whee, Fogcon!

[malka]

Fogcon was great fun, and I am now out of... actually, I don't know what it is that I'm out of, but I used all of it up to great effect.

I have a number of coherent responses I wish to make to the Childhood Games session, with more gradually evolving over time. I have a number of deeper and more personal, but ultimately incoherent, responses I wish to make to the Outlaw Bodies roundtable. I have discovered just how bad an idea it is for an adult who doesn't wish to be talked to to carry a doll openly on an plane flight.

For those who were at the con and am curious who I am: I was the person spinning blue-green stuff and knitting bright pink socks. For those who were curious about the blue-green fiber, it was 75% BFL (wool) / 25% silk dyed by Dicentra Designs.

Comments

[frotz]

I thought the really impressive thing about that fiber was that even the really well-saturated green bits didn't have that yucky matted/felted thing going on hardly at all that otherwise seems endemic. It's enough to make a person (or at least me) reconsider "ply, then dye"! Awesome stuff.

[malka]

They didn't have it at all. It was really nice.

Abby Franquemont (whose Ravelry backposts I'm still reading through due to somebody-who-shall-not-be-named's helpfulness) is fairly opinionated about that sort of texture trouble being a bad outcome of dying. I get the sense, although I don't know if she's stated it this explicitly, that she thinks fiber with those problems can be sold as seconds / mistakes, but not as standard-quality prepped spinning fiber.

[malka]

(To clarify, I appreciate being able to read much more of Abby's writing, because I think she's kickass. I just have lost a lot of time this last week and a half, and I'm about a quarter of the way through, so I'm ragging on you.)

[frotz]

I agree! Of course in part my agreement is based on reading a whole bunch of her posts and realizing that "hey wait all blue-green top doesn't have to suck!", but it does sound like (often from the posts she's replying to) that many of the nice-looking stuff on etsy is not dyed to the same standards.

In any case, I'm all set up for dyeing anyway, I just haven't tried wool yet! (So now I can make my own crappy blue green spectrum stuff? Except that I'll have spun it first so it will be differently annoying. I'm still not sure what to make of this lurid blue bamboo top somebody-who-shall-not-be-named's helpfulness has left me with, though.)

[malka]

Have you been having specific bad experiences specifically with blue-green, or is it just that that is a color you're interested in? I could easily see the different chemical properties of different dyes having an effect on how easy it is to dye something without causing trouble.

If I'm not being too forward in saying so, please observe good lab precautions with the dying? It seems like a number of people who do serious dyeing end up having to stop due to bodily rebellion, and having lots of follow-on effects. It worries me. Not as much as some of the truly terrifying stories from lab chemistry (like the report of what an insecticidal substance tasted like or the blog I used to read of substances this one chemist categorically refused to work with), but still: worry.

(Also grammar weirdness, apparently.)

You have my blessing to pass the bamboo on or throw it out or use it in experimental toupees. I do not love it; you are allowed to also not love it.

[frotz]

Something about blue-green in particular seems extra-problematic. It's also an are of the spectrum that I find shiny, though! (Getting awesome blues and greys and suchlike without it turning into a murky mess is its own trick.)

Thanks for the thoughts about dyeing, too. (Not dying. I hope.) I also know people who've been on the bad end of such things, and I'm trying to be better about it. Still, judging real exposure risk is sometimes hard, since documentation tends to be ridiculously overconservative. I've done a ton of both darkroom work and glassblowing and if we scrupulously followed best practices either one would be a complete non-starter, and it's irritatingly often that one ends up with traditional precautions that most people seem to think are OK because nobody with hard data wants to go out on any kind of limb and discuss real risk tradeoffs. Though someone I used to work with has burnt-out lungs from doing too much hand-processed RA4, so... yeah, reminders are good. Thank you!