Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

On the aforementioned trip to Maine, several other colors happened as well. These are 2 of the first 3 skeins we dyed and are More Sock Yarn. The light gray/black skein came out of the dye pot before we added the blue dye. The batch was a practice run/proof of concept to make sure these blue-blacks were really what I was looking for. And they were.

By the way, steam doesn’t help when you’re trying to take pictures of yarn in the dye pot! This is really a pity because the colors are so gorgeous, especially after the water has cleared. All the different layers of color under the water’s surface was just mesmerizing, perhaps to the point of distraction. Stirring the dye pot was not actually encouraged for this technique but I really enjoyed it. I did not enjoy having to simmer the yarn and wait a whole 20-30 minutes before dumping, rinsing and hanging it out to dry. Waiting is not always one of my strengths… especially when there are pretty colors to be had!

Of course, it helps that my mother’s dye pot is big enough to hold several small children… but that becomes rather important if you’re trying to dye 8 skeins of bulky yarn all at once. Which was our next project.

It really never hurts to learn from an expert, I guess. I’m very very very happy with how all the colors came out! Not that dyeing is rocket science, but chemistry was also never one of my strengths either so having a practical demonstration I could participate in really helped.

Plus it’s fun to play with colors. Perhaps too much fun. As long as I don’t dye everything bright-frickin’-turquoise[1], we’ll probably be fine.

And, my mother is also a terrible influence. I bought a pattern book and a pattern plus some yarn at her new favorite yarn shop. Some of it is truly lovely green! Yes, I know, you’re dying of that surprise. Plus I snitched a bunch of books from her library. Some of which I am obligated to return. This is going to be a great test of my book borrowing skills as I am, in fact, terrible at returning books. (Oh, hi, Mum. You should have known that before now anyway.)

[1] It should be noted that there is an inordinate amount of turquoise dye in the possession of the myself and my mother.
crafts, dyeing, yarn

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.

crafts, dyeing, knitting, yarn