Adventures in Yarn Dyeing

Late one night when I couldn’t sleep, I decided to browse WordPress and read different crafting blogs. I love to read what other people are doing, though it does nothing to help me go to sleep. It really just fuels my need to master all the crafts. I stumbled upon THIS tutorial, which is amazing, and the wheels began turning in my head. What if I dyed my own yarn? I love bright, vibrant colors. I love the thought of being able to perfectly execute the right mixtures of color to make the perfect yarn for a project.

So, at 3 a.m., a plan was born.

I went to my local Hobby Lobby and purchased a single skein of ‘I Love this Wool’. Don’t ask me why I only bought one. It would have been smart to AT LEAST get two just in case I failed miserably at this dying thing. But, alas, I didn’t think about that until later. I was in that blissful state of crafter’s oblivion — you know, the state between ‘I think I’ll try this’ and ‘WHY AM I A FAILURE?!’. Nothing could stop me!

Actually, two toddlers DID stop me. It took me almost a week to find a quiet moment in this hectic house to begin the preparation of the yarn. Oh, yeah, unwinding it into a huge loop? We won’t even talk about how long and how comical that must have been. I didn’t take pictures because…well… it was bad. Add to that a toddler that wants to help Mommy and another toddler who wants to play in the yarn, and disaster is a word that I would use.

Once I finally made the giant loop of chaos, I found a bucket to put the yarn and vinegar in. It actually looked a lot like spaghetti, which is TERRIBLE because my youngest loves spaghetti. She LOVES it. I had to hide the bucket.

I’d like to add that vinegar reminds me of coloring Easter eggs the night before Easter. It also reminds me of terrible sunburns and not being able to move my upper body for days. So a good-bad there. But at this point, the entire kitchen smells like vinegar, and I’m strangely okay with this. It’s torture to wait the recommended amount of time, but I’m a good girl and wait an hour before I start mixing the colors like some kind of mad scientist.

As the tutorial says, I choose a maximum amount of three colors, mix them in hot water and vinegar, and pour them carefully into the crock pot one at a time

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You can probably see my mistake at this point. I wanted a nice red-orange-yellow transition, and it really only went red-yellow. But, cest la vie, I went along with the experiment, silently kicking myself for only getting ONE skein of yarn and mourning the fact that I ruined it already. Maybe by some miracle it will look alright. I prayed by the crock pot. Don’t judge.

So, three hours later, I peeked at the water (which was clear) and began the process of cooling the yarn and setting it with more vinegar. Once it set for a while, I pulled it out and began the slow process of drying it. I wrung out as much water as I could, wrapped it in a towel and squeezed. I did this twice with two different towels. Once it was mostly dry, I took it out to my van and gently laid it on the seat. I live in South Carolina, more lovingly known as the steaming armpit of the world. It’s so hot out there right now that I could literally fry eggs on the pavement.

I figured that at the temperature that it was at (probably over 600), It would dry nicely without the danger of felting.

It was dry in ten minutes.

I would like to point out that before this lovely experiment that I had never hand-woven a skein of yarn. ALL of my experience with yarn has literally been from Hobby Lobby. I’m spoiled with the little strand of goodness popping out of the middle of the skein with no knots, no hellish fight to the death to try and NOT knot the ring of yarn I had just spent eight hours on, nothing like that.

I was baptized by fire.

It’s nearly impossible for me to touch loose yarn without knotting it. At this point, I’m pretty sure some entity is trying to tell me that I should never try to do this again. If it wasn’t for my amazing mother-in-law patiently fixing my mistakes, I may have lit the entire skein on fire.

But, I was finally able to twist it into some semblance of a pretty hank of yarn.

It turned out beautifully. The pictures really don’t do the skein justice. Once it was twisted and out in the light, I was amazed at how vibrant and beautiful it was. It didn’t even pool, like I was really afraid it did looking at the crock pot, and I will be naming this color combo Phoenix because of how fiery it turned out.

I’m addicted, and I learned so much from this one experiment that I will be doing much better on my next round. Maybe an entire mythical creatures line? Mermaid could be blues and purples, Dragon could be various greens…. I’m so excited!

If you want to do this yourself, please check out Night Owl Knit n Crochet and Daisy Head Creations. Both of them have fantastic tutorials, and I learned so much from them. But also, don’t be afraid to experiment on your own! You might think it’s ruined, but then it turns out beautiful. I can’t wait to work something up with this yarn.

The Rainbow In Your Hands: Protocols for Hand-Painting Yarn

This will soon be happening. All of the options for this leaves my head spinning! I’m so excited!

Elodie Under Glass

Figure One.

What did you do this weekend, Elodie?

Nothing much. Met the Awkward Army, put the world to rights. Learned a bit of materials science and inadvertently created a new kind of polystyrene plastic in my kitchen.

Made a rainbow.

In the aftermath of the unicorn dissection…

The richly glowing skein in Figure One is a sumptuous, hand-painted rainbow yarn that I dyed myself. With food coloring. And SCIENCE. You won’t find colors like that in a store…

And at the risk of becoming a craft blog (SCIENCE CRAFTS!) I’m going to tell you how to do it.

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Creating My Own Patterns for the First Time EVER!

I am a LARPer, and for those of you who do not know what that means, LARPing is an acronym for Live Action Roleplay. One weekend a month, I run around the woods with a bunch of friends and dress up like a beautiful fairy princess (because if you’re going to do it, do it with glitter and jewels). While I was crocheting amazing Disney princesses, I thought about what it would be like for me to crochet my own characters, or any other characters of the people I LARP with.

Then I thought that there was no way that would happen. There aren’t any patterns out there that would encompass all of the different clothing and accessories that I would need, and I had never written a pattern on my own ever.

What better time to start, right?

So with a cute drawing of one of my husband’s character, I set out to crochet him. Without a pattern. Armed with a hook, yarn, wool roving, and a felting needle. Oh, yes, not only was I making my own pattern, but I was teaching myself to needle felt at the same time. Because why not? I’ve never felted a single thing in my life, and I thought this was the time to learn. Pattern writing wasn’t stressful enough on its own, I guess.

This is how the drawing started. Ignoring the terrible handwriting, I planned out most of the basic shapes and prayed. Prayed because I had bought some wool roving and a tiny needle that looked pretty deadly if stabbed in the wrong place, and the hair and wings on this doll were to be felted. An attempt at it, anyways.

I started with the head. Crocheting the head it ended up being a little more oval than I expected. However, there is something you have to know about me: I seriously hate frogging work. So, the head stayed oval. But, it gave him a pretty cute look if I do say so myself. Once the head was closed up and the eyes were in place, I picked up some wool.

My husband’s character is a shadowy fellow, literally. To simulate the shadows coming from his eyes, I pressed some of the grayish black wool around his eyes and stabbed him in the face a lot. Now, I found this pretty amusing, though I don’t think he did so much. After the eyes were finished, I moved to the hair. I slapped some black wool onto his noggin and started stabbing again. It turned out a little something like this:

At this point, I’m pretty stoked. Look how cute he is! Onto the body I went, making it completely black because he literally wears nothing but black. Made things a little difficult without the proper lighting, but when you have to make a work-around, I suggest pointing the flash light from your phone at the yarn. It lights it up pretty nicely while you’re cursing at the body that won’t form properly.

And this was what came of the flashlight crocheting. Still pretty proud of myself at this point. The thought of making things without a pattern was really terrifying to me at first, and here I was making a pretty cute little doll with only a picture and my own brain to come up with it.

It took me most of a day to finish the little guy up. My toddlers obviously needed lots of mommy attention between the stolen time crocheting and ripping my hair out, so I’m not sure just how long the whole process took to finish off his crocheted bits. But he did turn out to look like this:

He wears a long leather duster, so that’s what he’s got around his body. Surprisingly the coat was the hardest part of the entire thing. It took lots of tries to figure out what the heck I was going to do to make the coat, and then I decided to just sew the arms to the body and not worry about sleeves. The color changing took care of me not having to think TOO hard about everything. My brain was pretty much fried at this point.

The final addition to this adorable little Teeny Doll was the wings. These actually took me quite a while to complete. I drew out a pattern for the basic shape I wanted and cut it out, then I laid it on my sponge block and placed some grayish-black roving on it and started stabbing. Thankfully needle felting is an incredibly forgiving craft, and after about twenty minutes of stabbing and shaping each wing, I finally got them into a shape that could pass as wings!

Once I sewed his pieces on and stabbed the wings onto his back (you can actually just felt everything directly onto the yarn. It sticks very nicely) the finished product looks like this.

This was definitely an adventure and a half, but I am SO happy with the way he turned out. I documented every single step of the pattern, and I’ve already typed it up and saved it so that I can reference it again when I start making the next doll. Which will be very soon. I have a lot of little dolls to make already, and with the amazing way this one turned out, I’m hoping the girl dolls will turn out half as well. We girls do have a lot of skirts and ruffles, so it will be fun to see what I can come up with as far as how to crochet things like full skirts and bustles.

I’ll definitely be updating as I slowly work out all the kinks. If there’s any kind of interest in the pattern I wrote up, I may even post them on the blog for people to customize on their own. There’s still a lot of editing to be done before that, though!

Works in Progress

I have a secret to share with you: crafters of all kinds have a terrible time with keeping their brains on one specific task. There is a meme out there in Internet-land that says something like “if you need to imagine what it is like inside a crafter’s head, imagine a browser window with sixty tabs open at the same time.”

This is my life. 

So in a weird off-kilter way, I would like to share with you what I’ve been working on this past week. I’ve seriously fallen in love with a couple of patterns I’ve bought recently, and I wanted to get something up on the blog (*cough* I swear I’ll get to that round up soon!*cough*) 

So I’m in a gift exchange on Facebook, and the theme is chibis! You know, anything crocheted that is super tiny and cute! So I began an epic search on Ravelry for all things tiny and cute. Alas, that is a terribly broad search term, so I got some pretty amazing (and sometimes….interesting) results. I did manage to stumble upon this lovely lady’s page, and I instantly fell in love with everything she had patterns for. Seriously everything.

Jana Whitley has so many adorable patterns up on her page, and I purchased two of them this weekend for my daughter to see how they would work out. I got Ariel first and she worked up SO quickly that I knew I had to have Belle just a few hours later. Here is a picture of Ariel’s parts as I was trying to sew her together.

  
She has plenty of pictures and very easy to follow directions in her patterns, and they are so worth the money I paid for them. I’ve made up almost four (two Belles and two Ariels) in the span of 48 hours, and I am by no means a quick hooker.  They are my new obsession. My husband fears for the small amount of space we have in our room because I need all of the princesses…and the yarn to go with them.

Below are the finished products. Feel free to squee along with me. 

   

My small children and big children love them. They are small, adorable, and super easy to whip up for that special Disney fan. And seriously, what’s not to love about those cute faces? 

A Long Hiatus and A Tiny New Friend

Whoa, it has been a crazy long time since I posted. Life had unfortunately taken me on a rough road with little time for crocheting. Recently, however, I have been hopping back onto the bandwagon and trying some new and amazing things! 

Micro crochet.

Now, I know some of you are sitting there scratching your head and wondering what in the world I am talking about. To those that know, you are either feeling a little pity for me, or you’re wondering how in the world it’s possible. Let me introduce you to Patches, my tiny elephant.  

He is seriously too cute for words.

 

I found this amazing little pattern on Ravelry by Conni Hartig. She has some adorable micro crochet patterns, and eventually I will be making all of them! Though I will say that the elephant is super popular, and I’ve already gotten several requests for pink ones! 

Of course, since he only tops a little bit over an inch, this led me to wonder what else I could do with tiny crocheted animals. Earrings, necklaces, and key chains all came to mind, and then Christmas ornaments were suggested! Can you imagine how cute a little animal in a clear ornament would be? I seriously should start making things for Christmas now. There is never enough time for it once we get to the later part of the year. 

What else do you think the micro crochet could be good for? Would you like to see the construction of one of them? Let me know in the comments! Sometime soon I will be bringing out a roundup of adorable tiny animals! What kind would you like to see?

Homemade Holidays

With the holidays in full swing, I thought it would be appropriate to begin fresh with an awesome new blog. I’ve tried the blogging thing before with very little luck, but since my focus this year is homemade instead of store-bought for my girls, I felt that it would be a great time to document my journeys into Pinterest and other crafty-type things to see what I come up with!

On our Christmas tree this year, we’re doing things a little different. I bought some plain ornaments, and sometime this weekend each person will decorate one with whatever they want! But, while wandering around Pinterest, I came across the cutest DIY hat ornaments. This lead me to gather up some of the best DIY ornament ideas that I could find because who doesn’t want a tree filled with awesome memories and meaningful ornaments? So without further adieu, here is my very first holiday roundup!

Each picture is owned by the blogs that took them. They are cited right below this post in order.

Salt-dough Ornaments: The Imagination Tree has a fantastic recipe and tutorial on how to make handprint salt-dough ornaments for your Christmas tree! What a great way to save the little times.

Beaded Candy Cane Ornaments: Fountain Avenue Kitchen did an adorable post about different ornaments to make with the kids. My favorite has to be the beaded candy cane ornaments made with beads and pipe cleaners. What a great way to have the candy-cane look without worrying about someone eating a twelve-year-old candy cane on your tree! (This may or may not have happened in my life…. I can neither confirm nor deny this.)

Cinnamon Spice Ornaments: I don’t know about you, but I remember making these things in school, and our house forever smelled of delicious cinnamon and spice when we opened up the ornaments box at Christmas time. Simply Notable has an awesome recipe for these ornaments, and they will make your home smell like Christmas for years to come!

Yarn Ornaments: I have a lot of yarn at my house. A lot. So crafts like these where I can take some of my scraps and make something adorable are a huge plus in my house! Decora Recicla Imagina isn’t in English, but the photo tutorials are easy to follow in any language. Check it out!

Winter Hat Ornaments: This one falls into the awesome yarn-scrap ornaments pile. These little hats are so cute, and you could make one for each person in your family! This tutorial comes from Goodknits, and I definitely recommend it for those that have a ridiculous amount of scrap yarn to work with. Even if you don’t, they would still be fun to make!

A lot of these I chose because they are simple enough for my two and three-year-old to help participate in, but there are so many others that you could do or come up with! Do you have a favorite Christmas DIY? Share it below; I would love to hear from you.