It would seem that the secondary technique of letting the yarn soak on cold in the Kool-Aid gave me more coverage than letting soak in just plain water and heating with the color. You can see the results here (from left to right): black cherry, strawberry, tropical punch, and watermelon/cherry. The black cherry resulted in a brick color, which does not look great on me. The watermelon/cherry was a pale dusty rose; quite pretty, but not really what I was going for. That left the two middle skeins. I overdyed the strawberry with the extra cherry packet. It now looks very similar to the tropical punch, yet more vivid. Both are pretty close to a blood red. I have a friend bringing me back some more tropical punch from the states. If I can get the tropical punch as vivid, it would be easier to dye that at double strength than to dye everything strawberry then cherry. With the number of dye batches I am going to need, I am a bit worried about variations in the color. I hope to swatch up the strawberry/cherry in the meantime to see how it looks and get a first stab at the gauge.
In two days we are off to Madrid. I have never been to Spain before, so I am looking forward to the tapas. Luckily we have a friend house sitting, so the ferret will not be lonely. Any recommendations? We plan to mostly hit up the museums near our hotel and eat a bunch of food. I have brought the baby on vacation to visit family before, but have never tried sightseeing, so we don’t want to overbook ourselves.
Thanks to my wonderful sister (who mailed me the Kool-Aid), I got to start my Epic Sweater project yesterday. The lovely natural brown alpaca yarn I have seemed too brown for an entire coat, so I am working on making it the perfect red. I had never dyed yarn before, so I hit up the internet for some tutorials. The one at Knitty.com is great because they show a bunch of different flavors on white yarn. The Piper and Snowangels were helpful as general how-tos. I am recording my method here for posterity.
Since I am experimenting with color, I wound 4 smaller hanks of about one ounce each. Notice the really high-tech glass bowl method.
I received five Kool-Aid flavors in the mail: strawberry, watermelon-cherry, black cherry, tropical punch, and cherry (not shown). I am going to keep the cherry as a backup in case I want to experiment with over dyeing one of the colors. The base yarn is a pretty rich brown, so it will be interesting to see how the red reacts.
The first method I tried involved soaking the yarn in a stainless steel pot of hot water for 30 min, then putting the dye in and simmering for a further 30 min at about 180 F. I used this method for the black cherry and strawberry flavors. There was still some brown spots showing through after the process was complete. I was afraid of agitating the yarn too much while it was hot (for fear of felting it), so I think the dye was not incorporated as well as it could have been. For the tropical punch and watermelon-cherry flavors, I instead let the yarn soak in cold water with the dye already mixed in (1 packet per ounce of yarn, just like the others) for 30 min and then heating the whole kit-and-kaboodle. The yarn for those two are still drying, so I can’t attest to whether this method provides better coverage or not yet.
Sorry for the long hiatus. It seems that sleep deprivation makes blogging take a back seat. Lilo just turned six months old and stuff is about to get real over here. I know that crawling is imminent- the poor ferret is going to be chased from one side of the house to the other.
Our trip to Belgium was awesome, as always. It was quite chilly, so Lilo got to show off her cute jacket with the bear ears!
We went out to eat a bunch (you always eat well in Belgium). Lilo loves people watching at the restaurants. She is starting to stand while holding onto things like the coffee table and she definitely wants to crawl. She kinda flails on her belly like an upturned bug, but I am sure one day she is just going to figure it out and then there will be no stopping her. Did I mention I dyed my hair black? I am digging the look, so I am going to keep it for a while.
Mamouche and Papouche watched Girlie for a night so that her Poppa and I could have a belated second anniversary dinner. I had two glasses of wine! It was heavenly.
As for myself, in between not sleeping, feeding a baby, making baby food and trying to convince her to drink out of a sippy cup, we are trying to make a new routine. She is getting older and more social, so we are starting her in a music class and a Gymboree class. The first one is on Tuesday, so I shall report back how it went. I am starting to study for the patent bar exam. I hope that in a few months I can start applying for jobs again and I think this is the direction I want to go. For fun though, I am dying yarn. I got gifted some lovely alpaca yarn from a friend. I am doing an epic sweater coat project. Dying the yarn, knitting it up, then lining the coat. I have 4 kool-aid colors to try (with a 5th saved in case I want to overdye one of the other colors). I started with Black Cherry today and I hope to post updates as I go along.
The tulips are out; the cows are back. Since I am more or less back to my normal size again I got to spring all of my dresses and skirts from their attic imprisonment. LL and I got all cuted up and met the Captain for lunch.
She turned 3 months old on Sunday and she has changed so much! She has started cooing along to the guitar when I play for her. She is also working on grabbing objects with two hands. This weekend’s excitement was playing at the table with an avocado. Textures are fun. She is still eating ’round the clock. We are now at a minimum of 2 hours during the day and stretching between 2-3 hours between feeds at night. I am sure in 3 more months when we start solids that will all change, but for now I am settling into this routine. At least she seems calmer now that I can anticipate her hunger before she gets upset.
It has been fun to watch her go from a helpless, flailing (albeit cute) mass, to a happy, smiling, interactive infant.
Today we are supposed to list a song you hate. Hate is a harsh word. There is not really ‘a’ song I loathe with the fire of a thousand suns, but there are several that make me want to find a mute button right quick. This is especially true for artists who think very highly of themselves and whose videos have them traipsing about as if they believe you want to jump their bones right then and there. I have a newsflash for you: if you have to try that hard to seem sexy – you are doing it wrong.
It was hard for me to whittle down the list of awfulness. I could have picked songs at random from such bands as the Insane Clown Posse, Korn, or Slipknot (incidentally the guitarist of this band invited me to a concert in Austin back when I was in college, but that is neither here nor there), but seeing as I don’t like this entire Genre of music I don’t really have much opportunity to pick a song I hate from the vast catalog of scary metal music.
Instead, I chose to pick a song that I run into on a regular basis, which makes me lunge for the remote. It was a close tie between this guy Mohimbe and Inna (all three of which think they are God’s gift to our species), but Colonel Reyel has been on heavy rotation in the countdowns. His song ‘Celui’ combines the use of third grade creative writing-style lyrics with heavy use of autotune (not for artistic reasons as I can tell, but because dude can’t sing) and a smattering of hand gestures and scenes that make me stop watching the video because I am embarrassed for him. He reminds me of a 13-year-old girl who gets gussied up and tries to hit on college guys. You just cringe knowing how awkward it all is.
Somehow his new song also made the top 10. I am wondering if Virgin knows that there are other songs out there that are more worthy of a countdown spot?
There is a fun little game going around facebook called the 30-Day song challenge. I am playing it there, but I thought I would bring it over to the blog as well (in the interest of having something more interesting to talk about than just feeding and changing an infant!).
Day 1: Your favorite song.
This song gets me to the core. It is at once crushing, uplifting, and beautiful. It is a song for imperfect people. Many versions of the song exist, sung my many different artists. I like the Rufus Wainwright version the best (followed closely by Jeff Buckley’s version). It makes me confront my many mistakes, but realize that I am a broken person, living in a broken world, but still able to give the most I can give to the equally broken people whom I love.
It is two months into our parenting career and I would like to say that cloth diapering is going really well. We are using prefolds and PUL covers, with the occasional wool soaker or longie thrown into the mix. We do diaper laundry every other day and rather than being a whole extra chore that is making my life more difficult, it is actually forcing me to get into a laundry routine. Instead of our regular clothes piling up until someone announces they are out of undies (which is quite the predicament seeing as we have no dryer and thus, no one can have dry undies within mere hours), all the laundry is getting done in an efficient and timely manner. The Captain is most proud!
The prefolds are great. They are easy to fold, quick to dry, and we have not had too many leaks onto things. Certainly no massive issues. Once girlie gets more mobile (and she grows out of the infant prefolds we have), we are transitioning to pockets. We have some Kushies, some BumGenious, and I think I am going to order some WAHMmies to try them out. Folding things for a baby that can’t crawl away from you is one thing, but once she is on the run I need a more simple system.
We are not 100% cloth, though… we are still using sposies at night. Though they smell chemically and I prefer the cloth, it is nice to have all that stay-dry technology. With the Pampers, we can make it through most nights without a change and this is of the utmost importance since changes wake her up! One or two sposies a day is not going to break the bank and quite frankly I will be happy to avoid the stuffing gymnastics an overnight cloth diaper requires for bigger babies.
We are settling into what can pass for a routine here at Chez Petite. LL is going to be seven weeks old tomorrow. While I am getting much less sleep, food, and comfort than I would normally, at least it is more predictable. I installed a baby tracker app on my android phone today called: baby minder. After a few days, I shall do some data mining and determine whether there is a pattern forming, or if my hallucinations have migrated towards the waking hours as well.
Feeding is working splendidly now. I have some milk saved in the freezer, so I can actually leave her for and hour or two i the capable hands of her Papa without fear of starving her. The cloth diapers are working out pretty well too. We are still using sposies most nights (because, frankly, I am more keen on sleeping than dealing with waking her up just to clean a pee diaper).
Last week’s goal was to start getting out of the house every day. This week’s goal is to work on incorporating the bassinet into her nighttime routine. She is getting better with sleeping in her bassinet during the day (and by better, I mean not every nap and only for 20 min sometimes). We are trying to start putting jimjammies on around 10 pm, and reading her stories. Ideally this would lead to blissful sleep, but so far it had lead to one screaming fit and one nursing-to-sleep session- LOL. We try to put her in her bassinet then and hope for a good sleep before waking for food. Last night that got us about 30min. The rest of the night was the usual routine of me nursing her and Papa getting her to sleep on his chest. We tried to put her back in the bassinet after the last night feed ~6:30, but that only bought us about 15min before she flailed herself awake and was ready to start her day.
Nominally I don’t mind her being in our bed at all, however practically, we need her at least in her bassinet by 3 months. She is starting to move about (probably gearing up those muscles for the arduous task of crawling in the far future) and grab things. Since I am not keen on giving up my nice comfy duvet and sheets, she needs her own space before she learns to wiggle down below my waist and pull the covers over her head. Luckily so far, she is only wiggling up. Apparently, in the dark, she thinks milk comes out of my chin.
I can’t believe she is almost two months old. They say they grow up so quickly- sleep deprivation will do that to you.
Periwinkle arrived on Feb 8th in the wee small hours of the morning. The last month and a half have been a blur. We are settling into a routine now and are slowly starting to venture out of the house. I am hoping to pick my knitting back up and start cooking again in the near future.
I had thought there would be this huge life change when I became a maman. Ok, my day-to-day life is way different, but I still feel like the same old me. Maybe parents are just big kids who figure stuff out as they go. I am super lucky that my MIL and FIL were here to help out and even more lucky that my mom not only came to help, but made it just in time for the birth as well.
I hope everyone had a very enjoyable holiday season. Ours was pretty good even though we did not make it to Belgium to see family as we had hoped. The stress of being pregnant, plus the snow, a few blood pressure scares, the ice, and crushing amounts of holiday commuters rerouted to the Gare de Lyon in Paris just made the whole idea of travel too much to contemplate. Luckily my MIL and SIL managed to make it out to see us for the New Year instead. It was great having them here. We mostly just hung around the house, but that was plenty fine by me.
Now that Epiphany is over it is time to take down the lights, undeck the halls, and detrim the tree. Oh and get our house ready for a baby that is set to arrive in 5 weeks! I still have baby stuff to knit, wipes to sew, and bassinet sheets to make. Big to-do for this weekend is to get the car seat installed.
The next edition of the knitting tutorial is coming. As are general life updates and adventures in food and physics. 2011 is my year for getting a job, having a kid, and making sure the blog is up to date so that the grandmothers have plenty of Periwinkle stories to read about. I am a bit nervous about the job prospects for a solid state physicist who is a resident alien and has been out of the job market for almost a year due to moving and then getting knocked up. I shall just have to do my best.
