Ripple of the Week #20 – And a Third

Both of my earlier Round Baby Ripples weighed about fourteen ounces, so I assumed that this twelve ounces of Jack Frost Wintuk Sport ‘Buttercup’ and two ounces of chartreuse would be enough for a third.

These yarns would provide six rows of yellow to every one row of green.  To make things a little more exciting I thought I’d start with just four of yellow with one of green, repeat that twice, then increase to 5 rounds yellow and one green, and end by repeating 6 yellow, one green until I ran out of green.

I was pleasantly surprised by just how lovely the yellow feels; for being a long discontinued acrylic, it’s quite fluffy and soft!

Just nine rounds in I stopped to reconsider. I was wondering what a little of my precious ‘Petal Rose’ Caldor Sport Yarn, one of the only two pinks in my sport yarn stash,

might add to the mix.

O.K., so maybe the best place for it isn’t right next to the Chartreuse like that, lol, but with plenty of yellow between them. . .

Oooooh, yes, I like!!

Wow!! What a difference just one ounce of ‘Petal Rose’ makes in this baby ripple! I’m so glad that I changed my mind.

Primrose Path

This springlike ripple measures 37″ in the valley, 46 at the points and weighs 13 1/2 ounces. The single round green edging goes * 1 sc, chain 2, skip 1 dc, and then repeat from the *. Plus, whenever I came to a valley I skipped two dc, and at the very tip of each point I didn’t skip any.

A Little Somethin’ Special

A particular little ball of fuzzy white yarn, the one I’ve highlighted there on the left, was such a tiny part of last week’s haul,

that even though I noticed  it was “100% angora”, it didn’t seem worth mentioning. But later, as I was about to put it away, I again read the tiny handwritten words “Yarn $12″ on the back of its tag, and I began to wonder.

On closer examination I also made out “10 g = ca. 25 m” and considered that I might be holding a 25 meter ball of yarn that had sold for $12. But it hardly seemed possible. I mean, it’s angora, which comes from bunnies, not something exotic like. . . like qiviut, which comes from musk oxen!

Well, clearly, I don’t know much about the full retail value of some yarns. I found “Angora Schulana” here in Yarndex. It’s MSRP is $13.95 – so my benefactor actually got a pretty good deal if she paid only $12! lol. It’s described as “a soft, fuzzy, 2-ply yarn” for sweaters, shawls, cardigans, shells, and scarves. Oh, My! I don’t want to think about how many of these little balls it would take to make a sweater.

Instead I wondered what most people who buy this yarn make out of it. Not really knowing how far 27 yards of yarn goes (25 m. is 27 yd.), I could only think of it as an accent on a scarf, or maybe a mitten and hat set, but I knew Ravelry would give me the facts.

Out of the yarn’s 51 project pages, baby booties, which only take one skein BTW, were the clear winner with fourteen finished projects. That’s probably because Joelle Hoverson chose this particular yarn for her Angora Baby Booties pattern in the book “Last-Minute Knitted Gifts”! Four people trimmed Christmas stockings with it, while three trimmed hats, and another three made cowls. It’s not surprising to me that no one made a 100% angora sweater.

Of the projects that mention the number of skeins used, an adult tam took the most at four. A snood, a wedding shawlette and a vintage stole each used three. Other uses were mixing it with other yarns or trimming just about anything with it, making a baby hat or lace fingerless mitts, lining the ears of either a stuffed bunny or a mouse, knitting a snowman and crocheting a bird.

I feel I should create something wonderful with my one precious ball of “Angora Schulana”,

but the question is, What?

Maybe that’s how it ended up hidden in a fifty cent bag of yarn at a tag sale in the first place; the original owner couldn’t stand the dilemma of what to make with it either! lol.

2013 Ripple #19 – Another Round One

I had nearly equal amounts of three sport weight yarns, Bernat Coordinates ‘Soft Blue’, a similarly crinkled yarn in blue/pink and an unknown plain white, so I decided on a simple repeating pattern of three rounds of each yarn for this ripple. I ran out of the white, which was of  a slightly lighter weight yarn than the other two and would have made a rather wimpy feeling edge, so I added two rounds of the sturdier-feeling solid blue before I measured.

The baby blanket was already bigger than I’d planned, 37″ in valley and 43″ at peak, so Ta-Dah!

Sky at Dawn

The name would make more sense if you could see the blanket in person. Oddly, the crinkled blue/pink yarn appears grey in these photos. hmphf.

The blanket’s weight – fourteen ounces, the same as the 1st Baby Ripple, which was one inch smaller.

An All-Town Tag Sale

I don’t remember why we missed last year’s – you can read about 2011′s here – but I’m so glad that DH and I were able to go to this year’s all-town tag sale. We were at the first sale site long before eight – You know you’re ‘there’ when you see a long line of parked cars on an otherwise empty street. -

and we shopped steadily. . .

until almost two. What a fun, satisfying and tiring time we had!

Maneuvering through tag sale traffic can really frustrate and slow you down. . .

unless you think to drive your golf cart like this young woman did! lol.

Everything was hectic – so many people, so many cars, so much ‘stuff’ strewn on people’s driveways and lawns! It was nice to pause for a moment just to look at this meadow blanketed with pale purple wild violets. . .

Aaaaaaah. . . . . so delicate and lovely.

After a short respite we felt ready to dive back into tag saling, how about you? I haven’t even started to tell you about what all we found. . . or didn’t find. Well, we didn’t come across any wire fencing or a single metal fence post, both items high on our wish list, but we did see a weaving loom early in the day! It’s the first loom I recall ever seeing at a tag sale, at least the first that wasn’t a potholder loom or a toy.

PHOTO – loom

Yup, that’s the spot where it’s photo belongs. lol. It didn’t occur to either of us to take a picture. But you can imagine a sturdy wooden elementary school student’s desk with a four harness loom bolted to its top; that’s the major idea. Unfortunately, the loom was an ‘antique’ so they wanted $260 for it. Boo-hoo.

Don’t worry, I’m not about to bore you with descriptions of every item we saw or bought. I’m so good, I can probably do it (bore you) with just the highlights. lol.

It was a great day for finding critters to go with my ripple blankets for the foster kids.

About half were 25 cents each and the rest were 50. I got seventeen in all, plus three soft balls, 10 cents each. Just think of the fun and cuddles these will bring!

All this yarn came tightly twist-tied in three translucent grocery bags.

I bought without even bothering to peek inside cuz they were only 50¢ a piece. After we got home did I discovered I’d gotten some pretty interesting yarns! In no particular order, the royal blue is Melody, an Italian mohair/acrylic blend from Bucilla and the pink/grey feels like it might contain some mohair too. The Purple is Bulky Bouclé by Caron, 100% Orlon.

There’s a delicate metallic wrap of pink, blue, copper and gold on the fine black yarn at the bottom. There’s not much of it, but probably enough for a few accent strands in a woven scarf.

There’s over 5 1/2 ounces of this finely crinkled orange. A burn test says it’s mostly synthetic.

I don’t know what I’ll put with it to dampen the effect of Orange, but I think it wants to become a woven scarf too.

I’ll set all this aside for Christmas Ripples,

well, except for the Caron Cotton Tales.

It’s 95% mercerized cotton with a metallic gold wrap. Maybe it’s destined to become  Christmas dish cloths? I suppose the metallic strand would be helpful for scrubbing dishes. lol.

It was late morning when I was offered this stack of Procion Dyes for a quarter. . . just to get me to take all six of them. The woman was very determined to sell Every Thing that she’d hauled out to her driveway!! lol.

Today I found out this stuff goes for over $3 a package and they’re smaller packages now too! Hmmm, an eighteen dollar value for 25 cents. . . Don’t you just love tag sales?

I found a couple of things for our house too. Remember the blue plastic trays we put our wet/dirty shoes on under the deacon’s bench in the new entry way? Oh, yeah. I never showed them to you because. . . although I was thrilled to have gotten them for only 50 cents each at a thrift store, they are Bright Blue! lol.

Well, at least they protected our floor until I found something a little better. I got two of these larger black ones on Saturday for just a dollar a piece.

Now even DH’s BIG shoes can easily fit. – No more excuses DH. -

and, obviously, I’m very happy that they’re not Blue!

Just as soon as I paint the frame burgundy, I’m going to hang my ‘new’ 50-cent cork bulletin board over the work table in my craft room. It will replace the old fabric covered one that DH and I made several years ago.

As for personal finds, DH got a like-new LowePro Rezo 170 camera bag for $5.00! He’d seen the very same one in Best Buy for $52. Yee-ha!

And, of course, the Laurel Birch bag is mine. I don’t know how much it may have been new and I don’t care. I just love it! Originally it was marked $5, but when I returned the pair of reading glasses I found inside, the owner let me have it for $3. hee-hee.

You know, we used to see lots of hot-air corn poppers at tag sales, but I’ve noticed lately that they’ve been replaced by an overflow of George Foreman grills in several different sizes. I wonder why so many people are getting rid of them! We bought a little one at a tag sale several years ago and liked it so much I bought a larger one, even went so far as to buy it at a real store! lol. Do you have one? Do you like it/use it?

Oh yeah, we saw quite a few lava lamps too, a sign that particular retro fad is officially over.

P.S. Maybe you wonder why we choose to shop at tag sales and thrift stores. Well, it’s not because we have to or because we’re cheap. O.K., so maybe we are cheap, lol; we were raised by frugal parents who lived through the Great Depression after all. But that’s not the only reason. It’s fun! And it’s incredibly easy to find most of the things we need or want in excellent or nearly new condition, often for a tiny fraction of their full retail price. By spending less in the areas most easily met by treasure hunting: clothing, craft supplies and home accessories, we can funnel more into other areas, like charity giving, healthy eating, saving for our future and the occasional splurge. . .

like the Handwoven CDs that arrived in the mail just the other day, a wonderful, if slightly belated, birthday gift.

You may not hear from me for a while; I have eleven years of Handwoven magazine to go through!

It’s Done!!

I learned an important lesson about making tarn (t-shirt yarn) while preparing to start our new kitchen rug. Two of the t-shirts had side seams so I couldn’t just cut looong spiraling strips from a t-shirt’s hem up to the bottom edge of its armholes like I’m used to. So I made piles of short strips by cutting from seam to seam instead.

Not hard, just time consuming. But now, Ah-HA, I realized that I could cut short strips out of the upper part of t-shirts I’d been flinging aside and the sleeves too! This could give me as much as 50% more tarn per shirt. Yay!

Earlier I’d wondered if my dozen shirts. . .

would yield enough tarn to knit a 40″ long kitchen rug. Now, thanks to my new idea I was sure I would have plenty!

But wanting a 65% larger and denser rug meant a much longer knitting slog compared to that of my lighter, smaller bathmat.

When I got to this point, so very close to being done. . .

it seemed that no matter how long I knit, it didn’t get any longer! A typical case of “a watched pot never boils” I suppose, because I did keep measuring it in hopes that I was done. lol.

It’s all been worth it though. I’m so proud to show you our lovely new kitchen rug. Ta-Dah!!

Who would guess that I made it from discarded t-shirts?

In conclusion:

I cut tarn from the bodies (hem to armholes) of 12 t-shirts, mostly sized XL to XXL, and from the upper parts of a few of them. This was way more tarn than I needed. Our 22″ x 40″ rug weighs 2 lb. 13 oz. and I have 1 lb. 4 oz. of left.

This means I used only about 70% (45 oz. out of 65 oz.) of the tarn I made. That’s about 8 1/2 shirts’ worth (12 XL-XXL shirts x .7 = 8.4 shirts).

And that means that I got about 100 square inches of rug out of each t-shirt. (22 x 40 = 880 ÷ 8.4 = 105 in²/shirt) I’ll keep that in mind the next time I want to knit a dense tarn rug. I’m wondering about putting one at the front door. Must check to see whether the door could swing freely over such a thick rug.

I’m also wondering what it would be like to weave with tarn!

P.S. Just noticed that the colors in this rug are almost the same as in the Rugby Scrum ripple. Hunh.

#18 – Rugby Scrum

I designed this ripple around yet another of the many pretty variegated yarns that my friend, Anastacia, gave me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this one before, but maybe one of you recognize it? I put RHSS ‘Buff’, ‘Soft Navy’ and ‘Hunter Green’ with it plus three somewhat rusty colored burgundy yarns. Two of those, one of regular weight and one so thin I had to use it doubled, are chenille I unraveled from thrift store sweaters, and the third is a simple acrylic yarn.

The widths of the burgundy, navy and hunter stripes were easily decided by the amount I had of each yarn, twice as much burgundy, so the burgundy stripes are twice as wide. But yarn amounts had nothing to do with the order in which I arranged the stripes. A simple burg/navy/hunter repeat would have used exactly the same amounts as the sequence I chose to use instead. I just thought flipping back and forth between burg/navy/hunter and burg/hunter/navy would be a more interesting result.

I panicked when near the ripple’s finish I ran 25 stitches short with the ‘Hunter Green’. ACK!! Who wants to go buy more yarn when they’ve got just ten rows left to do?

But, thankfully, my panic was very short-lived. Only a minute into a frantic scrap box rummage I uncovered this sizable ball. Unlabeled, but I was quite sure it was ‘Hunter Green’. phew. On close comparison I could see I was right.

I have more, twelve ounces more, of the variegated left for future play,

but since I used all but these small scraps of the colors that most closely match, I’m going to let it continue to age in my charity stash.

Oh, yeah. lol. I suppose you’d like to see the finished blanket.

Ta-Dah!!

Just look at how the white bits in the variegated Pop! and Sparkle! I don’t think they would if I’d included white stripes. I had brought a skein of white yarn down from the attic, but as soon as I realized I had far more yarns than I needed, I decided it was the one to be omitted. These results say I made the right choice!

A Weaver’s Birthday

Happy Birthday to Me! I turned 57 last week.

I had suggested to DH that he make some weaving tools for my birthday: a triple warping peg, for measuring out warp – That’s the lengthwise pieces of yarn you put on a loom. – and a yarn meter for measuring the how many yards are in a ball or skein. I thought one would be real handy for unlabeled skeins and the yarn I harvest from sweaters.

I’m not sure if it was because he didn’t quite understand how a warping peg is used – this 13 minute video with Syne Mitchell shows the entire warping process. To watch only the warping peg ‘action’ start at 5:15. – or if he just wanted to make use of the entire wooden broomstick, but he made me not just one, but two triple warping pegs!

This is Very Cool because, if I ever need to measure out an extra-looong warp, I can set them up something like this and they’ll substitute for a much harder to store warping board.

And my yarn meter is almost finished. DH is turning a little measuring wheel, which I found at Harbor Freight Tools,

into a marvelous yarn meter with the help of a 2006 craf-te-ra-ti blog post.

Yarn will pass through an eye screw, wrap around the wheel and then pass through a second eye screw while on its way to my yarn ball winder. Each turn of the wheel represents one foot and moves the counter ahead by one. I just divide the number that’s showing by three to get yardage.

We still need to make a stand that will bring the meter up to the same level as my yarn ball winder and add the eye screws and some o-rings, quite large ones that are usually used inside water filters. Those will go on the wheel where the rubber bands are now, creating a deeper channel for the yarn to ride in – a very clever idea shared by Twosheep.

More weaving birthday goodies are ‘in the mail’. Interweave had a 70% off sale on their Handwoven magazine CDs, plus I found a 15% off coupon code. Whoo-hoo!! Such a deal!! Soon my brain will be overflowing with weaving project ideas. Once I’ve finished the sport-weight baby ripples and added crochet edgings to a bunch of fleece blankets, I’m going to Weave, Weave, Weave!!

DH also surprised me with two more G crochet hooks. Thank you, Sweetie. He’s so cute; he wanted to be sure I knew they were on sale when he bought them.

They may be small, but they’re such a thoughtful birthday gift; I no longer have to be so terribly concerned about misplacing my hook while working on a baby ripple. Why, one fell into a box of yarn the other night and I haven’t yet bothered to dump all the yarn and find it!