Still Here

Just too busy or hot or something.

I painted (walls) but that's another story for more time.

I always forget to do this: take "Before" pictures so as to illustrate Why I Finish My Yarn And Why You Should Too, but this time I remembered. 

This is a polypay fleece, washed, dyed and spun by me, carded by someone else with better toys. The dyeing was fun: I wet the whole fleece, and stuffed as much into a crockpot as I could, mixed up something red, and let it do its thing until the dye was used up. Rinse, lather, repeat with a different red. Or I guess: lather, rinse, repeat - apparently there's always something to rinse before you can do anything.

Apart from the colour editing of the photos (my camera pouts until I adjust the exposure so much that the pictures turn out orange, and then I have to twiddle sliders until it mimics real life. Apparently my perception of real life varies from photo edit to edit) I'm not sure that the pictures really show the difference, but trust me, it's a far, far better yarn finished than it was before.

The differences in reds are fairly subtle, but close-up the yarn is pleasingly non-uniform in colour due to variations in each ply. Colour more than twist and thickness I hope. As usual, it's a three-ply because that's what I like unless there's a good reason to use more or fewer plies, and there isn't a good reason all that often. Once I made a twelve-ply yarn, but that's also another story for when I don't have to shower and get ready to go and make mojitos and trust me, mojitos come before stories, no matter how lame.

The realio trulio colour is less grey-purple, more burgundy-rust, though not terribly dark. I'm not a fan of the primary colours, nor even the true secondaries to tell the truth, and being that my definition of a colour I might like is one that cannot be described in a single word, I'd say this dye job was pretty successful.

There's enough for a sweater, one with panels of varying widths and stitches: cables, lace, texture, whatever. It might need a scoop neck, but I'm not sure yet.