Skeleton Troubleshooting, and More!

I've spent the majority of this week focused on student-y things (midterms!), but here's some stuff that happened:

The day after I put up the whale skeleton, I arrived at school to find that half of it had fallen down overnight.

Oops. Oh, dear.

So, I put it all back together, reinforced the attachment points, and got it back up there. And everything seemed to be fine...

But over the next couple of days, the spine seemed to be sagging more and more at the parts in between the three attachment points.

So for now, the best option seems to be to just make a few extra attachment points along the spine in between the existing ones. The skeleton is going to be covered in snow fencing (orange plastic mesh-y stuff) before the knitting goes on it, so that should offer a bit more support to the structure as well and prevent the bigger ribs from elongating.

In whale wool news, I'm in the process of dyeing the dark grey portion of the wool... it's been in the mordant since yesterday morning, so I plan to actually get it into the dye tomorrow or the day after. The wool did actually all fit into the container I had, but without tons of space to move around, so I've just been giving it frequent stirs.

Aaaannd, the teapot is just about finished! Here I am, trying to get the lid knit on before my midterm critique:

Hanging Up the Whale Skeleton

Major progress with the whale skeleton over the past few days!

Here I am way up on a ladder, setting up the ropes that the whale is going to hang from during the next few months:

And with that task finished, I could get to work on attaching the spines to the rib pieces.

I'm just using duct tape... it seems to be working out okay. 

A whale shape started to come together very quickly!

And then it was up! It comes out into the room quite a bit further than I had initially imagined it would. Everyone else who's seen it has said the same thing. It's hard to really grasp the scale of the project until it's been put together like this.

The plan for this week is to dye the remainder of the wool, fingers crossed that I can manage to get a consistent colour across all the skeins... it's going to be a challenge, I think.

I'm Also Knitting a Teapot

I'll have another whale update within the next couple of days, but in the meantime, here's another knitting project that I've been working on! It's a teapot.

I dyed all the wool for the teapot with natural dyes:

From left to right: indigo, cochineal and cream of tartar, lac, logwood

In addition to the colours in the picture above, I also used some undyed wool.

The teapot, although a relatively small and simple shape, was pretty exciting to knit. I designed the knitting pattern for it myself, which is something I've never done before (mostly, it was a lot of math). I also wanted my teapot to have a fair isle design going around the middle. Unable to decide whether I wanted the design to feature hearts or foxes, I chose both. Here's the design I came up with (it repeats once more, but the second time with two fox faces on top and one on bottom):

And here's some colour sampling that I did:

I spent about three days asking everyone I spoke to whether the preferred the red foxes or the purple-y foxes (I ended up going with the purple-y ones).

This is right after I finished knitting the base of the teapot:

And these two shots were taken as I started knitting the body:

That braid you can see is called a Latvian Braid, and it's a really lovely technique that's super easy to do. This was my first time trying it, but you'd probably see it most often on mitten cuffs.

The fox/heart design around the middle ended up taking much longer to knit than I thought it would, but finally, I finished, and blocked the teapot body.

I blocked it on a glass jar that I taped some layers of folded up newspaper onto so that it would be a little more teapot-shaped, and not just cylindrical.

Before I can knit the lid onto it, I need to knit the handle and spout, and stuff it. Here, I just threw a bit of stuffing in there to see how it would look (it looked pretty cute):

And here I am knitting the handle. I'm knitting the handle in the round, and then poking a bit of stuffing in it to keep it nice and circular, and then I'll run a piece of wire through it so that when it's sewn onto the teapot body, I can shape it into a nice teapot handle shape.

I'll post another picture of the teapot up when it's all finished. And, if any of you blog-readers think you might like to knit a teapot of your own, I'm intending to make my knitting pattern available on Ravelry! (After I finish knitting this teapot and making a couple adjustments to the pattern.)

Dyeing the Wool (Part II)

 After leaving the wool to mordant over the weekend, I came into school yesterday, ready to dye. So, I pulled all the wool out of the container, emptied it out, filled it back up with water, tossed the logwood extract and iron in there, and put the wool back in. I gave it all a good stir and was delighted to see it was turning a lovely light grey colour. Then I put the lid on the container and left it alone.

I went to check on it a few hours later, lifted up the lid, gave it all a stir, and pulled a skein out to have a look.

It was so purple.

Oh no.

So, I pulled all the wool back out again, dissolved more iron into some hot water, added it to the dyebath, gave it a good stir, put the wool back in, and hoped for the best.

Another few hours later, I went to check on it again. Fortunately, the wool was looking considerably more grey this time, however, it was also looking a little darker than I would have liked. While I had originally intended to leave it in the dyebath for a couple of days, I decided at that point that I really didn't want the colour to get any darker.

I removed all the wool, rinsed it, and hung it to dry. I spent at least two and a half hours getting it all rinsed... I'm definitely not looking forward to rinsing twice as much during the next batch!

I checked on it this morning and it was mostly dry. The colour, although it had lightened up a bit while it was drying, is definitely a bit darker than I wanted it to be, but I think if I make sure that I dye the remaining 2/3 of the wool a really dark grey, it should be fine. The only issue I have now is finding something large enough to dye the remaining wool in. The container I have is a perfect size for the 29 skeins that I dyed a light grey, but I don't think it'll be nearly large enough for twice as many!

Dyeing the Wool (Part I)

 There's a lot of wool. 89 skeins, to be exact (I thought that there were 83, but I did a re-count). Before any of it could be dyed, each skein had to be tied up so that it wouldn't get tangled. So, here's me tying up some wool:

And here's the wool after it had all been tied. The pile started off in the crate and then grew up onto and around the table.

Next step, scouring! This wool was particularly dirty, and I wanted to wash it really really well before I started the dyeing process, so I made the decision to scour it in pots on the stove. So, here's the first batch of wool being scoured (I could only fit about 1/4 of the wool at a time on the stove):

Each batch had to be on the stove for about an hour, so all said and done, the scouring took around five hours, as it took some time to get each batch switched over to the next one (those pots are heavy!). Once a batch of wool was finished being scoured, each skein had to be hung up, or laid out somewhere to dry. I mindfully chose an afternoon to be in the dye studio when I knew that no one else would need to use it, because I basically took over the space and had wool lying around everywhere.

Before the actual dyeing happens, the wool needs to be mordanted so that the dye will 'stick' to the wool. So after the scouring came the mordanting. Same sort of thing as the scouring process... the wool has to sit in the mordant on the stove for about an hour. It needs a little more room in the pot at this point though, so I had to cut down on the number of skeins in each batch, meaning I'd now be up to five batches.

After a batch had been mordanted, I hung it up for a little while to cool down a bit, and then wrapped up the skeins in plastic wrap in bunches or three or four so that it wouldn't dry out before I could dye it.

I was about 1/3 of the way through the mordanting when my knitting instructor said "Alexe, I've been thinking, maybe we can figure out a way to dye your wool in a really big bucket without having it on the stove". Basically, 1/3 of my wool is going to be light grey, and 2/3 of it is going to be dark grey. Susan (knitting instructor) suggested that I go find a big garbage bin or something similar, fill it up with hot water and the mordant, and let the 1/3 of the wool (enough to dye the light grey portions) sit in there over the weekend. When it would come time to dye it, we'd do a similar thing... get the water going in there to be as hot as possible, and then instead of heating it on the stove, just let it sit for a long time. 

This was great news! Not only would it cut down on a lot of time (not necessarily overall dyeing time, but certainly time that I would have to actually be in the dye studio doing things), but it would ensure a consistent colour throughout all of the skeins, which was a big concern with the stovetop method. 

So, off to Canadian Tire to buy a huge container! This is what I ended up with:

It has a 55 gallon capacity and comfortably holds the 29 skeins of wool that I needed it to. So, I had it sitting by the sink this morning as I was filling it up with water... and more water... and more water... and then the wool... and then a little more water... and then it was full, and I went to move it into the back room where it would be out of the way while it sat there for the weekend...

Obviously, the thing was ridiculously heavy and wouldn't budge. So I guess it's just going to sit in the middle of the dye studio until Monday. Oops.

I did leave a nice note, though.

Whale Wool!

Some Non-Whale Stuff

 There hasn't been much progress on the whale over the past couple of days. Hopefully the anchor points for the pulley system will be installed tomorrow, which will mean that work on the skeleton can continue!

So, without an update on the whale, I thought I'd do a post about some other stuff that I've undertaken this term. In addition to knitting, I'm also majoring in weaving and print & dye. I majored in apparel construction last year, so a lot of my work is apparel-based.

One of my print and dye projects that's currently in the works is a dress that's going to be constructed from silk and dyed with natural dyes (I'm all about silk, wool, and natural dyes). It will probably end up looking something like this:

I wanted do dye the skirt using a resist technique called 'arashi'. I've never used this technique in a dress before, and I wasn't sure what colours I'd want to use, so the first step was to do some sampling. So, I took a couple pieces of silk and dyed each of them in a colour I thought I might want to use as the base colour for the fabric.

The piece on the left has been dyed with marigold and iron, and the piece on the right with cutch extract and iron.

Arashi is a technique that involves wrapping a piece of fabric around a pole, tightly wrapping string around that, and then scrunching the fabric up so there are pleats in it. When you top-dye it, the string and folds in the fabric resist the second dye colour.

Post-scrunching, ready to dye!

I decided that instead of just having two colours in my fabric, I wanted to have several. So instead of top-dying these samples by dipping the whole thing in a dye vat, I sprinkled a few different dyes in their dry form right onto the scrunched fabric.

Then I wrapped them all up in plastic wrap and let them sit overnight. The next day I steamed them to set the dyes. After rinsing and drying, this was the final result!

This was the sample I was happiest with... It's the one who's base colour was cutch and iron. For the actual piece of fabric I'll be using in the dress, I'll use the same dyes and techniques and try and recreate this sample as best I can. The nature of the arashi and sprinkle dye techniques means that I'll never be able to get it exactly the same, but I'm fairly confident that I'll end up with something I like.