Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Tertiary Yarn

So yesterday I mentioned that I had been spinning. There is a Ravelry "Spin-a-long" that has us spinning tertiary colors.

Here's a mini color theory lessons for you:

Primary colors - red, yellow, blue
Secondary colors - Mix any of two primary colors - ie: green, purple, orange
Tertiary colors - Mix one primary with one secondary - ie: red-violet, yellow-orange, red-orange, blue-green, etc.

In order to get my tertiary colors, I had to mix some scraps of roving(dyed with Kool-aid and Wilton's) that I had left from previous spinning adventures:




Then I got to mix them up, one primary and one secondary. Here's a pretty poor example, poor mainly in the photo quality, but still, it shows the mixing fairly well:


And then here are the singles, looking very unimpressive by themselves on the bobbin:


I opted not to Navajo ply as I had previously decided, mainly because I wanted enough yardage to do something with it. So I decided to spin some black singles and then 2 ply it up with the tertiary mix. I also threw in the primaries in three different places because I didn't like the color combinations without them.

Can I just say that I absolutely loooovvveee the result?


Now I wish I had more. damn.

After I finished, I still felt like playing with the spinning wheel. I had a bunch of different unplied singles just sitting around with no plan for any of them. Some are from a spinning study that I half-heartedly joined and never finished. Some were from when I first started spinning. None of them by themselves were long enough to do anything with. Therefore, I decided, in an artyarny sort of way, to combine them
all in a sloppy 3 ply.

This is what came from it:
Click to enlarge for details

I'm really curious to knit something with this to see how it knits up. Should be interesting.

I only got about 130 yards off of both skeins, but it should be enough for some small fingerless mitts or a hat or something.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

bummer

Well, I was going to show you some of the stuff that I've been working on, but my camera battery died. It (the camera) was residing in my purse and I think it got turned on without my knowing it and now the battery is d.o.a.

Which is, I suppose, okay since the knitting project doesn't look much different than it had previously. It's gained a few inches, but that's it. I've got about 2.5 inches to go before I begin the yoke section.

I've also been doing a little spinning. I'm working on blending different colors of roving to get tertiary (where you combine one pimary with one secondary) colors based on the monthly spin-a-long on Ravelry. Should turn out pretty cool (I hope.) All in all, it's been a great experiment with color blending with handcards.

So I can't show you those projects. bummer.

Last night, we had the last Monday night basketball event, yeah! It's really been cramping my blogging on Mondays. Anyway, They lined up a bunch of weight lifters as the entertainment. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they really were entertaining. The kids absolutely loved them. The Eldest (on the far left of the kids) got picked to become weight for this guy in red who holds some kind of record for bench pressing over 600 lbs:



This morning, I came **this** close to getting the drum carder that I've been wanting. Someone beat me to it by a hair, danggitall. I would have saved about $75 bucks too. I'm still trying to sell stuff to get the money for it. I'm so close, it's killing me.