4/4/2006
Lolly has chosen some wonderfully appropriately springy colors for April’s Project Spectrum - Yellow and Orange! And really, even those in the southern hemisphere should do okay with the orange in autumn as well.
In honor of Project Spectrum yesterday I made myself a Project Spectrum lunch and also captured a few other foods in the kitchen that were Orange and Yellow…
1. April PS Lunch in the Making, 2. April PS Lunch, 3. April PS Peppers, 4. April PS in the Pantry
This weekend I also did some dyeing. Again with Wilton’s and a touch of Kool Aid as well.
This is what our fireplace/hearth looked like on Saturday morning, LOL! It looks kind of like Christmas, but with whacked out colors!
I did some Project Spectrum sock yarn dyeing using a similar method of dyeing as I used in the Bayou yarn, but this time I double dyed it - once in rose (tweaked a touch with some green to tone it down every so slightly) and then the balls rewound the other direction and dyed again in lemon yellow in a *very* strong solution.
I also did some fiber dyeing for the first time. I’ve been so paranoid that I would felt it that I hadn’t tried it. But after being afraid of felting fleece when washing it and being successful in that I decided I could dye fiber without felting it. Both sets of colorways are dyed with the same four dyes that I mixed based on the colors of my Not-So Squatty Sidekick. The differences in them are just in the percentages used of the different colors. Isn’t that amazing?
1. Snow Cone Roving Pre Drafted and Not, 2. Snow Cone Roving, 3. A Comparison of Northern Lights Roving Pre Drafted and Not, 4. Northern Lights Roving
I also took the opportunity to put together a few Project Spectrum Desktop Wallpapers for the month of April seeing as how the March one went over so well and Scout informed me I should do so for each month of Project Spectrum… So, if you click on these just hit “All Sizes” right above it and choose the size appropriate to your computer desktop and right click to set as wallpaper in most browsers. I hope you enjoy!
4/3/2006
For Margene and the other official sky watchers I first distract you with a pretty photo…
One morning last week I happened to notice the brilliant blue sky (which Margene noted she was missing last week) and how the foothills nearly appeared to glowed with the early morning sun hitting them at just the right angle as I was in the dining room feeding Emma. It is hard to capture the glow on film (or flash card as the case may be) but this is close.
Things have begun to green up a bit more than that photo since we got a spot of rain on Saturday evening. But the reality is that our foothills appear quite brown for most of the year.
The big “A” on the hillside often brings questions from people visiting. Colorado State University was founded as the state ag school and they used be called the Aggies. In fact there are many things around town that still use that as part of their business name such as the Aggie Theater and Aggie Travel to name just a couple. So, for a looong time (I haven’t found any official history on this) there have been a formation of rocks on the hill in the shape of an A that gets painted every fall by a group of students and alumni.
Why am I trying to distract you? Despite ecidence to the contrary in Friday’s photo of WIPs, I have been quite monogamous in my knitting since I started Seraphim (you should click on that link and buy it, it is an easy lace project with clear and large charts). That means there isn’t much knitting excitement to blog about.
Sure, the shawl is bunched up a bit more on the needles which each round, but the lace gets more and more obscured. So I’m afraid progress photos are a bit on the dull side. I’m nearly done with the third ball of yarn and am roughly at 60% completion at about 2/3 of the way through Chart 2 (of 3 plus an edging chart)… So, I picked up some more yarn on Saturday when I was at a class at Shuttles (more on that later this week to further distract from the lack of exciting WIP photos). It of course isn’t the same dye lot or seconds for that matter. However, remember how it looked all kettle dyed when I blocked it at the end of the first ball of yarn? Well, balls number 2 and 3 have been solidly the darkest shade of that and there is no telling what ball number 4 will be until I get a few rows completed with it. So, I figure this shawl is destined to be a bumming around the house shawl so dye lot just isn’t really going to matter. What is going to matter is that I bust through this knitting block I have with triangular lace so I have some confidence back and can get back to Leaf Lace!
I hope everyone had a great weekend and that your Monday is at the very least bearable!
