Playing With Yarn- Making self striping yarn

I haven't been doing much pottery lately. My wheel and kiln were down for a while and now it's very cold in the basement, and I just can't get motivated to get down there.

I've been playing with yarn instead. I learned how to knit maybe 5 years ago, but only knit occasionally.

I decided to try to dye my own self striping sock yarn. I had a bunch of undyed kona superwash fingering from Henry's Attic. I had dyed some long ago and then put it away and essentially forgot about it.

Anyway... After educating myself by reading several online websites I learned that to make self striping sock yarn you have to have a really long loop of yarn. One website I read (here) helpfully suggested that one knit up a few rounds of a sock using the desired number of stitches cast on, marking each new round with a magic marker. Then to unravel the yarn and measure how many inches it takes to make a round.

I did this and found that my socks take appx. 30" of yarn for each round. So to have, say, 3 stripes of one color, 2 stripes of the next color, and 2 stripes of the last color, I'd have to have 90" of the first, then 60" of the second, and 60" of the third. This would require a skein of 210" or about 6 yards. That's a big skein!

I decided to educate myself further and find out how people wind such large skeins. Eunny Knit (link above) describes winding it around two tripods or lamps. I didn't want to do that. KS over at Knitters Review Forums pointed out warping mills to me (e.g. warping mill). These are used by weavers to wind loops of many yards (as many as 20 yards or more!) for their looms, and look like exactly what I want. Unfortunately they are fairly expensive, and I don't have $300 to spend on one.

I decided I could make a makeshift one myself, and proceeded to raid my daughter's tinker toys (actually SuperStructs). Here's what I came up with:

It's gone through a couple of tweaks since this first attempt. Basically it's just a box that rotates around an axle. There's a peg at the top to wrap the yarn around, and a peg at the bottom. You wrap the yarn around and around (as many times as it takes to get half the length of the skein you want) then you loop it over the bottom peg and wrap back up to the top following the path the yarn made on the way down. The cool thing about making it out of tinker toys is that you can change the height, move the pegs around etc... to get pretty close to the length of skein you want.

So far I've managed to make a skein as long as 16 yards with this contraption, which would allow me appx 19 rows of a sock to design stripes with.

I don't think I'd use this for making a warp for a loom (not that I'll ever do that), but for for making some self striping yarn it works like a charm! Here's a picture of some dyed yarn on the toy warping mill, and a picture of the dyed yarn being wound off the mill and into a center pull ball. That went surprisingly quickly and easily.

A picture of my first attempt at self striping yarn is posted at the top of this entry. The colors turned out with a little less contrast than what I had in mind, but I think it's still pretty. The number of rows per color turned out exactly as planned, so that's good.

And this is what happened to the warping mill after I was done with it:

An experimental pot

My mother wanted a little pot to store plant food in, so I thought I'd experiment a little bit. I tried applying different colored slips to different areas of the pot, instead of applying the colors over the whole pot. I think I kind of like the effect. Hopefully I can improve it in the future!

Video Treasuries

So... Tim See had a really cool idea for making etsy video treasuries and posting them on youtube. The idea is to try to introduce etsy to new customers by promoting to the broader audience of youtube.

I've been working on a few video treasuries and I'm going to try to post them here.





And here is Tim's original video treasury:



Let's see if that worked...

It did! It did! Yay!

Ink jet transfer of line drawings to clay

I sometimes do little line drawings in the computer and transfer them to my pots to serve as guidelines for my slip decorations. Cynthia was asking for a quick explanation of how this works.

I'll post a description really quickly and I'll add some pictures later.

• Print off your line drawing. I've found that black works probably the best. Here is an example of my flower drawing:

• I usually cut out the printout and cut some slits halfway through it and various places if it's needing to go on a very curved surface.
  
• Soak the printout in water for a few seconds and slap it where you want it to go on the pot. I've found the pot needs to be on the wet side of leather hard for it to transfer well. If your pot is dryer than that try spritzing it with water where you are going to transfer the drawing.

• Let it sit for a minute or two, then remove the printout. The image should have transferred to the pot. It may be faint, but it should give you enough to carve or decorate using the lines as a guide.

• The inkjet transfer should burn off in the kiln, but you might want to test it before doing something important!

• Oh, one more tip. If you are applying a lot of transfers, like over the whole pot, try to just do a few at a time, unless you are going to finish your carving or slipping very quickly. I have found that when I do this, my transfers tend to fade fairly quickly, probably because of diffusion of the dye into the clay.

Taking a break for a short while

I'll be taking a break for a week to do some other things, but I wanted to post a few things that will be going into the kiln after that.

I've got a few custom orders for kitchen utensil pots. Here are a few of those in the works.

Here is a custom honey pot:

I've also been working on some mugs and more pendants. I don't have any pictures of those though.

A friend asked me to make her some pots with a shiny glaze. I tested out a cone 6 pewter glaze and after a couple of trials I finally got the hang of it.

That's it for now!

A cute project for the kids

Eleanor of Studio Elan posted a great tutorial for these precious angels (http://eleanorhendriks.blogspot.com/search/label/tutorial). My daughter and I had a great time making them, and she decorated hers with underglaze today (be sure to note the nostril holes- LOL). We've glazed her and she'll be going into the kiln tomorrow! Thanks for the awesome tutorial Elan!

Custom Order Mugs- sneak peek

Here are a set of custom mugs that I have been working on. These have been bisque fired and in these pictures I've started glazing them (they have a glaze on the inside, but not the outside yet). Once these are glazed the colors will be darker and more vibrant. They should be going into the kiln tomorrow!