The Yarnarian Loves Cups and Mugs

I collect demitasse cups and saucers, and I adore my mugs. So this week when I was looking for some dyeing ideas, I decided to use a few of my favorites for some inspiration. Most of these cups and mugs have lots of white, and I dyed up BFL, which has a definite cream base. So I decided to ignore the white and concentrate on the other colors. All these sock yarns are my new Linda yarn, BFL/nylon 80/20. Unbelievably soft and hard-wearing. My British customers tell me that BFL is very strong, much better in fact for socks than merino. I know that my merino wears well. I haven't yet worn the BFL socks I'm knitting. Who wears woolly socks in this kind of heat. Yes, I know that wool wicks, but give me sandals in 90+ deg. summer days. And anyhow, I have 1.25 socks finished. So that takes care of that. At any rate, here they are.

Italian Demitasse Cup and Dainty Demitasse Cup:




Japanese Mug & Floral Cup:




Pottery Mug and Oriental Mug:




And, because I'm looking for a yarn for a pretty shawl for me, I also dyed up 2 skeins of Judith fingering wt yarn, merino/cashmere/silk, NOT superwash. Yes, if you want, I will graciously give them up for you. Hey, I know the dyer; she can always do another for me.

Tigerlily & Azure:




Off for a color job at the hairdresser. I'm sort of striped reddish brown and gray and white. I look very silly at the moment. Maybe I should do it this way intentionally. My sister is coming for a visit today. We'll do girly girl things for a few days. Fun for us!

Family crises are slowly abating. Some have been resolved, some are in process, and one is unfortunately the way it is. So it goes. We're all pretty relaxed at this stage, and chugging along as always. Thanks for your support and kind words; You know I appreciate it.

Floral Cup is taken. Smart Shark. No, not the usual Shark, a new Shark! giggle

The Yarnarian Did Warn You!

Are you ready for the update of the year? Tons of yarns, including some brand new ones. Why do I have so many yarns? Because I love to play with them, I'm a confused business woman, I like yarn, I need my head examined. Pick one or all of them.

Bambi: Heather Wine & Gloria's Morning




Alexa: Pine, Brise, Peaches & Wood Nymph






Emily 1/2 skeins (& half price and 1/2 yardage): Tigerlily & Rustic




New Yarns!

Linda: 80/20 Superwash Bluefaced Leicester/nylon. The nicest, woolly sock yarn around. Long fibers, soft as can be, and totally different from merino. Also known as BFL. I have just a few skeins of this because I wanted to try it out before putting in a bigger order. Well now you know that I am going to order more and more of this yarn; it's that wonderful! $20. 100 grams approx 400 yards.

Here's a pic of that sock I've been working on. This is BFL.



Cabin & Wine and Roses:




AND, the next brand new yarn is: Rachel. Yeah, I used to carry a Rachel lace wt, but don't anymore. But I had to name a yarn after elder DD, so here is the new Rachel and what a yarn it is! 100% superwash merino. 2 ply, amazing yarn. $20. 100 grams. approx 400 yards. This is for the skinny yarn lovers among you. It's skinnier than Bambi, Alexa or Linda, about the same heft as Penny. This is so new that I haven't even knitted anything from it yet. But the dyeing process was wonderful. This yarn just soaks up dye. and the hand is amazing and I just have to decide what to knit from it. Socks, scarves, mitts. No nylon so if you have feet that destroy socks, you need to add some reinforcing yarn for your heels and toes. Or you could just make the most wonderful scarves from this. It's that soft.

Grand Dame, Evening's Gloria, Lake and Elza's Colors.






I need to keep one of the Rachel yarns to try out. I'm thinking Grand Dame, unless you are desperate for it. Why this one? Because my bloody camera doesn't want to photograph it properly. The really dark color is deep wine. My camera seems to see it as brown; it's not. sigh. There are moments when it's camera - 1, ruth - 0!

You want? email me before Wed. fritzL234 AT yahoo DOT com
Last day I can ship is Wed, since I'm off to see Miss P on Fri. So, mail out day would be Wed, and I need to know beforehand. Make sense? I won't list on Etsy until I come back. And if you miss one, hey, there's always more yarn. Maybe not in those colors, but in some colorway or other.

I'm keeping Grand Dame; you can't tell the colors anyhow so it's mine! Hah!

Elza's Colors is spoken for.

Heather Wine is grabbed!

itsJUSTme-wendy - The hardest thing I find about internet communication is that you get no aural cues. That's what I don't like about talking on the phone - no facial cues. So much of chatting is watching the faces of the folks you're talking too. Sometimes I write things and I think: they'll take this seriously. And that's when I type in "giggle".

The Yarnarian Blathers As Usual.

Odds and ends going on here in Yarnarian Land. I am now posting very occasionally on Facebook. Younger DD got on it for some reason, and invited me to follow her. So of course I am, and also chatting with the same bunch of people I chat with on Twitter, and Ravelry. It makes me dizzy. I don't know where I've said something. ACK! I think I'll concentrate on little Twitter; it takes a lot less energy than Facebook.

Knitting News: Remember this BFL yarn I posted last week? I found the color inspiration in a magazine, and the minute I finished dyeing it, I knew that it would not sell. I wasn't even sure I liked it. But I was playing around with my new BFL, and with different color combinations, so that was the source.



Wound it up into a ball, and still was not wild about the yarn. Didn't want to overdye it, just wanted to see what I could do with a yarn that didn't thrill me.



Browsed through one of my Barbara Walker books (#1) and found this slip stitch pattern, and thought: What the heck! Might as well try it out. Surprise! I like it, I really like it. Which goes to show that variegated yarns, even in weird color combinations, can work up into ways wondrous.





Embiggen the pics to see the pattern. I love the word "embiggen".

Dyeing: I'm back on a brown binge. Must be looking towards fall, my favorite season. We are having a gorgeous summer (pooh pooh, go away, Evil Spirits), so why I'm dyeing up fall colors beats me. I also did some seasonless lace and some more loooong skeins of Penny.

Here are the Bambi yarns: Moody Brown and Forest. Moody Brown started life as something entirely different, so I dunked it into a brown, then another brown, and finally into yet a third brown, decided that it was a great yarn. I was going to call it Moody Mud, but decided that that was a negative name for a great, sophisticated yarn.




A Bambi that was sweet: Mignon. Dyed with leftover solutions and therefore in the pastel area.



And now Lace! Emily Lace Yarn to be exact. Wonderful 1200+ yards of merino love. This is so nice to knit with. Soft Teal, Purple Orchid, Pink Fling, and Apricot Sorbet. There is a lot of colorwork in each yarn, although it all blends into one pretty color. Your shawls and scarves will look so elegant!






And finally, one of the long Penny yarns. Yes, I know, this is not pretty, but just think of it in that sock pattern posted above. Think of it as a Hot Tamale colorway, which is what it is. That rusty red took me 5 different colors of mixing to produce, and I'll never reproduce it. It's not pretty, but it is striking. I still have some work to do before I get this technique down pat, so if you want it, I'm selling it for $20 instead of $25. Nice savings, and you get the red that I worked so hard on. ;-)



If you want, you know how to get. Every yarn is $20 + shipping, EXCEPT for the Emily yarn, which is $32 + shipping.

Gotta go and pack my Fiber Barista order. It's going out either today or tomorrow, depending on how fast I can get it all together. I'll leave you with a teaser pic of the yarn. Talk about nasty, How ebil of me to post a yarn pic, where you cannot tell the colorway. Mwahahahaha!\\

Moody Brown is spoken for.

Hot Tamale is "sharked!"

Linda - It's yours. The usual $20. no shipping since I can enclose it with the FB yarn

Carolyn - I wish I could take credit for embiggen. I saw it somewhere and fell in love with it. Here's one of my own: to shark. sharking means grabbing a yarn before anyone else gets it.

itsJUSTme-wendy - I like red buy find it hard to dye up with other colors. I don't like it with blue or black. gold and red I like. Purple and red.