Fabric Dyeing Workshop pt. 2

Here are my results from the workshop:

I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out. Most of the pieces are lightly marbled (instead of a tie-dyed effect) which is quite nice (I was too lazy to take a picture of each individual colour). Today we did some two colour experimenting (ie: put one colour in the bottom of the cup, then the fabric, then pour another colour over top) and some people painted with the dyes. Rinsing all the colours took quite a while and then when we got home we put everything in the washer/dryer then ironed it.
I would love to do another workshop like this - I had fun doing the rainbow thing with the three primary colours and I think it would be fun to do more experimenting with different shades of red/yellow/blue.

I'm planning on making a colour wheel quilt (pattern in Last Minute Patchwork & Quilted Gifts) and have about half my fabric with what I have dyed. Hopefully it won't be too tedious to find the other half.

Here's a picture I took yesterday on my way home from the workshop:

Temperature: -35C
Sunrise: 10:42am
Sunset: 5:35pm

A Little Bit of Yarn Dyeing

This is what I've been up to:

I always hate the way the yarn looks before it has been reskeined so I try not to lose faith until then ;-)

I haven't done any knitting in a few weeks now.. I don't know why, I just haven't felt like pulling it out. That's one reason why I decided to dye some yarn because then I at least felt like I was doing something. My Cricut has been getting some action lately too but it's all a surprise :-)

Other than that, things have been pretty quiet around here. We've been spending most of our evenings watching tennis (ok, evening to us is 11pm and later!) and that's pretty much it. A typical evening looks like this:
I get home at 11pm from work. Go on the computer or do Cricut stuff until 1/1:30am when the tennis comes on. We watch the tennis until it's over or I flake out and go to bed (the second part is usually the case!).

Fun times at my house, I tell ya!

Temperature: -35C (feels like -47C - !!!!)
Sunrise: 11:17am
Sunset: 4:58pm

Cricut Crafting and Possibly a Sunrise?

I can't say our weather has improved much since my last post but it's not -40C at least! (Ok, it's not much warmer than -40 but those few degrees mean the difference of getting freeze burn unlocking and closing your door and your hand just being friggin cold).

I'm happy that things have returned to their regular schedule now that the holidays are over! I of course excitedly rushed to the stationary store today to get cardstock only to find out... They don't have any! (Ok, they had some but only MASSIVE packs of one colour... I was looking more for packs of multi colour since I don't need like 500 sheets of emerald green cardstock...). hrumph... Here I've been pining away for the stationary store to be open for two weeks only to find out that they don't have what I want anyway (apparently there's some coming in).

Quilting started back up tonight too which was fun. I took my Cricut in with me since I told the girls I'd bring it when it got here (and then we didn't have quilting for two weeks). I did my first fabirc cutting project - woo! I'm SO not used to layering things so it took me a while to figure out what fabrics to use and what I even wanted to make! I ended up settling on a snow globe:

It's not quite finished. I'm probably going to put a moon on it (in the same fabric as the trees only yellow). It's too bad I didn't have a wider strip of the blue "snow" but I don't thing the seam line is as prominent in person as on the camera. The snow globe is 7½" and the trees are 3". I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it? One of the ladies suggested making a quilt and each block having an appliqué (or every other block). It would definitely give me an excuse to cut a bunch more fabric!
The snow globe cut fine but the trees were a bit more finicky and I ended up using scissors to cut part of a few of the trees out (it really didn't like cutting the stars on top!). I used max. pressure, low speed and blade depth of 5.

Going back to the topic of weather (only because this info is on the same site): Apparently we had a sunrise today? I don't think we did I think the website updates in a later time zone and this info is for tomorrow (I guess we'll see tomorrow). So yay for the sunrise! We made it through the darkness! It's only going to get lighter from here!


Temperature: -35C
Sunrise: 1:25pm
Sunset: 2:36pm

Another FO!

I'm on a roll!
I finished my earflap hat yesterday and got some pictures of me wearing it today. I wanted to get a shot too of how frosty my eyelashes get just from the walk home from the post office (less than a 10 minute walk). It wasn't as cold here as it has been for the last couple of weeks so my eyelashes aren't as frosty as they normally are. I know I look a bit dorky but at least my ears won't get frostbite and I won't have to keep taking my massive mitts off to tug my toque down all the time. (sidenote: My parka makes me look HUGE... I'm really not that big...)

Pattern: Official Kittyville Hat (no cat ears or devil horns)
Yarn: Bernat Big Value
Needles: Size 7, 16" circular and size 8 DPNs
Interesting tidbit: I bought the yarn in the summer a number of years ago and it happened to match my parka perfectly. I've been meaning to make some sort of winter accessory for ages.

When the weather gets cold again I'm going to see if I can get an even frostier picture than that.

Temperature: -26C (windchill -35C)
Sunrise: 10:28am
Sunset: 5:49pm