Annie Knits

How Do You Get a Hankie to Dance?

Oh, you know the answer to that one...

Plus, I'm talking about silk hankies, not the other kind.  For the uninitiated, silk hankies are square shaped pure silk that you spin -- dyed or undyed.  These came yesterday, Wooliebullie on etsy is my source.  They are the exact colors outside my window, so they must be spun.

I watched a YouTube video of a guy making these.  He takes a silk worm cocoon, soaks it, and ploomps the worm out like an olive pit -- gross.  Then he takes the cocoon and stretches it out over a square frame, just 4 nails really, and after 10 or so, voila.  A silk hankie.  

See the layers?  You tease each hankie from the stack ... 

and you end up with a diaphanous square of very sticky silk.  Well, not sticky precisely, but with dry hands?Each filament grabs you and the things are devilish hard to put down!

Next, you poke a hole in the center of the hankie, and pull the thing into an oval.  Keep pulling.  Pull some more.

After some more pulling and then some drafting, you end up with this.  A long oval of drafted silk.  This drafted piece will spin up to be about the size of crochet thread.  Very thin.  Silk compacts as you spin it.

What will I do with it?  Heck, I don't know.  It would be nice plyed with some soft wool or just alone knit into something lacy.  

This is process spinning, not intentional spinning...

Oh, ok.  You put a little boogie in it.

Success?

Rachel (uber dyer) came to help me dye my yarn.  I'm reserving judgement as to whether the effort was a success or not.

First I dumped the dye into two pans.  It doesn't look like something that will dye yarn warm brown, does it?

In went the white yarn and we brought the pans to the simmer on our gas grill.  

My hands are brown again but the yarn isn't brown yet.  It's more what I'd call loden thus far.  

While the dye pots simmered, we carded Rachel's pink silk noil.  If there was any doubt that the fiber was silk, the silkworm carcasses scattered throughout the stuff laid it to rest.  Pretty enough once carded, though.  Why yes, now that you ask.  That is my new drum carder.  Husband told me when it arrived, "I thought I was getting you that for Christmas..."

"You did," was my answer.  

Bridgett brought Leo over and while we experimented with wormy fiber stuff, she worked on an art project she's to teach at her kids' school -- marbled end papers.  They were pretty.  

Leo painted the furniture and the dogs with water and then he fed the dogs cookies.

Rachel checked the dye color (as if there was any doubt) by dipping a paper towel into the dyepot.  See?  Not warm brown!

This yarn came out exactly the color of the sludge that percolated on my porch for the last week.  Not a warm brown as the article touted, but a cool brown.  Deep loden.  Not horrible.  Just unexpected.  And yes I get the irony there.  Why I thought that deep greenish brown brew would yield warm brown yarn is a mystery.  It's all of the dyeing mythology I've heard over time about how things never turn out the way you expect or about how colors (commercial dyes mind you) break into their primary or secondary component colors on the yarn.  

Well, nothing except what should have been expected happened here.  What I brewed was what I got.  Perhaps the water I used to soak the hulls wasn't hot enough at the outset.  Rachel found some garbled directions about boiling the hulls or the water or the combination of the two, which I did not do.  Now when I rinsed the yarn?  The dye that washed out of it was a lovely warm brown.  As it ran down the drain.  Harumph.  Maybe.  

The yarn is still drying and lightening -- now it's all the color of the small skein in the middle of this picture.  It's softer now too, and slightly fulled so that it's puffed up a little.  I might get gauge on that cardigan.  Except it will be loden instead of chestnut.  Hmm.  Success?  I'm reserving judgement.

Dyeing (Get it?)

Gosh, it's just like I plan the puns, isn't it?

Amanda (of the comments) and her sister Christy helped me collect about 50 of Christy's black walnuts today.  They humor me, I keep them amused.

With kids at soccer practice and jazz band practice, I hulled the cursed things.  Many of them had little worms in them, and I can't imagine how the worms can live in such an astringent environment.  Symbiosis, I guess.  And Evolution.  You didn't think I could work something politically sensitive into a piece about dyeing wool with natural dyes, did you?  I'm special like that. (Ok, and I can't find out what kind of worm it is because, apparently, black walnut hulls -- more specifically a tincture made from the same green hulls I'm using -- is a treatment for intestinal parasites more of which I'd prefer not to view.)

 

If you embiggen the above picture, you may be able to see the worms in the bottom left.  If you want to that is.  The gal in the magazine didn't mention the wrigglers in her description of hulling the walnuts. 

 

So here I have the walnut hulls in a zippered fine mesh case in a plastic 10 gallon tub.  I started out using that hammer in the upper right hand side of the picture, but soon left off with it and just split them by hand.  The hammer was too splashy.  

 

Now, according to the magazine, all I have to do is wait a week and I'll have dye.  Not that big of a deal, really.  Pick up the nuts, hull them, put hot water over the hulls, and wait.  I wonder if the smell she talked about in the article (actually she just said that her family objected to her simmering the yarn in its dye bath  indoors and I extrapolated stink) is related to the worm carcasses or if the astringency of the hulls and the dye nullify that component.  We'll see, won't we.  Next Tuesday or so in fact.  And if you want to throw any thing dyeable in with the yarn, let me know by then.  I think there'll be plenty.

 

Next time?  Double up the gloves.

Kill Me Now

The new issue of Spin Off has caught my attention.  In a bad way.

Oh, executing the yarns described in the Core Spinning article, while interesting, isn't calling me in the night, although I like the idea of spinning art yarns using stash yarn that I'll likely never knit with as a basis for something more intriguing.  

And while I read the Debunking the Wraps per Inch Myth article with interest (I always thought it a ramshackle way to go about measuring yarn, with so much room for interpretation -- I prefer now to discuss grist), I didn't immediately get out my measuring device and wrap yarn with friends to see how our measures differ.

Nearer to the mark are the articles on natural dyeing.  As I'm spinning yarn at the moment that shades delightfully through spring yellows and greens due to a dyeing process using Osage Orange twigs, the discussion caught my fancy.  We used to call their fruit monkey brains and we delighted in smashing the things to bits.  

When I turned the page and a picture of beautiful handspun brown socks jumped out at me, I was hooked.  The picture was embedded in an article about dyeing yarn or fleece with black walnut hulls.  I read the article about a family living as simply as possible on a farm in Maine.  Yeah, not gonna do that.  I like my iphone a little too well.  But the daughter of the family describes in pretty good detail how to make the dye from the green hulls and then how she dyes the yarn or fleece.  The clincher, of course, was the pictures of gorgeous brown yarns and fleece.  Yum.

Every other year, I've more black walnuts than I know what to do with.  They clunk on the roof and roll to the driveway all through August and much of September.  We used to pay the kids to pick them up, but that doesn't work any more (the price has gotten too high -- a penny a piece means a lot to a 5-year-old and absolutely nothing to a 13-year-old and 5-year-olds delight in being paid in change, it being so much heavier and bulkier and noisier than paper money.)  This year, unfortunately I now think, I have not heard a single walnut fall.  This is usual -- the tree seems to alternate years of nut production and last year's crop was so large that a main limb was torn from the tree under its weight and I had to have a third of the tree cut away.

Let me endeavor to talk myself out of this folly.  First, says the author, you smash half a pillow case full of nuts out of their green hulls.  She keeps the nuts to snack on over the winter, but I've tried cracking the things before and I'd just toss 'em.  Then you soak the pillow case full of green hulls in water for a week.  No immediate gratification here.  Of course there isn't...

At the end of a week or two of soaking, apparently you have dye.  The tannin contained therein ( the reason green hulls are essential) is a natural mordant so there are no toxic chemicals to deal with.  Remove the pillow-case-encased hulls and dump them.  Then for the fun.   Simmer the yarn in the dye bath on an outside fire for an hour (the author says there is quite a smell and working outside is essential), let the yarn cool in the dye over night, rinse (a lot),  and voila!  Exquisitely brown yarn.

Well.  Now.  

Nope.  Didn't work.  I have 1200 yards of freshly spun snowy Shetland wool that is "dyeing" to be brown.  

Any Missouri friends have a sack full of green black walnut hulls for me?

Get Out the Violins

Poor Dear Daughter.  She had to have all 4 widsom teeth out unexpectedly on Friday.  Unexpectedly?  Well yes.

She told me that she had a tooth that was bothering her a few weeks ago and then said nothing more about it.  Mother of the Year that I am, I forgot too... Then this past week, she mentioned it again.  So I made a dentist appt. for her on Friday morning.  It was supposed to be just a quickie -- check to see what's bugging her, maybe get that poppyseed out from between her teeth, you know.   I didn't even put on my makeup as it was an early morning/after carpool thing.  Big mistake.  

Dr. got her in the chair and in about 4 seconds called me back.  At least I'd brushed my hair and changed out of jammies, I thought.  He told me that her wisdom teeth were the culprits and that they should come out in the next few weeks, and then asked about her schedule once school was out.  Dear Daughter's eyes got as big as saucers, don't you know, and I answered for her that 6 days after school was out she was leaving for an exchange program in France.  Not Paris, France but close -- Chartres.

Whoa Nellie, he said... these'll have to come out today.  She can't fly if there's a chance of bleeding and you don't want them flaring up in France.  They'll have to be completely healed before she leaves.  Whoa Nellie is right.  Add a Darned Tootin' for good measure.

So off we went to a dental surgeon, who by the grace of you know who, could take her that morning.  By noon, she was whacked out on oxycodone (sp?) and looked like this:

 

You didn't think my seventeen-year-old would let me take a picture of her after oral surgery did you?  Actually, as woozy as she was, I probably could have sneaked a snapshot and seeing as how everyone and their mother at the oral surgery center saw me in sweats and without even a swipe of Bare Essentials powder base...  Of course, I didn't take a picture.   

She's recovering nicely, thank you very much.  Dad came home that night with 2 quarts of Ted Drewes frozen custard (and a strawberry shortcake custard for me because I'd been through so much too -- good husband).  She's worked her way through them and several packages of Ramen as well.  Today we try mac 'n cheese.

   

 These are the roses blooming in my back yard right now.  Hubster brought them in for me.  He's a keeper.  They're cabbage roses and they don't smell.  Which is a good thing because the peonies he brought in last week, while beautiful, kept making me look around for something that was rotting in the sink or under the trash bag.  

......

Oh, alright, I'll blog about negative stuff, since you asked...

Actually, this is as much a rant as it is about negative stuff, so it'll be entertaining.

So, my hip thing.  You know, the one that the medication for which almost killed me with high blood pressure in February?  The one for which I've been doing physical therapy for three months?  Yeah, that one.

In April, I had a cortisone shot into the hip joint.  It was as much a diagnostic tool as anything.  If it calmed the pain, then that joint is the problem.  If not, then the problem is likely the bursa.  I agreed to the procedure, although, in my defense, I'd have agreed to nearly anything at that point.  When you have to plan each trip up and down the stairs and the kids are starting to ask why you're sitting on the couch all the time, you get a little desperate.

So the injection?  They do it with a digital x-ray machine, which is kind of cool.  And the doctor and the technician tell you it's a relatively low pain procedure and that the main side effect to watch for is infection at the site of the injection.  Ok, that's what you'd expect, right?

Jeez.  Very painful (and I've given birth two times, folks... I know pain).  My leg kind of cramped up and they asked who was there to drive me home.  I growled through clenched teeth that I hadn't been told I needed anyone to drive me home.  So we waited until I could walk again and I drove myself the two blocks (luckily) to the house.  Yikes.  

The next morning, I lit up like a Christmas tree.  I'm not kidding -- my face and chest went bright red and super hot the the touch.  No fever though.  And my heart?  Racing.  I kind of held on, and after this flashing had happened 2 more times, each coincidental with walking around or up stairs, did I call the Dr.?  No, of course not, silly!  I checked on the internet. 

Where I found that 15 percent of women who have this procedure experience "flushing". Flushing?!  A very polite word for what I experienced.  Yeesh.  I called my GP at about 4.  His assistant told me to watch my blood pressure (how am I supposed to do that) and that it sounded like an anaphylactic response to the steroid (Yikes)  and had I had that kind of response before (Um, no, I'd have remembered this)  and that I should take a bunch of Benadryl (That stuff puts me in a coma and husband's out of town) and if it got worse I should go to the ER.  Really.

The flushing/flashing decreased over the weekend, and I saw the GP first thing on Monday and we decided that I probably shouldn't have that shot any more as anaphylactic responses ramp up with exposure rather than decreasing.  You think?

Rant:  This is a considerable side effect.  They should mention it to women getting the shot, which btw is a very common procedure.  And, according to my friend's sister's allergist (don't ask) allergies to steroid- and non-steroidal anti inflamatory drugs are more common in women of a certain age (ahem, 45 plus) and can cause dizziness, flushing, swelling etc.  Really?  Like the dizziness I've been experiencing since I've been taking a ton of Ibuprophen and Naproxen with this hip thing?  To which my GP replied that most testing of procedures and drugs is done on med-students (primarily men 25 to 30 years old) and almost never on peri-menopausal women.  In fact we only have anecdotal evidence of how women respond to most drugs. Craptacular.  Well, add my anecdote to the pile, buster.  

So that was twice that hip treatments tried to kill me. 

Threes a charm, right?  

I'm going in for acupuncture today.  Cross your fingers.

Connect the dots

First, let me say that in this post, I will connect the following disparate things in one series of events:

• arterial stenosis;
• the Olympic Opening Ceremonies;
• rotator cuff injury;
• yarn from Russian wool;
• the WWE.

First, as this is foremost a knitting blog, let me say that my Olympic Knitting was ready and in the chute, so to speak.  Hubster chose the Portland sweater from A Fine Fleece and some Peace Fleece yarn from my stash in a kind of oatmeal color with slubs of orange and green (weird I know, but nice).  I figured that I'd been on a kind of a roll with sweaters and that I'd push it and try to do a 54 inch wide heavily cabled long sleeved man's sweater in 16 days.  Really.  I was swatched and ready to cast on on Friday night.  Spirits were high.  And that's where the trouble begins.

Dear Son and I were rough housing WWE style -- don't ask ... he's a fan and I'm hoping my interest in it will be the kiss of death for his --  during a commercial before the ceremonies even began (I enjoyed the telecast, but the speechifying at the end was too long).  I pushed at him with my right arm and something popped and tore alarmingly in my shoulder.  It was alarming, but not particularly painful.  Unless I tried to move my shoulder in any fashion.  Then, there was pain ... and I couldn't move it.

So much for casting on.  Hubster took me to an urgent care facility the following morning and, after looking me over pretty good, the doctors there gave me a sling, a probable rotator cuff injury diagnosis, and an appointment with a sports medicine guy at SLU.  What they also did was take my blood pressure.  Which was sky high.  Like crazy high.  I'd been getting slight dizzy spells and thought it was related to female stuff (why, I don't know as nothing's ever made me dizzy before).  

As it turns out, the Non Steroidal Anti Inflammatory Drug (NSAID) I've been taking to absolutely no effect btw for the pain in my hip has caused an inflammation in the blood vessels in my body.  

As these kinds of drugs are wont to do in some people don't you know.  

This is where the arterial stenosis comes in -- it's an ultrasound procedure which examines the blood vessels which connect your heart to your kidneys.  It's non invasive as these things go, but it requires an hour and a half on a table in the dark and you can't sleep because the gal doing the  procedure keeps asking you to stop breathing and then start up again.  And you have to lay on the side where your shoulder hurts for half an hour of that... That was yesterday.  The MRI for my shoulder and hip is next week.  God, almighty, I swear, my warranty is up.

Obviously, the most pressing question you might have for me is, "But can you knit?!"  

Why, yes, indeed, I can.

  

(As usual, first for color, second for detail.)  I have perfectly fine mobility from the elbow down, which is all I need.

Can I knit according to my pre-shoulder injury Olympic potential?  I don't think so.  

Do I have a little more time to knit what with all of the medical waiting rooms?  Yes.  

Will it be enough to medal?  I'm doubtful.  I'm nine inches in -- on the back of the sweater.  According to my pre injury knitting schedule, by now I should be finishing the back of the thing and ready to cast on today for the front.  

Was it a pie in the sky Olympic goal?  Likely.  

Will I persevere?  Do male figure skaters wear sequins?