Autumn blog header!

It's that time of...season...again! The blog just got a facelift! Summer has been over and done for a long time now over here and the autumn oficially started on the 1st of september, so 'bout taim to change that blog yo!

So, let's put summer behind us...

And enjoy the autumn for a while!

I am enjoying the colder weather and I'm hoping for a bliztering cold and snowy winter. Yes, I'm one of those crazy people that enjoys winter so so much. Being born and raised in Norway does things to you. For all you 'Murican readers (and probably the rest of the world too), Norway doesn't have snow days in school. Nope! As a kid, I rode my bike in -30'C (-22'F) and several meters of snow! GAH! Please! Let it be a crazy snowy winter!

But I digress... It's still only autumn... I decided to sneak out in the early hours of the day to snap some pictures of this pretty yarn in the bright, fresh daylight before anybody else has awoken. We don't have much green outside of our appartment, so to get pretty pictures, I've have to sneak into the garden of our landlords and neighbours...like a creepy person. Our landlords have some huge trees on their property and they've now finally started to drop their pretty coloured leafs, so it's a perfect time to get autumn pictures done. And I must admit, this header is probably my favorite of them all so far!

I love autumn, I love autumn colours and just about everything else! The only thing I can't stand about the autumn is the friggin' spiders that have decided to grow huge over summer and then move INSIDE of our appartment since it's so cold outside. Blasted araknids! GO AWAAAAAY!

Work in progresses!

I must admit, I've been REAL slow with my yarnster crafting these past few days. Minecraft snuk up on me again...and I can't help it when it does. So here's a little WIP of things that has happened since last blogentry!

The mindless shawl that I frogged have reached it's stopping point once again. I've misplaced the third skein in this colorway (that happened some time ago) so I can't continue it. This picture here are pretty old. I managed to finish the third stripe of red before I ran out of yarn, but this was the only picture I had that gave a good look at the pattern itself. If you're wondering what I did, I knit the row facing the front and the back was knit 1k, 1p all the way till the end. I also increased two stitches at the end of each row, that's four in total for one round, which made it a lot wider.

If you compare it to this picture, you can clearly see the differences. This version has a sharper point and boring garter stitch as the pattern.

I really hope I'll be able to locate the third skein cause I really want to finish up this shawl at some point.

I've also done some progress on Simon. I had an episode with Pepsi here the other day though... He had managed to grab my skin color dyed skein and turned it into a mess! I woke up to this vision...

It took me forever to unknot it and then wind it up neathly again. I was pretty upset cause I did put a lot of work into this skein, getting the right color. Lucky for me, he didn't manage to chew over the thread anywhere.
So far, I've finished the head, helmet, feet and body for Simon. I've just started the gloves/gauntlets. It's looking good so far and he's comming along nicely! Hopefully I'll have enough skin color after this for the others.

Otherwise, I haven't really done much. I spent most of the morning/afternoon trying to work up a project for the Super Mario contest over at KnC, but it didn't really work out too well, and I've got only 4 days left to work up something. Me not entering a craft related Mario contest is like blasphemy! What I did work on though, was a question block. I got the sides worked up, and my plan was to stitch on the question mark afterwards, but it didn't look good at all, so I gave up. I might just give in and do some of the Super Mario dishcloths from Ravelry, but I feel like that's uncreative. I might try and work up a Luma since I've got more yellow crap yarn lying around...

As a last note, something I've forgotten to mention on the blog here. A few weeks ago, I ordered  a truckload of yarn. Drops had this mega sale during may, but sadly I was too late for that one. I did manage to find this one page that had an extended sale on the Drops yarn, so I snatched up a good bit of Karisma, dirt cheap with free shipping. All the dark green will become a Marius sweater eventually.

Along with all of this, I did order a bit of Alpaca yarn in a bright an beautiful petrol color. I've been looking for some soft yarn in a striking blue color to go along with some vintage mohair yarn I got from Brooke ages ago. This will eventually become a cuddly, fuzzy pullover.

Again, got this dirt cheap cause of the sale, and I almost regret not buying yarn for a green version too!

Tea dyeing!

Sorry for not getting this one out for you guys on time... I managed to fall alseep with my computer in bed as I was about to start writing up my adventures with tea dyeing (so LAC members, please excuse me for just sitting there, silently all night).

So yes, tea dyeing adventures! I've been procastinating these last couple of days, doing yarn dyeing instead of making dishcloths that I really need to finish up by tomorrow... I've been wanted to do tea dyeing for a long time now, so I just jumped into it yesterday. I dug out three skeins of white (or "nature"), two of which were Safirgarn, a 100% new, pure wool and one Drops Karisma, 100% superwash wool.

With good help of my drying rack, I got them all winded up in loose skeins and tied up using some scrap acryllic.

I decided to try the three "main" tea types, black, green and herb. I got a bunch of tea, and I've stuffed a whole cabinet with boxes and bags of tea...to Bård's annoyanse. With this tea dyeing, I got to clean out the cabinet, sort through all my tea and clear out alot of them. Since I wanted to get a vibrant result as possible, I picked out a good bunch of tea bags for each type.

I didn't have too much green tea, so I ended up using some loose leafs for that.

I started with boiling up about 1 liter water (0,26 gallons), adding some vinegar to get the acid in there that binds the colors (I just poured some in, didn't mind to measure it up), and started to heat it up while adding the tea.

I let it sit for a while and when it started to boil, and the tea had soaked for a good time, I took the bags out and dunked the yarn in there.

When I had gotten it all cowered and soaked in tea, I took the teabags and put them on top of the yarn, letting it sit like this for about 15 minutes while it was barely boiling.
Turned the heat down, and let it again sit for 5-10 minutes before I removed the tea bags. The yarn I put in a plastic container after I drained most of the water out of it, to then cool down before I poured luke warm water over it, being careful to match the temperature of the yarn.

Looks like noodles, right?

Then I rinsed and repeated for the two others, it took some time, but I did get as vibrent colors as I could have gotten. Most of the tea I used was Lipton and pretty old so that may have killed the colors some. The green tea gave me a lighter beige color, which I was expecting from the black tea (which turned out warm, middle brown), but I can't complain too much on those two. The herb was more dissapointing though. I was expecting a more pink-ish brown color, but it ended up being more brown/grey. I also used the Karisma on that one, my favorite brand out of the two I used, so I wish I'd dunked that one in the black one instead.

The fun thing though, they all go really good together! I know for certain that I'll have to use these three together in a project some time!
They are more or less dry, so I'll probably get them winded up tonight