August 06, 2003
I'll Take That To Go, Please
Below, a picture of a sparrows' nest in a birdbox in K's back yard. Unfortunately, the B-52s viewed the birdbox as the bird equivalent of a fast-food window and we believe that they plucked the sparrow babies forth to feed to their young 'uns, despite our frequent mad dashes up from the kitchen table, out through the screen door, and into the yard, flapping our hands and yelling, "Shoo." All we know is that one day the babies were there and the B-52s were perched on the fence, eyeballing the birdbox hole; the next day the babies were gone and so were the B-52s. You do the math.
Well, that was a depressing story...
Knitting Knews
The "satsuma bowl" so quickly developed a little fan club, both in "real time" and online, that I thought I would experiment knitting a larger one. As is so often the case when you push your beginner's luck, this one didn't turn out as well but it was still a hoot to knit. The satsuma bowl had a 10-stitch base and 9 stitches picked up on each side; this one has 20-stitch base and 19 stitches picked up on each side. I used Noro Kureyon and, again, size 10 needles. Although for a bowl this size it would be better to use double strands, I used single because double-stranding and then felting the Kureyon would have resulted in muddy colors. The bowl is still recovering from being violently hand-felted so I don't yet have a picture of the finished product, but here is the "before" picture.
(Hey, is it my imagination or is "Kureyon" just Japanese for "crayon?" Or has everyone else already figured this out and I'm just behind the eight ball?)
Dye Garden Dyegest
An update for Ced from the Yahoo natural dyer's group: Ced, the green dye from the purple plum tree leaves failed the light-fastness test miserably. After about 30 hours in the sun, that wonderful bright green had faded to a very ordinary tan. Here's a picture for you with, obviously, the faded yarn on top, the original yarn on the bottom:
In my limited experience with the felted bowls, smaller works better. And the doubling the Kureyon made sturdier "walls" (but you lose the pure colors). The woman who wrote the article in Spin-Off said that she made them small on purpose because she didn't want folks to assume they were hats.
Posted by: Melissa on August 9, 2003 01:43 PM