some of the colorways will never see the light of day again, some may be reworked, and one or two may be real winners. We were mostly experimenting with laying the dye on the yarn in different configurations to get different kinds of swirl patterns, and also I wanted to add some colors to my color card. I do like the colorway on the far right, and maybe the one on the far left. The third from the left was pure science experiment, and the second from the right may be a good colorway, but I think it is the kind of colors a lot of *other* people like but that I just don’t get. Still, it was good in-the-dark knitting because quality didn’t count one bit, and I did drop a stitch and I didn’t have to care. How rare is that?

Now I’ve got to finish printing out a pattern order for the store and get my materials ready for the class I’m teaching tomorrow night. If I’m lucky, after that I’ll have time to do a bit more knitting and read a couple chapters of Harry Potter 6, which I’m re-reading to refresh my memory before the new one comes out on Saturday!!!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 3:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.