Back in April I went to Maine for a long weekend. These three balls of yarn are a mere fraction of the yarn we dyed that weekend. We did 29 skeins total using 3 different techniques. Remarkably, we did not make a huge mess though I suspect the t-shirt I wore is permanently scarred from the project.
These three balls are the “parrot series”. The brighter colors on the bottom of the pile were dyed in the pot by putting dye powder directly on the skeins. That was fun and resulted in very vivid colors. The more muted and darker ball on top was painted. When I was done painting it, there were white sections but the dye bled into those sections when we set it. I actually like how the colors came out better with muted yellow where I intended there to be white.
These skeins are all sock yarn, so there will be some parrot socks in the future!
Mum also sent me home with a mini-dyepot (I say “mini” because hers is big enough to dye 8-10 skeins in as well as bathe in while mine is a more normal sized pot) and starter dyes. One of the skeins I painted didn’t come out to my liking so I’m already planning to over-dye it. For my next trick, I need to start knitting up the yarns!
These photos show the painted skein (the one on the top of the pile above) all wrapped up in its plastic wrap, ready to steam and one of the brighter parrot skeins on the swift getting ready to be wound. I love how rich the colors came out! The orange and blue in the muted parrot are lovely and the richness of the green in the bright parrots is just fabulous. Not bad for a first-time dyer, right? There’s a lot to be said for bright, pretty colors! Besides, bright colored socks are more fun. Trust me. I’ve collected a lot of data.
Here we have the 3 parrots from another angle. You can see the swatch I knit up in the lower left corner. It looks like the dominant stripe, at least on the first ball of parrot, will be the green with the other colors shifting around it. Even so, my swatch was about 40 stitches I think, so not a full round for socks. There are some rather wild socks in my future.
For the multi-colored yarns, I think I am happiest with the skeins we put dye powder on directly because we got such vivid colors from that technique. There’s another round of blue-gray-black yarns that I’ll post another time. We used liquid dye (in the pot) on those and came up with some lovely yarn too. But the powder technique is just so much more *pow*. The painted skeins were interesting too though I need to work on my color layout to avoid blending. So, like everything else, it depends what you’re going for.
Handily, dyeing is really fun so I’ll need to practice and experiment more.