Showing posts with label alpaca. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alpaca. Show all posts

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Teaching my kids the art of the fiber arts

Today was "take your kids to work day". My husband brought my older boys to work with him today, and I starting thinking that I could keep Morgana home with me and I could show her how I create my hand painted yarns. Thinking of it, our 3 year old Gabriel has been desperately wanting to dye his own yarn, after watching me dye my Alice in Wonderland series of yarns.

The day started off pretty darn nice. I slept in to 7am, which is wonderful on a school day. I made myself some coffee, and let my morning just come along slowly since I had plenty of time to kill while I waited for my husband to come back with the car.

The yarn journey started at Northwest Wools in the village. They both picked out some alpaca/wool blend to dye. Morgana told me she wanted me to knit a stuffed kitty, and she wanted pink and gold ochre for her yarn. Gabriel just wanted blue yarn so I could knit him a puppy.


Gabriel getting on with his blue painting!


Morgana begins with pink, after she figured out how she wanted to paint her color sections.





Gabe has used two blues, green, and now a third tone of blue. You can see me starting off my Trail Blazer red for my playoff socks :)



She added in her gold ochre to her pink.


Gabriels yarn wrapped and ready to be heated to set the dye.


She's all done! I think her colors look like a Spring sunset.

We wrapped up M's yarn and it's getting ready to be heated.

When Gabriel was done, he did red, blues, greens, and created some purples. He took some of my black dye I mixed up and he added a little of that to it. His yarn is heat set, and cooling here.

Go Blazers! Almost done painting the yarn. Black dye is sooo messy I had to really be careful using such dark colors to not let them contaminate each other or seep while keeping an eye on the kids and their dye. 

A little self-made bed he made while waiting for his yarn to set. Peregrin looks on in the background, admiring  his brothers work. For a 14 month old, he really did good playing calmly while we got three skeins of yarn painted. Seriously.

Not a great representation of the the colors, but here are their yarns, hand-dyed by a 3 yo and a 6 yo, and heated, cooled, rinsed and now hanging up to dry. Should be ready in about 2 days, then it's onto winding it into a knittable ball of yarn, and knitting these skeins into a kitty and a puppy.


Saturday, December 20, 2008

Sockies and the floppy puppy


Here you are, the tiniest little sockie around. This is from the handspun local alpaca I got. It's loftier and denser than I'd have imagined. Definitely use a #2 needle next time. Possibly a #3. That's the toe for the second one on the #1 circulars next to it. And they are both lounging on top of my one Baudelaire sock. Keeping it company. I will now have to re-wind 1/3 of my alpaca ball because one of the kitties (I don't know which..) took it out of the bag, and unwound it while I slept. So....apparently it's nice to snuggle with. But now I have to attempt to detangle it so I can knit with it. Damn kitties.



Here's Gabe snuggling up with Morgana's xmas present that I knit. I have to make him the stuffed kitty now because he is sorely upset that he has to stop playing with it so I can hide it and wrap it. Luckily she slept in today so I got around to the face. I really don't like embroidery on toys. I'm trying to get over that issue. And I'm convinced that pattern-makers must be lying when they tell you to make a 'french knot' for the eyes and you see their perfectly not small and circular "knots" on the faces. I thought I just sucked, but I decided to do a french knot, then do chain stitches from the center to the outside all around to make a dense circle. That seems to be the trick.


All my knits love to hang out with my sock.

September takes a break from watching the snow to investigate the floppy puppy. Nope. Doesn't smell like alpaca. Back to the snow.
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