tow favourite colour

I think it’s pretty obvious my favourite colour is from the blog title! I am happy to report that the favourite colours swap was a smashing success! The interesting twist we learned later that we were paired up with the person we were sending it to. See in the swaps I’ve been you only know who you are sending to, not who is sending you a swap. So we weren’t aware that the moderators of the swap put a twist in and paired us to have direct swaps without knowing about it. Fun!
My swap partner was Kristen and she sent me the awesomest blue swap package. Look!

Uuuh, what could be in the packages?

The notebook, the pen and the scisors are all from Smiggle. It’s a store I like going in to but never bought anything for myself from there before. The notebook cover does funny things to your eyes as you look at it! The yarn is silvery blue Tofutsies –a new yarn for me to try! And the highlight was the branching out scarf made for me in beautiful blue KPPPM!

I am happy to report my swap partner, again Kristen liked what I’ve sent her! With her permission I took these photos from her flickr page,

The socks fit!

And the additional goodies. The tea wallet was custom made by lulli on etsy. She did a fantastic job, I high recommend her!
On the other swap front the Juno shawl is coming along great!

It looks like I will need more yarn than I have to complete it and my kind swap partner offered to spin some more so I can finish the project. Crafty people are the best!
The colours in the yarn is amazing. You can not get beautiful variety of shades and hues with machine spun yarn. This photo shows the colours a bit better

Hmm, maybe I’ll get a nicer camera for my birthday!
I got a question about the yarn I’ve dyed. Heh, didn’t think anyone would be interested in the details honestly! I didn’t have a clear plan in mind. I wanted to play with the icing coloring my mom sent over from America. I read that black icing breaks into interesting colours when you pour in vinegar. I wanted to try that. I soaked the yarn in water with a splash of vinegar for a couple of hours. I think it takes the dye much quicker if you soak it for a long time. I put in 8 cups of water into a pot and dissolved 1/4 teaspoon of Wilton’s icing dye in black in it. I plopped the yarn in the water and turned on the heat to low. I poked it around periodically to make sure it was taking in the dye. I also poured in a cup of vinegar for a good measure after a while. The dye went clear rather quickly and I didn’t like the colour too much.It was murky dark green. I dissolved 1/4 teaspoon of Kelly Green of Wilton’s icing dye and poured that in to the pot. I had Queen’s food colouring at home so I poured in a bit of that yellow and mixed that in. I also poured red food colouring but I poured it just to the top bit of the yarn so I can have it in certain spots. And once again waited for the dye to be absorbed and water to turn clear. To sum it up, I was experimenting and got lucky!

tow Ormanda

The long awaited package from mom arrived last week. Every couple of months my lovely mother puts together a package of assorted goodies from US and sends it my way. I’ve been living in Australia for the past year and half and having packages from home is great! If I haven’t mentioned it before I’ve moved here because I got married to the most amazing man on earth and he just happened to be in Australia! I really dislike shopping so my mother kindly shops for me and mails them to me, sad I know! She just has amazing taste in clothes (I don’t) and she finds incredible bargains. Even with the weak Australian dollar the clothing turns out to be a bargain.
In this package she also sent me Kool Aid and Wilton’s icing dyes. I’ve been wanting to get into dying yarn and Kool Aid is hard to come by here. Being the awesome mom she is, she sent me 45 packets of assorted flavours and sent me a 12 pack of Wilton’s icing dyes.
Last night I’ve dyed this yarn. To be more accurate I overdyed it because it was already dyed a pale yellow with flecks of pink.

I am very, very pleased with how it turned out

Ignore the blue yarn, that was to tie off the sections of the hank.
Another side because it’s pretty

I named the colour “Ormanda” (Turkish for “in the forest”). I think I will knit it up to the Forest Canopy shawl.

Yesterday the tap in the laundry decided to drip. I stuck a bucket under it but the “drip, drip, drip” was driving us insane. I remembered something I read somewhere ages ago. You can tie a length of string to the tap and the drops follow through the string and drop gently and quietly.

It worked! (Note to mom, that’s the LAUNDRY sink ok? Love you mom!) Now I just have to get ACA to fix it!

tow procrastinator

A wise person once quipped that procrastinators are the leaders of tomorrow. I agree, but I want to break out of the cycle of putting things off and let things add up and fixing everything at once. I thought about this when I noticed my blog entries were few but very long. I put of writing the blog entry for so long I end up with massive posts trying to cover everything. It might stem from my annoying desire for everything to be perfect so I leave things off until I know that I can get it done properly. I want to get better at getting tasks done as they arise instead of putting it off until all the tasks mountain up and I have to do them all at once. Here’s to hoping writing smaller entries more frequently!
Look who arrived last week,

No, she’s not mine but I wish she was. Say Masallah with me and look how cute and perfect she is! She is the daughter of a friend. I’ve been waiting for her to arrive for the last three months or so!
I made this doll for her,

The doll’s name is Aliye! I also made a blanket for her, but I didn’t get a good photo of it before I gave it to her. Ins I’ll try to get one with the baby on it!

I finished the arrowneights. I almost ran out of Wollmeise yarn and I was worried because Wollmeise is very hard to get a hold of. But a friend from Ravelry came to rescue and I was able to complete them.

Insert the usual complaint about camera not capturing the colours properly. It’s actually a brilliant shade of blue with some teal mixed in.

The pattern has you ending with 5 rows of stockinette followed by a YO, K2tog row and another 5 rows of stockinette. The rows with the yarn overs gives you a nice place to fold the edge down. The instructions said not to bind of but sew it down, but I bound of anyway. Then I threaded elastic through the gap left by folding the seam down (just like the hem of a waist band of a skirt).

This worked great. I have worn the socks a couple of times and they don’t slide down one bit.

The next sock project was for a swap at the Australian Knitters group. The theme of the swap was Favourite Colour and my partner liked red. I decided to knit her a pair of socks. The pattern is Vinnland socks from the anti craft website.
I chose Dream in Color -Smooshy yarn for the socks.

The colour way is called “In Vino Veritas.” That’s latin for “in wine there’s truth” I wouldn’t know I don’t drink, ever! I decided the call the socks “veritaserum” after the truth potion in Harry Potter

Nice huh? I am hoping the swap partner will provide some photos of the sock on her feet so I can update the photos.
I loved working with this yarn. It’s true to its name. It IS smooshy! The pattern turned out beautiful as well. I did get a bit tired of the repeat of the pattern, 16 row repeat and each row was patterned and I couldn’t memorize it!
Here’s the work in progress shot,

I colour the charts which makes it easier for me to see what kind of decrease or increase I am doing. SSK gets coloured blue, K2tog gets coloured pink etc. I kind of went overboard and coloured the entire chart this time! I found the clipboard the pattern is on at K-mart. It is very handy because of the sliding ruler thing. I just slide the ruler up as I finish each row, no need for post it notes (my old method of keeping track of rows) or highlighters. I also find it helpful to place the clipboard on the bookstand so I can knit without having to look down constantly.

The other swap I was in it was the magic yarn ball swap. This is where you get small goodies and wrap them all into a magical yarn ball. As the person knits or crochets from it they get the presents! This was the one I’ve sent out

I can’t reveal the contents yet because my swap partner hasn’t started crocheting it yet.

And this was the one I’ve received,

That’s handspun merino, silk and alpaca blend you are looking at! My swap partner spun it for me. It’s 16 WPI which makes it 4 ply! She suggested I turn it into socks but it is too gorgeous to be worn on my feet. I am making it into a Juno shawl. Here’s what it looks like so far,

I had to unwrap my ball because it was huge and it was tangled in some places and I am impatient! Look at all the goodies I got,

Awesome! See the little sheepy? That was for ACA! Here’s Shaun the sheep with the rest of his friends Irfan and Mojo,

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Melbourne stitches and craft show. I got to meet up with a bunch of ladies that I met online through ravelry. Get this, one of the ladies I’ve met and had lunch with was my magic yarn ball swap partner! I have to admire her self control for not blurting out that she was my super secret swap partner. Overall I was disapointed with the yarn content of the show, but I sure enjoyed the company of friends!

Those were some serious needles!

I wanted to take this one home! It was $150, and I left it where it was.

I made three squares to send to the Friendship Blankets Bushfire relief. They are 30 cm by 30 cm’s. This picture was taken before they were blocked. I can assure you they blocked into squares! Blocking is magical!

Plain double crochet, worked back and forth.

Stared with a circle and worked in to a circle, worked in the round

And a knit one worked diagonally.

I started a butterfly wing shawl for me worked from 2 ply lace weight yarn dyed for me by my friend Mel months ago. (whoa over run sentences much?!) I usually work on it when I go to the lecture at the Mosque on wednesdays. I am happy with the way it’s coming along. I stared with a 4 mm crochet hook and kept increasing the hook size. I am using a 6.5 mm hook now.

A couple more rows and it’s done!
I wanted to share a tip regarding crochet. when I put my project into the project bag I usually leave the hook on the loop and wrap the yarn around the hook a few times. The yarn does find a way of getting unwound and then frogging itself. What I do now is this

I slip a stitch marker through the loop and that’s it! It’s a bit like putting the stitches on a holder when I am knitting, but the beauty of crochet is there is only one loop to worry about!

Now on to a completely different subject,
I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before but I hold an Bachelors (Honours) degree in Journalism. I graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2006. For one reason or another I have not persuaded my major but chose to work on the library field instead. I am still not thinking about becoming a journalist but I got an offer to write a freelance article for an Islamic magazine. I thought about it and decided this was something I can do. What I am looking at is the help of the Muslim community to the bushfire victims. The media coverage of this is sorely lacking and I wanted to change that. One of the places I’ve visited was Balha’s sweets. this company donated 10% of their profits from March 14th to March 20th to IISNA which donated them to Redcross. I stopped by to interview the owners and didn’t leave without sampling the offerings,

YUM!