My new dye job

Yesterday J and S came over and we had a blast, we pulled out all of the fun salon supplies and bleached and colored our hair.  I desperately wanted to dye mine teal, but the pink hadn’t come out of my hair yet and I know enough about color-mixing that I figured that was a bad idea.

So we dyed the formerly pink hair a bright blue with some purple blended in. And we added a section of teal over and under it.  I am thrilled with the way it turned out.  I am hoping for a better picture later today – one that doesn’t feature my messy kitchen   .  But for now this one will have to do.

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!!!

It feels like its been about 6 years since the winter holidays.  We had a bit of a tough time around here, and while it isn’t my story to tell, suffice it to say the resulting stress has used up quite a bit of our resources.   

I’ve been being a bit more of a homebody, and a little less “grossly” social.  This has done great things for many of my hobbies.  I did a lot of knitting over the holidays, some spinning and picked up a new hobby as well (more in a bit).  I unfortunately lost my camera over the holidays (really the least of the crappy things) but it does mean that I don’t have pictures for a lot of the knitting, spinning and dyeing that I did.

I know that some of you know and some of you don’t know, that my mom used to be a professional baker. Over the thanksgiving holidays I helped her make some bread, and I got a little caught up in the process and result.  I started doing some reading and then was given some fabulous books and I then started playing.

At new years I went a little berzerk baking bread, and since then I have tried to keep it to 1-2 loaves per week.  I am kind of liking it as a Sunday morning ritual. I tend to wake up much earlier than everyone else, and I can get started and have fresh bread by the time the rest of the house is awake.  I have created my own Buttermilk Oatmeal Wholewheat bread recipe which I am pretty proud of – it still needs a bit of tweaking but is pretty darn good already.  Tonight I am experimenting with bread made with a starter I have been growing all week. 

Last weekend at ‘s house she let me play with ‘s sourdough starter, and I was pretty impressed with the bread we created.  So tonight I am trying a bread with a starter that used in part the starter that i created.  Hopefully tomorrow morning I might make bread that leavened completely from my starter.  We’ll see how that goes.

Work has been getting kind of interesting – we have been very very busy, and I am taking on a bunch of new responsibilities. Its a bit of lateral change, and I haven’t yet determined if its because I suck at 1/2 of what I am doing, or just because they really need someone almost full time doing the rest of the stuff.  I am a bit trepidatious about how the change will go, it will put me back doing mostly IT work, which I left many years ago.

And there is much more, but well maybe I’ll get to it later  . . .  

[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.

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.