New patterns, old projects

I recently (recently as in just this very evening) discovered that I got a love/hate relationship with new patterns, expecially when it's new patterns for things I'm so used to making. Example: I'm so used to making the same fair-isle socks over and over again, so if I try a different pattern, expecially a non-Scandinavian one, I have way too much problems with that project.

Right now, I'm working up a dishcloth with the newest pattern from Bittami. After making not one, but six dishcloths with a different pattern from her that I know by heart and back again, working up this new one give me way more problems than I signed up for.

Let's take a look, shall we? I started this one this morning. The first thing that threw me off was the fact that the edges are done in basket weave, where I'm used to garter stitch. Then I managed to count wrong and divide up the hearts all wrong. If you look at the picture underneath, they are off centered by quite a few stitches.

 

As if that weren't enough, I managed to skip the whole last row of the heart pattern! They look cut off and sloppy like this...and I didn't realise it until I was finished with the second row of hears, ove half way finished with the cloth!

Another thing is that I decided to drop the colored stripes on it. The pattern ask you to knit two rows before and after the hearts. After being half done with this cloth, I noticed that people in Bittami's Facebook group had done the stipes in basket weave stitch to fill up the empty spaces between the heart rows, which is genious!

So, it took me way too long to realise that I just had to redo the whole thing... And now, I just finished the first row of hearts, and it looks SO much better!

The yarn is the same in both pictures, just with and without flash and daylight. BTW, this is one of the mixed fabric cotton skeins I bleached some time ago. Sorry for not posting the results on those, but I had them lying in bleach for a whole day or so and they didn't show too much more result than what you can see in these pictures. Still looks good though!

Dishcloths and more bleaching!

Over the weekend, while I was at my brother's place, I decided to work up some dishcloths. It's easy, it's practical, it's fast and you can never have enough dishcloths! Also, I decided to start working up the cottons I've been bleaching. I love how they turned out!

I'll get better pictures of them later when the ends have been weaved in. These are so much better looking than the others I've made. The pattern is from Bittami, if you were wondering. It's my favorite dishcloth pattern of all time! Or...so far atleast... Turns out that Bittami is having another dishcloth knitalong this summer, starting in the beginning of june. I just can't wait! I joined the dishcloth knitalong she had last summer and I got 7 wonderful patterns out of that event!
She just released a pre-knitalong pattern yesterday and I'm dying to try it out...after I'm done working up this last one I got on my needles right now.

So, since this knitalong are closing in, I need more cotton! That is, I allready got cotton, but I need to bleach it all! Pretty cloths need to be pretty, bro! So I've just put six new skeins of my favorite dishcloth material in bleach... I dunked an extra blue and cream colored one in the leftover bleach sullotion...

...and they look amazing! I can't WAIT for new patterns!!!

The colors will get better when the skeins dry up...and the two red ones ARE different... For some reason, red colors take a lot longer time to bleach than other colors...but only with this brand, from my experience atleast.

Mixed cotton fiber bleaching!

I just wanna dip all my wool in Kool-Aid and all my cotton in bleach! Yarn dyeing are addicting!

But I thought I should do some more research on the matter of cotton bleaching. As we allready know, bleaching works best on cotton cause it doesn't break down the fibers nearly as easily as it does with wool, cause with wool, the fibers gets destroyed. Acryllic doesn't change much at all in bleach, and lets be honest here, acryllic yarn suck anyway.

But after my test with the 50/50 bamboo and acryllic yarn that I did earlier, I decided to test out some of my other cottons that's mixed in fibers. I pulled out two skeins of Drops <3 You 1 which was a limited edition cotton yarn from Drops Design almost two years ago, 50/50 cotton and polyester micro. It sold out super fast and it was just about the cheapest cotton I've ever bought. In return, it's not THAT great to work with cause it splits way too easily, but it worked fantastic as dishcloths. I still got 5-6 skeins left in red and blue, so I decided to test with one of both colors.

The other yarn I decided to test out was Tuva from Trysilgarn, 50/50 cotton and acryllic. This is one of the most popular brands for dishcloths over here. Personally, I still prefer just about anything that's 100% cotton over these.

So I plopped two of each brand into bleach two days ago. I checked in on them every 15 minutes for an hour before I gave up and let them sit over night. There was just about no change on them, which didn't surprise me really.
I let them sit for just about 20 hours before I pulled them out and rinsed them off, and while being wet, only two showed any change in color, the red Drops <3 You and the blue Tuva. While I was rinsing them off, the red Drops <3 You bleed like a maniac! Every time I squeesed that particular skein, the water turned pink.

 

 

After I was done rinsing them all off and put them to dry, the blue Drops <3 You started to show some change in the colors too. The more it dried up, the more change it showed.

The green Tuva on the other hand, hardly showed anything. It had a slightly lighter hue on one end, but that's about it. Not even visible on camera. So just for the sake of experimenting, I poured a little more bleach, concentrated this time, and dipped the end of the green skein in. Mind you, I've been using a 1/3 bleach to water ratio so far.

Second round of experimenting!

You may remember the experiment I did with bleaching on bamboo/acryllic yarn? And you may also remember the not so good results I got from that?

Well, now I've finished up a second round of experimenting. Over a week ago, I bought a new bottle of bleach and decided to try new yarn in a 50/50 water and bleach sollution instead of the 1/10 I did on the other experiment. I plopped in two more strands of the yarn and let it sit over night. Sad about the same result as the first round, I didn't even bother to take them out! Over the next week, I noticed small changes in the colors every day, until I took them out last night, after being soaked for one week in bleach.
It's still not white, and it takes too long for a good result, not to mention that the fibers must be very weak at this point... So I doubt I'll be able to do it with this perticular yarn.

But I still got a huge amount of this yarn lying around, so I might just knit up some kind of light sweater with it anyway.

Experimenting!

When the cat is away, the mouse will play...or however that saying goes in english... In norwegian, the mice dances on the table when the cat leaves! Fun fact of the day!

What I ment to say is, Bård has left me this weekend...don't worry, he's just visiting his parents! But I truly enjoy the alone time...for some reason, I turn back to college life when he's gone, which is both refreshing and dangerous, cause the appartment suffers from a hurricane! So I've just started an experiment...which I would have done if Bård was home...so all of that crazy talk was now pointless...

A week ago, I got the idea of making myself a summer sweater or pullover of some kind out of cotton...or whatever light and soft fibers I could find. Then, a few days ago, I got the wonderful idea of dipping the sweater (after I've made it) in bleach and make it awesome and retro! Like this sweater:

I just got a feeling that it would be super awesome and unique...that is...if this doesn't become a trend by then and I'll look mainstream...I hate to look mainstream...that's why I don't give a crap about fashion!

Anywho! Late spring/summer/early autumn sweater/pullover YES! It'd be awesome! But what kind of yarn should I use? Cotton is just as expencive as wool, and I'm trying not to buy too much new yarn for myself these days... Well, what about the crap load of bamboo/acryllic I got lying around in my yarn storage that I bought last summer on clearance for just about nothing that I was going to use for hand towels and washcloths but never got around to it cause I'm a lazy but that don't know how to use punctuations?

Welp, still got those lying around, still haven't made those towels not cloths, why not make a sweater? GENIOUS! So that's where the wannabe dancing mouse comes in... I managed to squeeze a few drops out of the bottle of bleach and I put two strands of this yarn into it and I'm going to let it sit over night to see the result...if there even is any... You see, bleach doesn't do a hell lot on acryllic, and this yarn is sadly 50/50 bamboo acryllig... Now, I haven't tried to bleach bamboo before either, but I can't imagine it being too much different from cotton. The question is, how much damage does the bamboo take from the bleach? Cotton takes little to none while wool takes heavily damage.

 

So the cat is gone... The mouse is out... Let's see if it can dance over night! LET THE EXPERIMENT BEGIN!!!

Dyed and bleached yarn!

I am finally awake and I've gotten around to wind up and photograph all the yarn I've been dyeing over the last week or so! So much fun new yarn and so many fun few colors!

First off, we have the Gloss DK yarn from  Knit Picks that Brooke sent me. It's so pretty and soft, I was scared to dye it, in case I messed it up, but I love the outcome! With two packs of Kool-Aid Lemonade and half a pack Lemon Lime, I got these fantastic colors, variating from minty green to neon green! Fits my life so perfectly!

Right after I finished up dyeing this skein, I dipped two skeins of Bomull Sport cotton in bleach and got these amazing colors! A much better result than my first bleaching cause these don't go to white.

So I then decided to try and bleach a different cotton brand that has a totally different feel to it. This was a skein of Bernat Handicrafter Cotton that I recieved from Star during Secret Santa. It turned into these amazing camo colors which I really love.

And at last, we got the tea dyed yarn. I've wanted to try this ever since I started dyeing, the result was better than expected, tough, I wish that the herb one would turn out better. Bottom left is green tea on Safirgarn, 100% new pure wool yarn. Bottom right is black tea, also on Sarfirgarn. The one on top is herbal tea on Karisma from Drops, 100% wool, superwash treated.

So, maybe I should start using some of the stuff I've dyed and bleached now before I do more? Yeah... My shelf behind me is getting stuffed...

Bleached and dyed yarn!

Results of my recent yarn dyeing!

The Kool-Aid yarn turned out fantastic! I love the different shades, and as I did say earlier, I did another round of dyeing where I added Black Cherry and a bit of Strawberry Lemonade, and the result was perfect, just like I wanted it! Gonna see if I can make a pair of fair-isle socks with these!

After I did the last round of Kool-Aid dyeing, I did the opposite on some cotton yarn, I bleached it and the result was beyond amazing! So much fun and these will make beautiful dishcloths!

I'll probably do alot more of yarn dyeing and bleaching in the future, so stick around if you've enjoyed this!

Bleached cotton yarn!

I'm having too much fun with yarn this weekend! I did a second dye on the Kool-Aid wool yarn, and I got it JUST like I wanted!

But I also started some other coloring this night! I poured concentrated bleach into glass jars and dipped cotton yarn in them! The effect is AMAZING! Can't believe the results!

Ok, so lets start from the beginning! I just remembered that I saw someone pouring bleach over cotton skeins this last summer and used the yarn for dishcloths. The person had used black yarn and the bleaching made parts of it brown-ish, made for a really cool effect.

So I dug out some cotton skeins, first in three colors, but I ended up using four so excuse me for not including the purple in this picture...it was taken before that decision...and I've allready plumped some of the skeins in bleach allready...

 

 The yarn I'm using is Bomull Sport, which is my favorite cotton to use for dishcloths. 100% cotton. sturdy and purdy!

Ok, so I wanted to try and make the skeins half and half in color, so I needed some kind of glass or plastic vessel so they could stand up right into the bleach. The best ones I could find I could find, wich was the empty glass jars from my Diamon Candle candles, and I could just fit two skeins into each jar! Perfect!

I poured about 50/50 water and bleach into the jars at first, not too much since I knew the skeins would fill them up and I didn't want to have bleach spilling out over the bathroom sink cause I had put too much in there... But stupid me forgot that the yarn is COTTON! WATER ABSORBENT! Stupid me! So I had to pour more and more bleach and water into the jars cause the skeins kept sucking up all the liquids! But I was surprised to see immediant results! The skeins switched colors in front of my eyes and it was beautiful!

The dark green got a gradient of orange, yellow and white, the purple got a beautiful gradient to hot pink, light pink and white, the turquoise turned white and the red turned orange-ish and white! So much fun! I let them sit for about 30 minutes, I could have taken them out maybe 10-15 minutes earlier, I let them sit so long cause I was afraid the bleach wouldn't reach the center of the skeins before I took them out and rinsed them out... I am SO pleased with the result!

 

These will become four fancy dishcloths soon enough!