The Cakewalk

Most of this past week was spent catching up on chores, especially laundry and cooking. Because I missed both our anniversary and Charlie's birthday, I baked him a cake on Saturday...from scratch.

Here's what it looked like before I cut the first slice. Did I mention that I made it from scratch?

I didn't have all of the ingredients I needed, so I went to the store on Friday. I put on a mask when I left the house and didn't take it off again until I got home. I was pretty sure I wasn't contagious, but...why not. 

You may remember from last week's blog post that I took a Covid test on Saturday, just to reassure Charlie, and it was negative. I took another one on Monday and again on Wednesday, because I planned to go to choir. Both were negative. I was the only soprano who showed up, and my ride, Gail, was the only alto. She had missed the Condega event because she was out of town. The two other choir members who got sick when I did were not at practice. One, I believe, was still feeling unwell, and the other was still testing positive. They both expected to be back on Sunday, and it was an easy program, so we should be fine. What I didn't expect was a fever Saturday night. It woke me up in the middle of the night. I moved back into the guest room, took another Covid test, and it was negative. I don't know how I could have caught something new, and my temperature was normal again Sunday morning. I still don't know what was going on, but I wasn't sure if I was contagious and didn't get much sleep, so I didn't go to church.

During the week I managed to get some knitting done while listening to the rest of Anthony Fauci's On Call. I could identify with him somewhat when he talked about how he went to an event wearing a mask and took it off because he was the only one wearing one. He came down with Covid a few days later and took Paxlovid. He felt better after the third dose, but he had to miss his daughter's wedding! Well, missing one anniversary and one birthday isn't nearly as bad as missing your daughter's wedding. It's always fascinating to read or (listen to) details of events you remember from the news years ago. I've been around almost as long as Dr Fauci, and I remember many of the events he wrote about: AIDS, Zika, Ebola, H5N1, H1N1, etc., as well as the Anthrax and Smallpox scares, and then Covid. I can recommend this book. There are a lot of descriptions of the scientific discoveries and how they work, but he has spent most of his life explaining things to laypeople, so his explanations are easy to follow. So, as I said, I got some knitting done. Just a few more inches before the border pattern on the sleeve.

We often see deer roaming our neighborhood, but it's unusual for one to bed down in our front yard. This fellow made me think of the quote from President Harry Truman, "The buck stops here."

We did some walks this week when the air quality and temperature permitted. On Saturday, we took a short detour through the wilderness on the other side of the trail.

It wasn't much farther than if we had stayed on the trail. The pups often take a nap after a walk. They get a lot of exercise chasing eat other in the back yard or playing in the house, but there's nothing like a nice walk, even just two miles.

Dusty got some vaccines on Tuesday. I stayed home with Sandy, because I wasn't needed at the vet's for just that. We weren't having a checkup or anything, and I would have had to do an extra test.

Finally, my wonderful editors are finished with my manuscript, and I'm just finishing up fixing things. I hope to send it off this week. To follow up on one suggestion, I had to take another photo and add Nico to the cast of characters. Now I'm trying to decide if I need to change the photo on the back cover to include Nico. I think I will.

I have a lot of difficulty responding to comments to my blog posts because of technical issues beyond my control (my lack of understanding of how things work). Message me on Facebook, Ravelry or Spoutible if you need information.

If you have a few minutes and are willing, please go to Amazon and B&N and search for "Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll's Storybook by Peggy Stuart". Every click on the page for the book makes it more likely they will keep a good supply in their warehouse and stores. If you are outside the US, you may have a separate website for these retailers. If you have a copy of any of our books, including Emil, Mariah or Classic Tales Retold, please leave an honest review on the websites, especially if you bought from them.

Where's my blog: If you want to follow my blog, go here and sign up to follow.

What's on my needles: Still working on the Oregon Cardigan.

What's on my loom: Still in its corner under the windows.

What's on my sewing machine: Still its dust cover.

What's in The Doll's Storybook: In Different Ways To Write, Mariah is learning Arabic and Charlotte is learning Hebrew. They explain to Emil that these two languages use letters that are different from English and that you write both of them from right to left.

What's on my iPad/iPhone: Just finished with On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service by Anthony Fauci. Now listening to Dean Koontz's new book, The Forest of Lost Souls. Also reading a physical book, In the Shelter of Each Other by Milree Latimer, an author I met at the Condega event on September 8th. 

What's in my wine glass: Madroña Riesling 2019. Riesling will go with anything, and this Riesling is my favorite!

What's my tip of the week: For those of us who are US citizens, we have an election coming up. You can check your voter registration for any state at IWillVote.com.

Where are my books: The stories in each book first appeared in the blog and they are reproduced with a few changes. 

Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll's Storybook is available from the BookBabyBookshop and other booksellers worldwide. Poems included are Valentine's Day, Keeping Pets, Back to School, Victor the Vulture, The Week Before Christmas, Insomnia and Veronika's Vocabulary Verses.

The stories in Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Little Green Greatcoat, The Boy Doll Who Cried Wolf and Lost in the Woods.

Emil: Stories from The Doll's Storybook and Mariah: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are also still available from booksellers. The link for Book Baby is here. The three stories in Emil are Best Buds, Getting What You Want, and The Boys Cook Dinner.

The three stories in Mariah are Being Little, Besties, and Distraction.

If you don't get free shipping from Amazon or B&N, buy from the BookBabyBookshop, because 50% of the price goes to St. Jude. Other booksellers pay much less. 

Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals or dolls were harmed during the production of this blog post.

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To Everything There Is a Season....

A time to be born and a time to...dye. At my place, summer is a good time to dye using the method I like best. The sun-tea method with Kool-Aid and food coloring.

I'm sort of a health nut, so this is the only purpose I ever put Kool-Aid to, but it's a good product for that. I started out with the instructions I found on Knitty. 

The instructions are mostly designed for top-of-the-stove or microwave, but being a health nut, I'm also concerned with using renewable energy when I can, so I use the sun-tea method, mentioned in passing in a small side bar in the Knitty article.

I have two sun-tea jars dedicated to dyeing. 

I made a lace shawl a few weeks back, using lace-weight yarn left over from the gown I made for Miss Daphne's naming ceremony, back in July, 2010.

I don't know what I was thinking when I calculated how much lace-weight yarn I would need, but after making the gown and bonnet, I ended up with about 500 gm of Knit Picks Bare Merino Wool Lace Weight yarn (now called "Shadow," like the predyed version), most of it already wound into "cakes."

I really enjoyed making the shawl, as well as wearing it, so I decided I needed to make more shawls, but not all in "Bare." The line of Bare yarns are designed to be dyed as well as knitted or crocheted up as-is, so....

Here's the finished yarn:

Here's how I did it. I had about 4 oz. to dye, including one of the cakes and what was left over from the shawl. The instructions said to use one packet of "dye" (Kool-Aid) to one ounce of yarn, so I used four packets: two cherry and two orange. I added a few drops of black food coloring to grey-down the color a bit. I soaked the yarn in some warm water with a few drops of mild dish soap while I mixed the dye bath in my sun-tea jar. You don't need to add vinegar to the water you mix your dye in, as the drink mix is pretty acid, so I just used warm water. (No sugar, of course!) I added the yarn and more warm water to cover, and put it out in the sun. About an hour later, the dye bath was clear (exhausted), so I knew it was ready. I wanted the kettle-dyed look, so I didn't turn the yarn over during the dyeing process. The pups and I went on a hike instead.

Because I didn't turn the yarn over and open up the hanks of yarn during the process, the dye bath didn't reach all of it. The effect is nice in the finished yarn, though. It came out lighter in some places and darker in others.

If you want a yarn that's consistently the same color all over, you will need to open up the yarn and turn it several times during the dyeing process. Use tongs or rubber gloves for this, or you'll be wearing your dye for a while. (Your skin qualifies as an animal fiber for the purposes of this project.) This is because to dye with Kool-aid, the yarn has to be all or mostly animal fiber, although nylon will dye nicely. (My sweater dryer, made of nylon net and a PVC frame, has dye spots on it from previous projects.) Cotton won't take up this dye. This is why you want to be sure you are wearing old clothes you don't care about or 100% cotton fabrics. A cotton apron in a dark color (just in case) over your clothes is perfect. Since wool comes from an animal, it's perfect for dyeing with Kool-Aid, and my yarn is 100% Merino wool.

I rinsed the yarn in water close to the same temperature as the temperature of the dye bath and handled it gently, so the yarn wouldn't felt/full. I put vinegar in the first rinse and then Kookaburra Wool Wash in the last rinse. One disadvantage of dyeing with Kool-Aid is the lingering scent of (phony) cherry and/or orange, which eventually goes away. Neither is my favorite scent. The Wool Wash and vinegar seemed to take care of that problem, although in the past I've had to smell it all the time I was knitting the project.

Since I still had lots of leftover yarn and more hours of daylight, I decided to try tea dyeing. I found instructions here.

I used pretty much the same method except I didn't worry about getting my hands in the "dye bath." I was careful not to spill on cotton clothes, though, as tea will stain cotton, which means you can use this method to dye cotton.

For this batch, I used eight black tea bags in hot tap water. I poured in a couple of tablespoons of white vinegar, just in case. Very old tea works just as well as fresh tea, so this is a good use for tea that is past its prime. I was looking for a light color, so I didn't leave it in too long, but kept checking every 15 minutes or so. I don't think the tea dye bath "exhausts," but I'll have to experiment and report back in a later blog post.

You can get different colors from herbal and green tea, so it's fun to experiment with. Heres what I ended up with:

The original yarn (I still have more to dye), is on the left, and the tea-dyed yarn, on the right. Now I have yarn for two lace shawls and they aren't "Bare" anymore. For me, the hardest part came at the beginning and the end. because I had already wound up my yarn and didn't want the kind of regular pattern you can get from just putting your cake of yarn into the dye in a dish, I had to get out my knitty-noddy (which my wonderful DH made for me out of PVC pipe) and rewind it into hanks. Since it was lace yarn, this took for-ev-er! Then when I went to wind my yarn into a cake again after it was dry, the yarn kept flying off the ball winder. I finally got out a new TP sleeve to fit over the shaft of the ball winder, bent the bottom edge in so it wouldn't slip, and had no further problems, other than it still took for-ev-er even when it worked correctly. 

I was happy with the result and look forward to dyeing the last of the leftover lace-weight yarn on another nice day.

On almost any sunny day in the summertime, you can hear me paraphrase the famous Klingon battle cry: "Today is a good day to dye."

Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals were harmed during the production of this blog post.

Watch for my regular blog, returning July 27th.