Nerd Wars 2!

The second round of the Nerd Wars over on Ravelry began on June first & this my first time ever participating in such an event. I have been blogging some of my contributions to the Guild Wars over at Ravelry's Ankh-Morpork Knitter's Guild (such as Nanny Ogg's Best Hat Tea Cosy, Granny's Frogs, Magrat's Amulets, Granny's Shawl, and Perdita's Shawl) & have had a great time dreaming up Discworld-inspired creations. It's really fueled my creativity. One day, while perusing the forums at the A-MKG, I found a link to something called "Nerd Wars". Life hasn't been the same since... I'm lucky to have found the Nerd Wars between rounds because, although you can jump in & participate as  Ninja Warrior, I am having a lot of fun participating as a member of a team.

To rewind a bit, the Nerd Wars is set up as teams of various nerdy fandoms, like Star Wars or Dr. Who, or video games, and then during the 3 months of the Wars you are presented with 6 challenges every month on various topics like "Giving Geeks" (giving to charity) or Science (making something to illustrate a scientific principle). The topics stay the same throughout the Wars, but the specific challenges change every month, & each challenge must be submitted within the calendar month. Still with me?

There's also another category called "Dissertation" where you can propose a challenge for just you to complete that you think will take you 3 whole months to do. These have to be approved by the mods in that thread. All completed projects are scored, with points going to your team. You get extra points if you can theme your projects to your particular team's fandom, which sometimes requires a lot of creative thinking :) The folks over at Nerd Wars are a lot of fun, & although I don't post as much as some on the forums (I get a bit tongue-tied when posting on forums- sounds weird, but it seems to bring out the worst of my aspie-tendencies) I really enjoy reading the forums, especially the Otaku Lounge & the Photo Dominos threads. I really am in awe of the organiser, Eyeamelise. I can't imagine what it took/takes to put together such an amazing event.

The team I was assigned to (I got my first choice!) is Team 4-Panel, which is dedicated to comics & manga. It may seem that the Star Wars team was a more natural choice (& it was my second choice) but I felt that, due to my present immersion in manga & anime in both Japanese & English (see my left sidebar for more info on this :), I thought I'd find more inspiration on Team 4-Panel.

So far, I have submitted (& had approved) a dissertation & also 2 completed projects. I am really excited about all of my projects because I decided, after talking to my friend Momo in Japan, that I would donate the bulk of my Nerd Wars 2 output to the Touhoku earthquake survivors through Knit for Japan, a charity I found on Ravelry.

For my dissertation I proposed to knit 14 (one for each week of Nerd Wars 2) children's hats to send to Japan for the earthquake survivors. I will theme all of the hats to various manga. Pictured above is my dissertation swatch, which I'm calling the Yotsuba Hat :) Yotsuba is the name of the manga right below the hat, as well as the little girl on the cover. Her name means "4 leaves" & I picked the colour pattern because it reminded me of Yotsuba's hair (green & in 4 ponytails) & name. I made the hat from KnitPick's Swish DK yarn with size 1 & 2 needles, & my own pattern.

This is my contribution to the "Giving Geeks" category, which this month asks us to contribute an item of baby clothing to a hospital or charity. I made an infant cap & mitts set to send to Japan (the challenge asks us to include the package you'll be sending in the picture). The yarn is shibori-dyed Knitpicks bare sock wool that I dipped in indigo. The knitted-up yarn makes me think of a starry sky, which works beautifully with the manga "Twin Spica", about young people training to be astronauts.

And here is Pikachu, whom I made for the scientific challenge on the topic of lightning. My son wanted me to make a Pikachu, so this little Pokemon will hang around with us as a souvenir of the Nerd Wars :) I used the book you see behind him in the picture, which is from Japan & just full of Pokemon-inspired patterns for kids' clothing & toys. I'll be using it again for my dissertation, I'm sure! The Pikachu I made is a mini version, crocheted with KnitPick's Palette fingering weight yarn & a size c/2/2.75mm hook. The pattern has you make his tail & feet from felt but I crocheted them instead. He really looks like he's going to give you a hug, doesn't he?

I'm looking forward to posting my further adventures in Nerd Wars 2 creations. I've got a Naruto-inspired hat for my dissertation started, & I think there's a pair of child's mittens on board next for one of the challenges. Stay tuned...!

Perdita's Shawl

Howdy! Here's yet another recently finished project, which I made for the Ankh-Morpork Knitter's Guild Guild Wars 3. I blogged my other project for GW3 here, my first Rippled Wrap. This here is my second, because I really like this pattern! Plus, I found the perfect yarn for it while up in my attic fibre storage area: it's naturally-dyed, fingering-weight alpaca yarn that I dyed a few years ago. I had been thinking of weaving with it, so I'd purchased some black alpaca of the same weight to use with it. Sadly all of it became moth-eaten :( I was able to reclaim the yarn I'd dyed with not much loss (the black was chewed terribly), and was looking for a project where I could use the multiple, small balls of yarn that I ended-up with. Enter the Ripple! 

I used an I/9/5.50mm hook to get as light a fabric as I could (without it being to loosey-goosey). The alpaca is slightly fuzzy so it has more body than a fingering-weight yarn usually has, but it feels nice on my shoulders (& will feel even nicer when it isn't 80 degrees out!). 

As you can see in the close-up, I decided to edge it on black single-crochet. As mentioned above, the black alpaca fared much worse than my hand-dyed yarn & has sat around looking sad for a long time.

As I was getting close to finishing Perdita I decided I should try to reclaim some of the black for edging, so I put it on the swift & have been hand-unwinding separate strands for a few days now. Just one lump of it was sufficient to finish the shawl, luckily! Who knows how long it may take me to unravel it all from the swift, though...

As you've probably guessed, each stripe was cut at the end of each row & a new colour tied-on. 

It was kind of a pain early on (although it used-up the smaller balls of yarn nicely), but got better as the rows got longer. As it got larger & the ends proliferated, I periodically stopped crocheting & spent some time working the ends in, so that I wouldn't have it all to do at the end. That way, when I was actually done crocheting, there was only about an hour left of weaving ends, then I could do the single crochet along the straight edge (which helps cover up any bumps from tying new colours on...).

And, who is Perdita, you may ask? She's a character in some of Terry Pratchett's Disc World books, of course. She's the main character of Masquerade & becomes one of the Witches that Sir Terry likes to write about. I like to think she'd have worn a shawl of this kind during her brief, dazzling career on the stage!

Naturally-Dyed Gallery

Hot on the heels of my recent natural-dyeing adventure posts, I thought I'd put up a gallery of things I've made from yarns that I've naturally dyed over the past few years. It was kind of like a treasure hunt, looking around the house, in the winter woolies basket, & on the bodies of my son & husband for things to photograph.

The photo at the top is of some Latvian-style mittens (patterns from Lizbeth Upitis' Latvian Mittens book) that I made about 7 years ago. Most of them were given as gifts or to charity knitting projects. They are a mix of indigo, cochenille, & yarrow-dyed yarns, & naturally brown & white yarns. (On a side note, I'm really glad that I have been photographing things on-and-off over the years, because I absolutely don't remember making these. I remember getting the book & getting all fired-up about making stuff, but have no real memory of making this many pairs of mittens...)

Another of the older photos that I found is this one, taken on a beach in California during a 2004 family trip to San Francisco. It's my version of the Mobi-Q Shawl, designed by Margo Carr, from Handwoven's Design Collection 19. I wove it on my Mighty Wolf loom from all handspun & naturally-dyed yarns & it's one of the crowning glories of my fibre-life. I had always wanted to weave something useful like this from my handspun, & the natural dyeing was just icing on the cake. I used all of my usual plant-based dyes and most of the wool is Corriedale spun on my Lendrum double-treadle wheel over a few years.  I took the shawl apart after a few years because it wasn't as functional as I'd hoped & is sitting in lavender-soaked cotton balls, waiting for an idea to strike for it's next incarnation.

This is the last of the real oldies, & the only photo I have of the Gansey sweater I designed & made for Brendan when he was 8 years old, specifically for this sailing vacation around Cape Cod. I indigo-dyed Lion Brand Fisherman Wool yarn & put Gansey patterns Brendan chose from a book on the front. When he outgrew it 3-4 years later, my mom wanted it (it fit her :) so she has it now.

Here's the vest I made for Charlie for our 20th anniversary in 2008. Many of the yarns are from the experimental dye pots from the summer of 2007, including birch bark, rhubarb leaves, & alkanet. He has a list at work of which stripe is which plant material because some folks like to know :) Also, I decided that just striping it would be boring, hence the patterned edges on each stripe.

The year before I made the anniversary vest, decided I wanted to make him a red vest (I usually make Charlie a vest for our anniversary because it's in early December, right when he needs warm clothes :). So I dyed Knitpicks merino worsted yarn with brazilwood (all skeins in the same dye bath) to get the heathered red of this vest. (A side note on the vest pattern: it's adapted from a WW2 Red Cross pattern that I found in Charlie's grandmother's things. I made it longer (he's a tall guy) & adapted it to knit in the round. I love it because the armhole & neck edgings are knit at the same time in garter stitch, so there's no pickup afterward. It's about the only vest pattern I use these days.)

Here are Charlie's snow-shoveling gloves, made from Elizabeth Zimmermann's "Winter Spruce" pattern, from Knitting Around.

And here are this year's winter gloves, made from shibori-dyed Knitpick's Gloss fingering weight yarn, dyed with yarrow & indigo, to get shades of yellow, blue, & green. The pattern is from Ann Budd's the knitter's handy book of patterns. I've placed them in the photo so you can't see the mends :( These gloves are destined to be felted & recycled as something else, as about 4 fingers have either mends or holes in them...

And, last of the photos of Charlie's stuff, a pair of shibori-dyed socks from Knitpicks' fingering-weight sock wool. The plants I used were birch bark & Rose of Sharon. Pattern- my own.

These are the front & back of my Adult Babies & Bears' Sweater from Cottage Creations. I used lots of odds & ends of the usual dyes & combos, & made sure that no 2 colours were next to each other for the whole sweater :)

This mitten & leg-warmer set were made from some yarn I dyed back in 2002. A friend had brought me some skeins of single-ply dk-weight yarn from New Zealand & I dyed them in golden marguerite, onion skins, brazilwood, indigo, & marguerite in indigo for green. These are the mittens I've used this winter, warm but light.

Here's another pic of my big flowers shawl, made with the popular motif from Nihon Vogue's motif book & Lion Brand Fisherman Wool, in lots of natural colours, after the 2007 dyeing. Among the plant dyes used were alkanet, indigo, yarrow, onionskins, brazilwood, rhubarb leaves, birch bark, & safflower.

I posted this bag back in September. I made it from Knitpick's bulky weight yarns from dye pots I ran the summer of 2008. I noted that the yarrow dyepot lasted 3 full dyebaths before exhausting, giving very nice golds-to-yellows. The pale red is brazilwood exhaust, with the rusty-red being from the first dye bath. The purple & green were brazilwood & yarrow over-dyed in indigo.

For some other finished examples from naturally-dyed yarns, please see my Shibori 1 & Shibori 2 posts. Let me know if you're inspired to try natural dyeing!

Sock Weight for Physical Therapy

Just a quick post today! (I'm collecting & photographing things for a naturally-dyed gallery post, so stay tuned...) Until then, my son suggested that I post today's little project. I am now in physical therapy post reconstructive back surgery (last January) & needed a weight at home for exercising. I knew instinctively that I wouldn't need to go out & purchase weights because there's so much stuff laying around...

Like Brendan's old, felty socks from 3 winters ago, which I then adopted (because, even felted, they were much bigger & fit over my socks). I found some fish-gravel in the basement, usually used for the bottoms of flower pots (we haven't had fish for some years) & was able to fit a kilo into one sock, a kilo being my target weight (for now). I just sewed it shut with some size 10 crochet cotton & voila!

We're nothing if not resourceful around these parts :)

A side note, regarding the felty socks. These socks were made from regular, superwash sock wool (from Knitpicks's Bare line- the fingering-weight sock wool) that I shibori-dyed in indigo. Now, Brendan is known for his ability to felt wool by just looking at it (in a sweaty-footed, growing-kid way) but he's never felted superwash sock wool before this. It's not the only time that indigo-dyed superwash socks have felted, & I've come to the conclusion that the alkalinity of the indigo bath does something to the superwash process (ie: removes it). Good thing we have uses for felty socks around here, huh?