Career Direction

I participated in several discussions this weekend on Ravelry and further read some past threads that helped me make some decisions on how to proceed with a possible career in the fiber industry. One of the things Rob, my husband has been hounding me about is limiting my scope on what I do if I am going to pursue a career in the craft business.

After thinking about this for quite awhile and trying my hand at several things, I have come to the conclusion that my strength is in what I have been doing most of my life, knitting and working with yarn.
I have tried beading & braiding and I produce nice pieces but designs don't come easily to me, whereas I have several knit designs flowing in my head.

So with that decision made, a path emerges -

1. Get my name known in the knitting community through test knitting and tech editing
2. Offer to test patterns for other designers - make sure I produce a quality finished product well before the deadline and make sure I review the pattern with a fine tooth comb to give the best feedback possible
3. Become a technical editor, which first requires I take a course on tech editing. Hopefully I can do this in March. Then get my name out there. Again when I start editing to give each client a quality review. 
4. Design patterns, but withhold offering them for sale until they have been tested and technically edited. Figure out correct pricing, learn not to sell myself short.
5. Determine best knitting software and pattern template.
6. Knit up my patterns using my dyed yarn so that I spark interest in my yarn. Also to start dyeing yarn with better quality dyes. I also want to invest in a better yarn blank maker. Rob was able to fix the Singer Toy Knitting Machine but it still is very hard to use and continues to have held stitch issues. 
7. Put together a list of start up needs/costs work into household budget
8. Get business registered
9. Knit, Knit Knit and at the same time look for ways to mix media with Knitting, Jewelry Making and Braiding. 

So that's the beginning of the plan. I have been flopping around trying to decide how to proceed, it feels good to have a sense of direction now. 

So what do you think, does it sound like a plan? Do you see pitfalls, if so what?

Anatomy of my first shawl design

It started with my yarn dyeing experiments, one that produced a skein that went from a grey purple to yellow and then to a pinkish purple. For some reason this colorway spoke to me.

 Immediately I thought of going from dawn to daylight to dusk.

 For the dawn section I wanted it to be earthy, not lacy so I used only a few yarn overs. I also wanted it to be chunkier than the sum section so I used bigger knit & purl patterns in grey/purple sections that symbolized the dawn.

As dawn moved into the mid-day sun section I wanted to add more air and therefore added more yarn overs and made the break from dawn to day a strip of yarn overs. In the daylight section I also wanted to convey a sense of sun rays so I made a series diagonal decreases paired with yarn overs and I also had them move in two directions.

Finally the dusk section I wanted to go back to earth, so no yarn overs were used. A flowing pattern of knits and purls was used to symbolize how everything cycles in a day. 

And because this was not a lacy shawl I finished it off with a few rows of garter stitch. 

I am extremely pleased with the way it turned out and I am going to see if I can market the pattern. 

I have written up the instructions and through a free testing group in Ravelry I am asked for at least 3 people to test my pattern. If all goes well I can publish the pattern in early March. So excited. I have to say I really enjoyed designing this shawl, it knit up quick because it was coming from my brain and I didn't have to stop to check the pattern. I think I can safely say the designing bug has hit, I can't wait to get some other designs put together. A number of concepts are rolling around in my head. While I wait for this pattern to be tested I am testing two patterns for other designers. I feel it only fair if I ask for someone's help that I also help someone. 

off to knit ...

Here are some better pictures taken using the snow as a backdrop

Blog conversion

I was having trouble linking blog posts to Ravelry projects so I decided to abandon Wordpress.com in favor of Blogger. All posts have been transferred so I am ready to kick off all new posts from here. Fun to come.

Yarn Dyeing - All bare yarn colored boo hoo, need more yarn

Originally published on wordpress.com on 2/18/15

I spent most of the weekend making, soaking and dyeing yarn blanks or yarn cakes. Definitely loving dyeing.   These first photos show the yarn I dyed as yarn cakes, basically dyed in a center pull ball.

The turquoise and orange ball actually was dyed with natural dyes made from beets and red cabbage. The beet juice which started out a brilliant red washed out and left a yummy orange, the red cabbage looked to be a royal purple but left a turquoise when the yarn was washed. While this is not what I thought I was going to get I am extremely happy with the result.

Cake Dyed using beets and red cabbage

Cake dyed yarn using beets and red cabbage

The second cake dyeing was done with a tightly wound ball of lace weight yarn. I dyed this using grape and blue raspberry kool-aid. Because it was so tightly wound a lot of the yarn did not get dyed so there is a lot of white with hints of light blue and dark purple. Not sure if I will leave it like this or if I will over dye it.

Cake dyed lace weight yarn, tightly wound, dyed using blue raspberry & grape kool-aid

caked dyed with blue raspberry and grape with black

Cake dyed with blue raspberry and grape with black

The Red, Green and Blue were dyed using kool-aid and McCormick food coloring, turned out very bright. 

The burgundy, purple, green and mushroom was dyed by putting segments of the yarn blank in a dye bath on the stove and over dyeing transitions. The mushroom color in the middle was produced from boiling down the beet leaves. The burgundy and purple was produced from boiling beets and red cabbage to extract color. Vinegar was added to the soak bath for the yarn and directly to the dyes. Observation - the natural colors look wonderful in the jars but don't produce anything close to what you see in the jar and much of the color washes out.

The rust colored balls were laid out on the counter and color was poured over the yarn blanks and kneaded in, once color was set the yarn blank was transferred to a glass bowl and microwaved. 

I also had some yellow lace weight yarn that I thought was way to bright so I decided to use the remaining beet juice to see what I got, one ball was more tightly wound than the other so one is now more orange and one is a toned down yellow. In both cases I think they are better than the original yellow. What do you think?

Original Yellow lace weight yarn that was over-dyed with remaining beet juice

Cake dyed with beet juice, original color was bright yellow

cake dyed with beet juice, ball was tightly wound. Original color was bright yellow

Yarn Dyeing Reference Samples

Originally published on wordpress.com 2/16/15

Yarn Dyeing - Kool-aid & Food Coloring

Originally published on wordpress.com on 2/16/15

So the next experiment was to be the biggest experiment yet - Kool-aid and Food Color! Who knew that Kool-aid could be such a great yarn dye? It started with a trip to the local Wal-mart to buy every flavor possible, and wow my Wal-mart likes Kool-Aid. I was able to purchase the following flavors -

• Grape
• Tropical Punch
• Strawberry Kiwi
• Strawberry
• Black Cherry
• Sharkleberry Fin
• Strawberry Lemonade
• Blue Raspberry Lemonade
• Orange
• Lemonade
• Peach Mangp
• Mixed Berry
• Pink Lemonade
• Green Apple
• Cherry

I also picked up McCormick's Regular & Neon Food Coloring.

Kool-aid & Food Coloring mixtures

Kool-aid mixture labeling

oh the colors oh the possibilites

To make the Kool-aid mixture I mixed up 2 oz of white vinegar + 6 oz of water + Kool-aid for each flavor. To make the food coloring mixture  I mixed 2 oz of white vinegar + 6 oz of water + 25 drops of color. I then cut up a skein of KnitPicks Bare Wool of the Andes into several 10 ft segments. For each color I put in an ounce of color  +  2 oz of water. I then microwaved each segment for 3 minutes intervals until the water was clear. Most of the time it was just one nuking. After the yarn was done absorbing the dye it went into a lukewarm soapy bath and then rinsed thoroughly.

Initial samples

Once rinsed a color label was attached to the yarn and it was hung on hooks to get ready for phase three. Phase two was experimenting with 2 color recipes, I perfected a few good browns doing this and learned a bright purple is very hard to achieve.

Phase Three involved over-dyeing the segments with five different colors - Green Apple, Strawberry, Peach Mango, Weak Black and Yellow. From this experiment I learned that Peach Mango & Yellow are virtually the same when used as over-dyes.

Yarn soaking before going into over-dye pot

 

Yarn samples in Strawberry over-dye batch

Yarn after finishing with one segment of over-dyeing

Now I am working up each segment into an I-cord I can then use as references. Gallery will be added soon.

Yarn Dyeing - The Adventure Continues

Originally published on Wordpress.com on 2/13/15

Toy Knitting Machine

yarn blank, more like snake

The goal of yarn dyeing was to create a skein of yarn with gradual color changes. So now that I conquered the first experiment which while very satisfying was not the end product I was looking for, now it was on to another trial. To do this one I purchased a toy knitting machine to make up a yarn blank. Unfortunately after about 2 hours the handle broke, grr, I had to complete by turning the pink needle part. It worked but was very hard on my hands.

Once the yarn blank was complete I put about a sixth of it in the remaining purple, bright pink & pink Tulip tie-dye dye I had from my first experiment on the stove in a steel pot and brought the temperature up to a simmer. After about 5 minutes I put in another sixth of the yarn blank so I would get a darker patch of color at the end and less color nearer the next color change.  I continued to simmer the yarn/dye mixture until water was clear. I then put in yellow food coloring and vinegar in the pot, I didn't note how much coloring I used, but it was a good squirt, how's that for scientific? I then put in the next section of yarn making sure to overlap some of the original dyed yarn. I did the same as before simmering until the water was clear. I also added some red food coloring near the end to make orange, it didn't work as well as I would have liked but overall I am pleased with the yellow section. The last section was done with red and blue food coloring, I was trying to achieve purple. I did get purple but not the bright purple that the Tulip dye gave me, this is more a soft grey dovie purple. Happy experiment overall. Now I just have to save my pennies to buy a real knitting machine $150 versus toy price of $20.

2nd Experiment, long color swatches, other side of yarn cake

2nd Experiment, long color swatches