Which-Crafts?

[singlepic=50,320,240,,left] But it should be.

I am sure I am knitting the pattern, but it really doesn’t look like the Lovelyness which i have seen in Grumperina’s scarf gallery. It also has a few structural problems, like needing a needle 2 sizes or so larger. So I have decided its a REALLY large swatch (at this point its about 2x the size it is in the picture.) So I am starting again on larger needles and with 20 fewer stitches than is in the original pattern (10 less than the “swatch”.)

The yarn is my own hand-dyed yarn, the base yarn is *Kn!@ !@#ks* and I actually can’t say enough bleah things about it. Suffice it to say, I won’t be purchasing more, and certainly not as a base yarn for me to dye with. Which is a bit of a shame, because I LOVE the colors though. I cannot get a picture that does justice to the colors in the yarn, the blues go from a midnight blue that is almost black through to beautiful turquoisey sky blue with some lovely stark white highlights.

I have been looking for some patterns that really do a nice job of showing off my style of hand-dyeing. Just enough shape/texture/pattern to really make the color ways stand out, without burying the colors or the patten.

I am working on a pair of mittens that are plain stockinette, and the yarn is blending to a beautiful mottled heathery color texture.

Coming soon: actual decent pictures - I am getting a camera on loan. YAY!!!

So I snagged the bosses camera (an EOS!!! - now I am totally spoiled) and took some pics of my recent playing with hand-dyeing. I was a bit in a rush so haven’t edited the pictures much, but the colors are pretty accurate as is. For all of these there are more pics on the tab labeled Hand Dyeing at the top of the page.

[singlepic=41,320,240,left] The first pic here is of one of the 2 skeins of Knit Picks Bare sock weight merino/tencel yarn I dyed this way. It is incredibly squishy and feels great. At the risk of sounding conceited, I am very pleased and a bit surprised at how the colors turned out. Right now I am not hand-painting the yarns, but using my own version of kettle-dyeing. The results are turning out very cool, and not at all regular and stripey which is exactly what I want. I have 1 skein from the earliest dye batches (my test skein) that I am currently knitting into mittens. It ends up knitting up with a sort of watery heathery affect. I hope to get these in front of the camera soon.

The next two pictures are of over-dyed skeins. This one was the last one I dyed from the holiday batch and really - I think [singlepic=44,320,240,right] my inspiration had sort of temporarily burned out. There were two skeins of a merino-silk blend that ended up sort of this sad sickly pink with dullish purple splotches. So I decided that seeing as they were already sort of miserable, I would use them as my test skeins for trying out the warping board. I reskeined them in these big long skeins and then over dyed them. I do have to admit that once I reskeined them and then soaked them to prep them for dyeing, they looked very pretty - all sorts of multilayerd grapey colors that just didn’t show up when dry. So they got over dyed, and I tried very very hard for a nice multilayered color spread - but mostly ended up with 2 colors. I am not sure I am able to create the same color subtlety over-dyeing that I can when I start bare.

[singlepic=40,320,240,left] This yarn was a fabulous freebie give-away yarn and has a whole long story behind it. But mostly for our purposes here, the important part was that it was ugly. Inho REALLY ugly. Sort of a dull, pastel, but still olive and not sage green. It is 100% Alpaca and wonderfully soft. And I didn’t want to let it go to waste, so I took it and knew that someday I would over-dye it. I was a little paranoid dyeing it, because a lot of what i dye is Superwash and I don’t have to be too careful about it felting. I KNOW this yarn felts and so I had to be v.v. careful to prevent ending up with a beautifully dyed lump of useless fiber. Once again I didn’t quite get the color depth that I wanted. But it is still about 500% better than it was when it started, and now I am trying to dream up what I can do with 1lb of DK weight 100% Dark green alpaca.

this is one of those times i REALLY wish I had a camera - so i could show you some of the awesomeness that I created this weekend.

Over the holidays I dyed some yarn for gifts, and got a really good response. This has been the first weekend since then that I really had time to play again.

A few weeks ago, I was talking about some of my future dyeing plans to a friend of mine. I was waxing rhapsodic about all the ways I could experiment once I made myself a warping board type thing to wind yarn on.

“You know i have a warping board in the basement? Right?”

“Huh?” (I am very cogent when surprised )

“Ya know, from when I used to weave. Do you want it?”

“!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

I spent some time this week reading up on warping boards (there isn’t a lot of info out there) and then went to town. Up until now skeining yarn has been a bit of a pain. Winding on to my umbrella swift hasn’t been thrilling me - it is ungainly and my inner mechanical engineer (who is a 2nd grader) can tell that it is wildly inefficient. The warping board, while having its own amount of inefficiencies, is WAY better and much easier to use. As far as I am concerned it is a total win.

I had 2 skeins of KnitPicks Bare merino/silk fingering yarn that I had dyed at the end of my holiday dyeing and had ended up a drab pink and dull purple. They got reskeined and over dyed. They are now still pink and purple, but now its more of a deeper purple with some pink glowing out of it. It still isn’t my favorite, but my roommate, is trying to steal it while my back is turned.

I had 2 skeins of KnitPicks merino/tencel sock yarn - they are now a fiery blend of light golden yellows, deep oranges, and burnt chestnut.

7 skeins of puke light olive Plymouth Baby Alpaca DK got completely re-skeined and over dyed. They are now drip drying in the bathroom, I am hoping that they are a a dark green/teal with light green overtones when dry. This was my first attempt to make 2 separate pots of yarn turn out the same, when they are dry I’ll be able to judge better - but I think I did a pretty good job.

So I am working on a super Sekrit project. But I have something really specific in mind, and I think I finally found the pattern I want, or something really close to it. Now to the yarn to knit it with.
. . .

. . .

. . .

I am not sure it exists. I start searching and am not coming up with much (something v.soft, preferably worsted weight, superwash wool, variagated, with fairly long and gradual color repeats). Next up, I think well I could buy “bare” yarn, and dye it myself, but I am not finding a lot of superwash options that come in the weight/style I want. And I am thinking of the process it would take to get the long color progressions. And because now that I spin, I have some real ideas about what I want my yarn to be like, and what options I have for fiber content. And whether or not it would be easier to dye the fiber or the yarn etc.

I realized how MANY options I have now, its pretty cool. It sort of opens up a whole new horizon of choices for creativity and that is pretty exciting.

OTOH I have to balance how much time I have for this project and whether I really want to blend fiber, dye it, spin it and then knit it. It would certainly make the project special, but i am not sure that it won’t be cherished no matter what I make it out of.

1. Handspun Scarf, in the “oooh soft” post I showed pictures of the yarn I spun from fiber I got from Grafton Fibers. I knit up a scarf that I love, from my favorite simple scarf pattern. The pattern makes a nice reversible cushy scarf. It also works well with the irregular color and texture of the handspun yarn. The scarf itself is about 5.5 feet long and about 6″ wide. The picture is a bit sucky cause I took it with my phone.

2. In “into the dye pot with you!” I dyed a bunch of fiber, some of which was some a light turquoise/blue BFL, later I found some BLF that had escaped dyeing. During the holidays I took another stab at it and while I didn’t match, I did come up with a good complimentary color. At the time I didn’t post pictures, I snagged the camera at work for these. The lighter color in the back of this picture is the old dye batch, the darked one in front is the new dye batch.  There are a lot more pictures of it over here if you are interested.

At the end of October I posted about my experiments with dying fiber. What I didn’t mention what that I was *sure* that I had quite a bit more BFL for my Twisted Knitters project than I could find – I thought maybe my memory was playing tricks.  But then while digging through my stash the other day, I found it . . . a medium sized plastic bag, with probably a pound of BFL.  (I so need a scale for this hobby) I’d post a picture, but who really needs to see a clear plastic bag full of off white fuzz.
So now I need to try to dye this fiber to either match or at least blend with the previous batch.  (I am sure this will be easy HAH!) Especially because my scientific technique for dying the previous batch included free-form pouring the dyes across the fiber and crossing my fingers.  And the results weren’t exactly what I expected either.   I am thinking I might aim for it to be darker and then blending the two together, being that I had wished my original batch was both darker and more saturated.

I have been spinning quite a bit lately, and not knitting much - for more than one reason.

• I shouldn’t have allowed myself to get into a position of being pressured trying to get the socks knit for my mom (IOW I shouldn’t have offered), I hate the pressure and it makes me not want to do it.
• I have TOO many projects on the needles (plus more being planned in my head) and it makes me feel disorganized and it is hard to focus on a single project.
• The tiny sock needles on the projects I *should* be working on, hurt my hands when I use them too long, and in conjunction with all the extra hours I at work with my hand superglued to the mouse - I just am not out courting the hand pain and tendonitis.
• Spinning travels better than 2 socks at one time with 4 balls of yarn that are always twisted up. I can spin in the car with my drop spindle (and did all the way back from MN) and I proved last weekend that my spinning wheel is quite portable.
• Spinning has more of a zen quality for me. I can get started and once I get the feel for what I want to produce, it just flows and flows. No need to worry about the pattern or maintaining gauge or switching needles etc. Its all in the touch and plus the spinning feels all soft and cozy with all the fiber.

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Whee! I’ve been wanting to try this for a while, I am such a color whore, that I figured it would be really cool to try dying

my own fiber. I had to get all my ducks in a row (QUACK!), which I finally did

and my mom and I painted the basement a rainbow this weekend giving this a try. I read up a ton on the web, and generally followed the basic instructions at Spinning Athena . We used Jacquard acid dyes, and regular white vinegar. My mom has done some fiber dying of silk, cotton, and rayon in the past, but this was a first for both of us with wool and using these kind of acid dyes.

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