Doggie’s coming along! She is, I have discovered, a Boston terrier, and her name is Pansy (subject of course to renaming and/or re-gendering by the recipient upon transfer of ownership.) This is the test-stuffing. Right now she’s held together entirely with a running stitch, which is fast, but not very strong. Shortly I’m going to turn her inside out again and go back over all her seams with a back-cross-stitch in the softer pink cotton thread, and then possibly go over the whole thing again in the stronger polyester thread and do some rolled seams (as suggested by my mom.)
I finished the doggie! Just in time for Christmas presents! Sylvie was a little too unconscious to really appreciate it, but her dad was impressed; he pronounced it “very dog-shaped.” Later, Sylvie woke up, and I presented it to her officially. She was all like, “The hell am I supposed to do with this?”
So I got Star Wars Even More Crochet for Christmas and here is my first little dude! It's a Jawa and I'm prolly gonna have to make 'em a little buddy later.
I hate starting a new craft and being Not Good at a thing when I spend most of my time on hobbies I am good at, but! I really, REALLY love being so early in the learning curve that I can see myself leveling up row by row :D I think I'm going to abandon this sweater, because this ribbing is as interesting as it gets, and the ribbing is... minimally interesting. So I'll probably frog this soon, but it's been very nice seeing myself go from having to carefully, carefully wrangle every single purl stitch to being able to do it without consciously thinking about it Spoiler: large (for real though, it's so WEIRD figuring out how to Feel the tension when I'm juggling a hundred live loops at once and slipping yarn off my needles between stitches, instead of crochet, where I've only got one loose end at a time and all my tension is right there in front of me)
YEAHHHHH, I always forget how much I really, really like learning new skills. Spoiler: large? I'm probably going to abandon this project too, may or may not frog it, because I've absorbed most of the new skills this pattern requires, and the yarn is too busy of a color to really dig into the other bits. I think tomorrow... I'm going to start knitting the severed horse head. I've wanted to make this thing for over a decade. I used to pass the bookmark from computer to computer while I was still in school, but by now it's just drilled into my brain. What do I want to knit? Easy question, the severed horse head!!! In more serious project work, I think.... next I probably want to focus on fancey colorwork. I think that will be less frustrating than complicated shaping while my fingers get used to this. Or I could dig out my grandma's sweater patterns and have a stab at cables, but I've got limited needles on hand at this point down the knitting pit. Or, I could try spinning, because my parents are FANTASTIC about supporting my weird hobbies and better at following through on them than I am, and they got me the cute little electric eel nano spinning wheel for my birthday. I tried it once, spun some """yarn""", and severely bruised my ego by not immediately being a natural, but it's time to go back in and git gud
ONE OF US ONE OF US (sorry I just get stupid excited whenever someone says they want to learn spinning)
Yeaaaah! Speaking of spinning I finished the Primaveral Winterluxe and have progress shots! These are big, sorry in advance. Spoiler: Finished single Spoiler: Plying Spoiler: Winding the skein And the finished Instagram shot after setting the twist
You guys- and I’ve already been talking about this on the Fantasy Farm thread- I’ve been messaging this person who’s selling eri silkworm eggs on ebay, and they offered to sell me some of their cocoons for $5 per 30 grams, and I just offered to buy $25 worth, which works out to about 5.3ish ounces of unprocessed silk cocoons. Sight unseen of course, so I’m not sure what caterpillar poop situation’s gonna be. I am v excite and also have no more idea what I’m supposed to be doing than I can get from searching Google. I’m thinking of felting some of it and using it to make the mane for Sylvie’s bee-pony. (Do I know how to felt? No! Do I know how to spin? Also no! I shall be doing this anyway!)
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen people talking about felting with eri silk, but I’m having some source amnesia so I should probably go google it. It’s certainly sproingier than mulberry silk, and gets spun rather than reeled, so it doesn’t make quite as smooth a yarn. Hold on, Imma go look that up. Meantime, here’s the eri silkworm video I’ve been showing everyone lately:
Fibre crafters: I have two vintage pure wool, woven blankets in a rather appalling shade of surgical-appliance pink check with a cream background. They need some darning as they've been heavily used but they're super warm and comfy and buying anything comparable would likely cost well into the hundreds these days. Q1: Can I dye them and if so, how Q1: if yea, darn before or after dying Q3: how likely is dye to affect the fibre softness
yes, you can dye it! you can use natural dyes, food dyes, or commercial fabric dyes, and which you pick affects the process. darn before dyeing and make sure you use wool to darn it. that way it will end up the same color. it won’t affect the softness. the only way i’ve had dye affect the hand of the fabric was if i used too much alum mordant.
The cocoons came! I took 10 and simmered them in baking soda and dish soap, which is not the recipe given any of the resources I found, but I wanted to see if I could achieve the same effect without going on a shopping trip specifically for this project. tasty. The brown floaty bits are crunchy leftover pupa shell that come out when you squish the cocoons. Result the first: They were certainly cleaner, but didn’t seem particularly degummed. I ended up simmering them a second time, with More Stuff added, which loosened them up enough that I could pull them apart with my fingers. They were still pretty stiff, though, so I’m not sure I actually should have. And most of them left a stubborn little interior envelope that refused to give up its threads. I’m thinking simmer those again. But er mah gerd unraveling the cocoons is so satisfying. look at the floofs I made!
Hokay I did another batch, slightly bigger, about the same length of simmering time as the first, but with More Stuff from the beginning. Result: This looks about like I think it’s supposed to. Cocoons came apart very easily, but also the threads got very tangled together. Here’s what they look like unraveled: They came apart so easily, in fact, that some parts still have cocoon-shaped bits that came off in layers. And they also formed more readily into yarn-like locks/strands. Here are the two batches side-by-side for comparison: So, the results I’ve gotten are definitely different, but I don’t know which one is actually better? I’d expect the newer batch to have longer/more unbroken strands, because I used less mechanical force to unravel them- but they’re so tangled together I’m not sure if they’ll stay that way. Anyone here know more about spinning silk than me? (Even just knowing about spinning means you know more about spinning silk than me.) The only how-to I’ve found about eri silk is this one gal who pulls and spins her yarn straight from the cocoon with just her fingers, which actually looks pretty interesting so I might try that with the next batch, but I wanted to try with the whole combing and spinning process first.