Kool aid dying

Whenever I read about something, I nearly always have to try it. I have no real interest in custom dying yarn, but this sounded like fun. Turns out, it is. The problem is what I decided to do with the dyed yarn. The project I settled on was a fair isle sweater manually patterned on the Bond. The process was slow and tedious and I haven't gotten farther than making one piece. Plus there's my tendency to work on a project till I find something else that catches my attention, and then the first project gets put on hold indefinitely. That's why updates here are far between. Here's what I've got so far:

Looks pretty good, but I don't know about that bright blue. Kool aid is limited in the blues available, so this is the best I could do. I really wanted to include the whole spectrum because it was so heavy on reds. The plan was to have warm stripes alternating with cool stripes with yellow being the unifier. I don't think the blue is quite as loud in person.

The pattern is one I dug up on the internet. Getting a pleasing color sequence turned out to be quite difficult. I tried many combinations before settling on this one. It was accomplished using the two carriage technique. I highly recommend this to anyone who does fair isle on the Bond. It is far preferable to hand knitting every contrast stitch.

The dying is quite easy and there's no science to it. The yarn will absorb all the dye from the bath, leaving the water clear. The quantity of kool aid in the bath determines the intensity. Due to the nature of the process, you can't really stop once you like the color, so you have to start with the right amount of powder rather than try to stop early. It's well documented on the web, so I'm not going to give the particulars. When it's cool, rinse it well, and most of the smell will come out in the rinse. I believe this only works with natural fibers, or it could be only wool. I'm not sure. I used Knit Picks Wool of the Andes. The hot water will cause the wool to felt, so don't agitate it too quickly or it will ball into a prickly mess. Also, if you're trying to match dye lots, make careful notes about the quantity of powder used. Even then, the results are unpredictable. I haven't washed this yet, so I don't know how colorfast it is. I've read that it doesn't fade but don't know for sure.

Ivy League Vest

I wanted to make a fair isle vest in reds and browns, so I settled on Eunny Jang's Ivy League vest.

It's all nice and tight on the model. Mine came out rather loose:

The colors look unnatural in flash photography, but in real life, they aren't this loud. The yarn is Palette by Knit Picks.

I know I said in an earlier post that I was done with hand knitting, but machine knitting this wasn't going well. I punched a card for it and started knitting, changing colors as needed. The color changes were pretty tedious, and every mistake required ripping out the row and resetting the row counter and punch card. The last straw was when I got yarn wrapped around one of the patterning drums. I was pretty irritated and ripped hard on the yarn, damaging the drum. That's when I resigned myself to hand knitting the project.

The gauges between the hand knit and machine knit products were vastly different:

I can see now that I was knitting much too tightly on the machine. You don't know how well or poorly you're doing until you actually take it off the machine. The swatch I made was nowhere near this tight. Owing to the complex shaping and neckline, I had planned to cut and sew this vest by making rectangles of fabric on the machine and seaming them on the sewing machine. Plus the machine knit sample just looks better because all the stitches are the same size. Mine are all over the place.

My hand knitted gauge wasn't right either and I had to omit rows to get the length right. The stitches per inch were the same as the given gauge, yet the vest is still too loose. It is unfinished in the photo above, but we had one cool day this spring and I knew I wouldn't have another chance to wear it for a long long time. I expect I'll have a go at shrinking it after I've dealt with the strings.

Steeks are pretty neat. This vest was knitted round with steeks placed at the armholes and neck as placeholders to be cut out later. You still shape the armhole and neck as normal, then knit across the steeks to the next section in order to continue knitting round all the way to the shoulder bind offs.

66 Update

Good news on the 66 front! There's going to be a decal source soon which has renewed my interest in the project. I ordered the electroless nickel plating kit from Caswell and now I have just about all I need to get the show on the road. The kit looks extremely complicated.

 

It came with a custom printed manual an inch thick, and two little stockpots. You have to make all these calculations about the area of the piece being plated and how much nickel in the bath is being consumed so you can replenish it as it is depleted. Looks like a job for a weekend.

Quite some time ago, I started painting the head black, but I used a brush because I wanted to build up a thick coat like the original Japanning and then spray on some thinner ones. Considering how much sanding is required to remove the brush strokes, I'll probably be back down to the primer when I'm done. Perhaps it wasn't the best decision.

The next steps are to finish sanding the head and prep the metal parts for plating. Shiny ones like the throat plate will need to have a mirror finish if they are to look anything like they used to. I could just buy new ones, but that conflicts with the original plan of only replacing parts that I can't restore sufficiently, like the etched chrome covers. I especially want to save the slide cover because it has patent dates stamped on it, all before 1910. The goal was to do this cheaply, but I don't know if that's going to be feasible. I figured the cost of the plating kit would be lower than buying all the parts piecemeal.

I showed the handwheel in an earlier post. It still looks the same. Since the plating process is finicky about absolute cleanliness of the metal, I may be able to only plate the outside diameter and leave the spoked part for painting. I don't really want to buy another one, as it has the potential to be very expensive for this budget.

Let's recap the spending so far: we were up to $82 and the plating kit was another 80. That makes $162 and hopefully there won't be much more to buy. I'm using a lot of supplies that I already had, like black paint. However, I did buy supplies to do a hand crank conversion since I used the treadle table on the 306: $45 for a handmade wooden base that will have to be stained, and $12 for a hand crank. I'm basing my budget on machines for sale on ebay, which are often in rough shape and sold with no base or table, yet still have high prices.

Bob Ross style painting

Bob Ross is the ultimate motivator. After years of watching Bob paint hundreds of 30 minute masterpieces, I finally decided to try it. I've never painted before as you can see, but it really is easy once you get a little practice.

I bought his master paint set which comes with instructions and a glossy print of the painting project. The example painting is quite beautiful. Mine wasn't.

Then I tried doing a black canvas and only using 3 colors. The result was almost good:

What am I gonna do with these things?

Why I hate hand knitting

At some point I stumbled onto a blog post where some woman was showing off her successful version of this sweater from the winter 08 issue of Vogue Knitting:

And she went on and on about how well it fit and what a good job she did with her perfect two handed stranding technique and perfect gauge and how wonderful in general it turned out. I thought it was an amazing sweater and I'd just had a good experience knitting in the round, so I had to try. This is what I ended up with:

It's droopy, far too long, far too big around, etc etc. This is Lopi Lite yarn, which you'd think would felt if you looked at it, but this sweater steadfastly refuses to shrink. I've never seen anything like it. I'm quite disgusted and am done with hand knitting. Man I love my knitting machines.

Update: The oils in the wool were preventing felting. Adding a little soap to the felting water solved the problem. I was able to felt the body without disturbing the sleeves by putting that part into a dishpan, leaving the sleeves spilling over the sides. The body shrunk enough to lose about 3 inches of length and a lot of girth, resulting in a much more satisfactory fit. I ripped out the hand sewn zipper and put in a shorter one using the sewing machine. 

Knitting in the round experiment

I'm no hand knitter, but I wanted to try knitting a seamless sweater in the round. There is a good tutorial available at Knitpicks.com, complete with videos and handouts. I used bulky yarn because I can't tolerate the snail's pace that smaller yarns knit at. It went very quickly, about two weeks, and I didn't make all that many mistakes. Knitting round means no purling which speeds things up exponentially. I made some miscalculations about the amount of curl at the hem, but otherwise it turned out quite well. The yarn is Wool of the Andes bulky in redwood, which was being discontinued when I purchased it.

I really like the appearance of raglan seams by strategically placing the decreases. This project was a lot of fun and I would do it again (with bulky yarn).

Neckline lessons learned

This is a pair of drop shoulder work sweaters I made using the pattern in the book that came with the ISM. This is the first one I made:

On a knitting machine, it is not necessary to bind off stitches that will become part of the neckband. However, I learned from making this sweater that it is extremely desirable. The weight of the sleeves pulls the shoulders outwards, stretching the neck out as wide as it will go. The bind off around the neck band is sloppy too. The rest of the sweater turned out ok.

There were several wonderful colors at the store when I bought the blue yarn, so I bought this purple yarn as well and made this one:

This one, I did bind off the back neck edge and bound off the band a little tighter. The band bind off is almost too tight to fit over my head. I also thought the blue one was a bit loose and made some adjustments to the sleeves and body, resulting in sleeves that are too tight. In fact one sleeve was so tight that I took the sweater apart after finishing and remade it.

Maybe the neckline solution is to bind off both front and back and not bind off the neckband tightly.

Unfortunately, the yarn is Simply Soft, so both sweaters are hairy and fading after just a couple of washes.