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!!!

[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.

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.

. . .

. . .

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.