I wish I may, I wish I might...

I like maintaining a wishlist on my blog, not only for my own personal use, but because it also makes it easier when I participate in an exchange.  It's nice to be able to see what your partner is interested in, so I like to make that information accessible to them.  When you can see what a fellow stitcher is interested in, choosing something they'll like is a bit easier.

I've used The Things I Want forever, but I don't think their interface has been updated since they rolled it out in 2006, and their development blog has been on hiatus since 2008.  It seems they've stopped working on it, and I don't want to lose my lists, so it's time to transition to something new.

I've experimented with several different "universal" wish lists, and so far, Whimventory seems to be winning.  There's a browser bar add-on that makes it super easy to add items from almost any site (I've had some difficulties with one or two sites, but have been able to find what I am looking for elsewhere so I can add it to the list).  The list is visual, like Pinterest, but includes more gift list functionality than Pinterest.

I also find it useful to keep an online inventory of my stash so I am able to check before I buy a chart to see whether or not I already have it.  I usually visit my LNS with specific charts in mind, or to pick up something I've asked the owner to order for me, but I will occasionally spot something that catches my eye.  If it's not a brand new release, I like to make sure I haven't purchased it before.

Cataloging my stash serves another purpose.  My very careful and meticulous father-in-law devoted some time to creating an inventory of their home and its contents for insurance purposes and encouraged us to do the same.  He took photos of everything, room by room, and gave digital copies to both of his sons.  I've been working on our home inventory as well, and realized it wasn't a bad idea to have a record of our stitching stash.  While it may not be as extensive as some other stitching stashes out there, we've still spent a sizeable amount of money on charts, fibers and fabrics, and having that all documented would be a tremendous help for an insurance claim (heaven forbid we ever need to do that).  So in addition to my online inventories, I also keep an excel spreadsheet with a backup copy in our firebox, mostly because I am tremendously paranoid that one of these websites will go away in the middle of the night, leaving me no record of what I have.  It was a LOT of work putting it together to begin with, but has become very easy to maintain just by adding charts when I buy new ones (which surprisingly isn't all that often)

Where do you keep track of your wishlists?  Do you keep track of what you own online or otherwise?

Archiving and recording

This post has been sitting in draft format for a while.  I won't say exactly how long, but it's been a while.

I have a compulsion to organize and archive things. (There are more than a few of you out there that will relate to this)  It's always there, simmering just below the surface, but in the last few years, it's taken on greater importance. When my husband's dearly beloved 99 year old grandmother passed away a while back, my MIL and I pulled together many family photos from a variety of sources for her viewing and funeral. So many of them were unmarked and unlabeled.  Luckily, my MIL is very good with names and faces, so we were able to identify most of the people in the photos. (My FIL has been struggling to identify the photos he inherited in boxes from his parents, and having a bit harder of a time with it.)  It got me thinking about family history being lost in bits and pieces along the way, and I felt a need to do what I could to preserve it.

I keep fairly meticulous records of my own photos, especially digital ones. Everything's labeled and organized in my own files, as well as in the online digital albums I upload. Prints are marked with the date, location and participants when possible so that in 50 years, my son isn't wondering who is smiling down at his cute baby face in a photograph.

I've been borrowing old photos from my ILs and scanning them in as high resolution TIFF files for preservation, touch up and reprinting, and burning the files to CD as well as uploading them online. I've been making sure to have my ILs identify as many people as they can as well.  And we've also been printing and framing some of these photos so that they become part of our daily lives, and more importantly, part of our son's daily life.  We are lucky to have wedding photos of my husband's maternal grandparents and my maternal grandparents.  Both couples were married during the Depression, and the photos are a treasure.  We also have a variety of framed photos of the important people in our lives hanging on our walls so that in some small way, they are always with us.

In the spirit of this archiving and organizing, I've been combing through my own needlework photos, making sure I have designers, pattern names, dates, etc. We have photos of almost every single piece we've ever stitched and it's not entirely impossible to remember the basic details just by looking at the photos. I've had long stretches where I've only finished a piece or two, and my husband tends to take on major projects that take a year or more to complete, so I'm not looking at hundreds of pieces. But I have noticed that my pre-blog record keeping has been spotty. I didn't pay as much attention to designers or fabric or threads or things of that nature as I do now.  However, most of my pre-blog stitching came from kits, so it's not hard to track that information down.  I store everything, including the leftover kit threads, in plastic page protectors in 3-ring binders.  My charts are divided between binders and underbed storage boxes, usually by likelihood that I will stitch it again.  (I do have several charts I've stitched more than once with variations, usually smaller ones for birth records).  Once I started blogging and participating in the stitching community, I started branching out, experimenting and modifying charts for my own needs, changing colors, fabrics, etc.  Having that record in my blog posts has been helpful.

Anyway, I have instituted a way of identifying stitched pieces, at least the framed ones, and providing a bit of archival information down the road. I've started making up labels and sticking them on the back of the frame.

For gifts, this is in addition to a handwritten note. If the backing is black or another dark color, I write a short note to the recipient with a gold or silver scrapbooking marker. And if it's a paper backed piece, I write a note on a sticker and attach it to the back of the piece.  (And if you'd like to see the front of this particular piece, it's here)

What do you do to archive and record your stitching and/or crafting for yourself?  Do you keep a blog or journal?  Photos?  Do you prefer handwritten or digital records?  Do you do anything special to sign your work?

I'm dying over here!

First, many thanks to Rachel for her AWESOME floss dying tutorial. Because of Rachel, I not only didn't throw out the Rit Dye I had already invested in, but I picked up a few awesome techniques, including steaming the floss. Worked like a charm.

And now I am sure you are all very curious as to how I turned out such lovely flosses. Behold, based on Rachel's methods, I present to you my adventures in floss dying. (You will definitely want to read both mine and Rachel's, as I am sure I will leave stuff out. Important stuff.)

First things first. Invest in some floss dying equipment because most dye companies and websites will tell you that your equipment will no longer be food safe. Which means don't grab a bunch of bowls out of the cabinet for dying, then eat your cereal out of them the next morning. I don't know if a spin through the dishwasher will render them non-lethal, so why take chances? I hit up the kitchen section of my local dollar store and purchased the following:

a plastic mixing bowl with a pour spout (spout not necessary - any mixing bowl will do)
glass custard dishes / ramekins
chopsticks
disposable cookie sheets
ice cube tray
plastic measuring spoons

You will also need a large piece of plastic to protect your work surface. I used a disposable plastic painters drop cloth from the local home store. (as a side note, these are far too slippery to be used as an actual drop cloth when painting). Latex gloves are also helpful - you can usually find them at a beauty supply shop, or near the pharmacy counter at the big box discount store.

I used an old ice cube tray (we have several we no longer need) for mixing colors, and several glass pipettes (eye droppers) with rubber bulbs. You can get the ice cube trays at the dollar store, and I've seen plastic pipettes in the craft stores. You may also want to try a scientific supply house if you have access to one. And of course, you will need floss, dish detergent (I used Dawn), white vinegar, plastic wrap, plain white paper towels, boiling water and various and assorted dyes. (And you can use a regular food-safe pot or tea pot to produce the boiling water as it will not be coming in contact with the dyes.)

A Note on Dyes: Rachel speaks out against using KoolAid, and I agree with her assessment. Use dyes intended for fabrics. Now, you can either use Rit Dye or specially formulated cold water dyes for tie-dying. These are fairly easy to find at craft stores or online, and there are several good resources detailing the techniques for these types of dyes. (Check here as well). There are plenty of websites that tell you NOT to use Rit dye, but I had already invested in several colors and chose to go that route. Overall, I am satisfied with the outcome and would use it again. However, at some point I will probably experiment with cold water dyes as well, just for fun.

My personal recommendation is to purchase the Rit Dyes in their liquid form. Yes, they're more expensive, but they're pre-mixed and FAR less messy / hard to mix than the powdered dyes. If you have the choice between the liquid and the powder dye, go for the liquid, especially when it comes to the darker colors, like black and navy blue. In fact, I would strongly recommend against purchasing the black powder as it is flat out a total pain in the ass to mix properly.

You don't need a LOT of different colors, as you can make almost anything from red, yellow and blue (or cyan, fuschia and yellow). Start with the basics and work your way up from there. Experiment. I purchased Scarlet Red, Rose Pink, Dark Green, Dark Brown and Royal Blue in liquid, and Black, Yellow, Kelly Green, Teal, Pearl Grey, and Navy Blue in powder. I also purchased a box of Rit Color Remover. (More on that in another post). I would never, never, never purchase the dark colors in powder form again. Never. Check out the Rit Dye Website for available colors and ideas. They have some pretty good recipes on their site.

You also don't need to mix up a LOT of dye, especially if you're not dying a lot of floss. Mix up more of the basic colors like red, blue and yellow, but go easier on the other colors, especially black. A little goes a long way, and quite frankly, you're never going to accomplish a deep, dark black on your own. Go for DMC 310 and use the black dye more as a tint than an actual dye color. Also, black is super hard to mix and tends towards little red spots (grains of undisolved dye) that will wreck your work. Did I mention I highly recommend using the premixed liquids?

Are you still with me? Now comes the fun part. First, set up your work area:

I used our kitchen island, which was covered completely by the disposable painter's cloth. You can see how I have the glass dishes set up on the disposable cookie sheet, and the floss laid out according to color.

Really, the sorting was just for show, as was the notebook you cannot see in this photo. My original intention was to have my scientist husband apply his excellent and exceedingly thorough work habits to this process, and as you might have guessed, it didn't work out that way. I had grand plans of carefully measuring the dye, recording said measurments, and creating recipes from which to successfully generate consistent batches of floss. Yeah, not so much. The word "recipe" should have been a dead giveway, since I can never seem to follow them. This makes DH completely insane. He likes consistency and measurment (which makes him a fabulous baker, but cautious cook) and I like throwing things together willy nilly. After about 10 minutes of my random mixing and refusal to actually measure anything precisely, he gave up and went in the other room to watch football, leaving me to my wild ways.

Back to the process. First, I mixed up the dyes. I recommend / insist / demand that you mix any powdered dyes away from your dying area, as powdered dyes are teeny tiny little particles that can get EVERYWHERE. Some sites recommend using a mask when working with powdered dyes, but I'm just not that paranoid, and I'm working on a very small scale. I cut off a tiny corner of the Rit Powder packet and sprinkled some into a small, clean mustard jar (which is now part of my dying kit). I added hot water, a splash of vinegar, and a drop of dish soap and shook it for all I was worth (with the lid on, of course). And shook it some more. Then shook it again. Then I poured it into a glass dish in the dying area and added the boiling water. No, I didn't really measure any of this, and yes, I am well aware this is making some of you very nervous.


I repeated the mixing and shaking process with the rest of the powdered dyes, carefully folding over each packet, clipping with a paper clip and sealing in a ziploc snack bag for storage. As for the liquid dyes, I shook the bottle vigorously, then added the dye to a glass bowl with hot water, a splash of vinegar and a drop or two of dish soap. Supposedly the dishsoap opens up the fibers and makes them more receptive to the dye. I don't know if that's true, but it worked for me.

I prepped the floss by removing the labels and throwing caution into the wind. If I'm not going to measure correctly, why bother keeping track of what color floss I was dying? Most of it was one of the following colors: Blanc, B5200, 3865 and Ecru. I also went through my skein stash and pulled out some extra tans, greys, and pastels, just for experiement's sake. I highly recommend this as I got a fantastic autumn-y color by dipping tan floss into red dye.

As you can see here, I suspended the floss on a chopstick and dipped it in a vat of warm, slightly soapy water. Several websites recommended using Sythrapol for cleansing the floss ahead of time to remove dirt and oils that may impede the dye from penetrating. You can get Sythrapol in the craft store with the dying stuff, but it's expensive, and several well respected sites said dish detergent was just as good. And cheaper. And it works. So there you have it.

For the first batch of floss, I used a wire tie to hold skeins together, but ditched that idea for the second batch, chosing to just be a little more careful. The floss stayed together slightly better with the wire ties, but the ties ended up being tedious to remove. I'm all about making things less tedious. The floss rested on the chopstick, in the water, until I was ready to use it, at which point I squeezed it out and laid them out on a paper towel, like so.



I then went to town dripping dye on the strands using the pipettes. Sometimes I mixed up colors in the ice cube tray, sometimes I use a clean dropper to add a little water from the floss vat to the colors in the mixing tray to dilute them. Really, I just had fun with it and experimented. Sadly, I do not have a picture of a batch of dyed, pre-steamed floss, as I was working with nifty purple gloves and was afraid to get dye on the camera (or drop it into a bowl of water). Or it could be that I was so caught up in playing around that I forgot to take pictures.

I would suggest keeping batches of like colors together. The first time I dyed, I went a little nuts with expeimenting and ended up running a few colors together unintentionally. The second time, I worked in color families (shades of red, shades of blue, etc.) and it worked out much better, especially when it comes to wrapping them in plastic. Your floss should be thoroughly saturated with color, but not dripping wet. Dripping leads to bleeding onto other flosses (not as noticeable when you're working with one set of colors at a time). If necessary, pat out the excess watery dye with a paper towel. The white paper towel is also handy for testing out dye colors before you drip it on the floss.


Then do your jelly roll o'floss as Rachel describes, rolling the floss up in plastic wrap, one floss skein at a time. Be sure to roll it in the plastic enough times to separate it from the next floss (that pesky color bleeding again). The chopsticks come in handy here to maneuver the floss and get it into place without dirtying your gloves too much. Always be aware of where you are putting your hands and what you are touching, since it's incredibly easy to transfer dye unintentionally.

Now you will steam the floss. This is something else I neglected to take a picture of, but basically, I used an old pot with a lid and a roasting rack set on top. The flosses went on the rack, the lid went over the floss, and rested on the rack as well, and I steamed the bejesus out of those flosses. Rachel recommended 10 minutes, but once again, my experimental nature prevailed and I let them steam in batches for at least 20-30 minutes. Could be slightly more, could be slightly less, who knows? I don't keep track of these things. I flipped them over occasionally until I thought they were good and steamed, then took them off and let them rest in the kitchen sink until they cooled.

Once the packets are cool, carefully unwrap and start rinsing each skein of floss until the water runs clear. Be careful not to rinse over the other flosses. I rinsed in hot water, then a little cooler, and was surprised that I didn't get a whole lot of run off, except from the reds. The reds were a little harder to rinse, and I used a little more dish soap with them to make sure I was getting all the dye out.


This is what they looked like, steamed, cooled and rinsed. They're still wet, which is why the colors look brighter than they actually turned out, but I still think they came out great. I then draped them over a drying rack, carefully spaced out so there would be no accidental bleeding (I rinsed until clear, but you never know.) And this is what they look like on the drying rack in my dining room. (Don't get too upset - they're all dry, which is why they're touching. Also, I didn't move the drying rack into the carpeted dining room until the flosses were dry. I did not want anything dripping on the carpet. Not that there was a whole lot of dripping because I squeezed them pretty dry, but better safe than spotty carpeted)


There you have it. My adventures in floss dying. If you're thinking about trying it, go for it. I had fun doing it, and will start collecting floss on sale all over again so I can do another batch. Or perhaps invest in a cone of DMC (which is over 2000 yards) and dye even MORE floss. I do caution that this can be VERY messy and has lots of disaster potential, especially if there are children or nosy pets around. I used gloves, or tried to, mostly, and still ended up with some dye in my nail beds. (Lots of scrubbing, some lemon juice and later, some peroxide, helped tremendously)

It will cost you some money to get started for the equiment (less than $10 at the dollar store), the floss and the dyes. I mostly used coupons on the dyes and picked up floss on sale, but definitely check out your grocery store for the dye - mine sells it cheaper than the craft stores. And expect to devote a couple hours to this process, especially if you're dying a lot of floss. You can even make it a party where everyone bring a bottle of dye and the flosses they want to do. Be creative, have fun, and experiment! You're not being graded on this!

Tea Drinker's Tip

I drink a lot of tea, and I suspect quite a few of my fellow stitchers are tea drinkers as well. I usually drink my tea hot with a touch of honey and milk, and since I drink so much tea, I buy honey in bulk at the local warehouse store in a large plastic bottle. Sometimes I get lucky and can use the whole thing before it starts crystallizing, but sometimes, it starts crystallizing by the time I am halfway through the bottle, and it's hard to use.

However, I found a great tip to cure that - microwaving. Put some honey in a small glass jar and microwave on high until it melts, stirring occasionally (every 15-20 seconds). You need to be SUPER careful when you do this and you cannot leave the honey unattended. Honey in the microwave gets very hot, very fast. Be very careful when you do this! I tried it the other day, putting thick, crystallized honey into the jar. It melted down nicely, and more importantly, has STAYED melted. I was afraid it would go back to its crystallized state once it cooled, but it hasn't so far. So if you have problems with crystallized honey, give it a try!