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Fun with dyes

On dyeing yarn

09.20.09 | Tags: Fun with dyes, Misc | Comments: Comments Off

Labor day weekend I went to Ikea with my mom and aunt to purchase a new bookcase since my book and yarn collection was exploding. This Ikea was undergoing renovation so it was a complete mess, like their kitchen stuff was mixed in with the bedroom stuff. In midst of this mess, they had a whole stack for curtain rods on clearance for 99cents! My mom snatched up six of them for drying out laundry. I quickly realized that I could use one too but for the purposes of drying yarn on the balcony. One rod could hold a lot but I’m thinking I should have probably gotten another one considering it was only 99cents.

School was crazy busy for the last few weeks so I did not touch the 10 pounds of yarn that I had ordered until this weekend, which is a four day weekend for me. So I spent most of Friday dyeing yarn. I love dyeing yarn. I don’t plan out the colors ahead of time. I dye one skein at a time. When I’m done with one skein I decide on the color of the next skein. I haven’t dyed enough skeins to run out of color combos so I try not to repeat a color. But somehow this time out of the 13 skeins I dyed, two of them came out quite similar. I’m very happy with how they came out with the exception of one which I may end up overdyeing it.

I’ll be posting them to my Etsy store over the next week but if you like anyone of them, I’ll be happy to hold it for you, just email me at jane AT okayknits DOT COM.

What I’ve been doing

09.13.09 | Tags: Baby Fridays, Fun with dyes, Misc | Comments: (0)

August few by quickly. I had a month of school already. Its quite weird that this is my last year of learning in a classroom, next year its onto the hospitals. My school instituted this mandatory attendance policy with fingerprinting in which I spend an ungodly number of hours sitting in a darkened room learning about how to treat diseases before we learn what caused the disease. Its so backwards! So I’ve taken my knitting into school and knit during class. I knitted a cute little pullover for one of my classmate’s new baby boy. Though it may be a year before the baby can wear it. I knitted a 6mo-1 year old size but I think its more like a 1-2 year size. Oh well that’s what happens when you knit without a swatch.

I’m still dyeing yarn in my spare time on the weekends. Its expanding. I’ve got 12lbs of yarn in my possession waiting to be dyed when I get the chance.

My dog has gone to live with my mom until winter break. I don’t like walking her in the morning, in the dark, in the cold. I am missing our afternoon long walks looking for cats in the neighborhood and chasing squirrels. In the meantime I haven’t done any dog torture for a while. She has either forgotten how muzzle stacking works or that the cheezeits are so yummy that she just can’t help herself, she was horrible at muzzle stacking. I only managed to stack one for maybe 2 seconds before she knocked it down and ate it.

I actually wrote a majority of this post last week but never posted it. I am only doing it now cause I have a huge 4 hour exam tomorrow and so I am procrastinating it (the weekend before the last 4 hour exam I was procrastinating by dyeing yarn). No dyeing this weekend however I am doing more knitting in between cramming information on the heart.

I’m knitting my own version of Conwy from Knitting on the Road. My version meaning after an inch in the leg, I can’t find where I placed the pattern so I did the heel flap and turn and stuff on a whim. I’m using my own handdyed Mumbi II yarn on size 0 needles. I am knitting this for my self but I am getting close to two dozen working pairs of socks in my possession. Is it too much? I am already getting overwhelmed by yarn yarn collection. I fully realized that I have more yarn than I can possibly knit in the next few yarns at the rate that I am going. Maybe I’ll get overwhelmed by socks once I reach a point in which I have enough handknit socks to last a winter without repeating!

Dyeing Frenzy

06.16.08 | Tags: Fun with dyes | Comments: (4)

I nearly used up all my stash of KnitPicks bare yarn during my last two attempts at dyeing. I think I’m done at dyeing variegated yarns. They may look pretty in the skein but they tend to mask any type of patterning whether lace or cables, and pooling - oh boy do I hate pooling. I’m trying this new more time consuming way of dyeing the yarn. I make a base color and then dump some into a squeeze bottle and then add another dye color to the squeeze bottle. This way I can get a more semi solid yarn that still has hints of other colors.

The first one is a yellow/orange (it has a little more orange than my camera can take) sock yarn that I dyed during the heatwave. I couldn’t stand turning on the stove so the color was partially set by letting it sit out in the sun. I later made sure it was really set by placing it in the microwave. I’ve always used the stove to set the dye but now that the microwave experience was so easy, I think I’ll just do all of them in the microwave from now on.

My next dye job was to dye my remaining three skeins of the bare Swish worsted yarn. I want to make a scarf/hat set for my mom that hopefully, she won’t return (lets not mention the last set she returned to me a year later because the alpaca content she felt was too scratchy for her.) I don’t think alpaca is scratchy at all and we share very similar genes so I don’t really know where she is coming from hehe. Anyways this bare yarn is a much softer superwash merino blend so hopefully she’ll like it. I just need to pick out a pattern, or design one out.

Dyeing for socks

04.21.08 | Tags: Fun with dyes, Misc, Socks | Comments: (1)

Sunday, in between games of tennis and bowling on the Wii (knitting is going to slow down because of this new Wii), I was dyeing like crazy. First, I dyed up a skein of Knitpicks bare sock yarn in a color that I have been wanted to dye. I think this is the first time that I have dyed yarn that came out close to the color that I wanted to achieve. Most of the time, my dyeing is very inexact, I have an idea of what I want but no plans. I just mix up a bunch of colors and hope for the best. This time, however, I wanted a light yellow with hints of brown for something that looks like chocolate covered bananas.

The second part of my dyeing day was with this idea in mind. The crazy idea that I would dye up some sock yarn and spin it like the Noro sock yarn. So here is my plan to spin up some Noro like sock yarn. I have about five pounds mill end wool/nylon blend fibers. Mill end being that its mostly not one long continuous roving, instead its a bunch of smallish pieces rovings with some being nicely blended while others, well have quite a bit of visible nylon. I dyed several colors in the microwave. I didn’t plan out the colors ahead of time but I think they came out pretty well. I was especially pleased with the one that is a golden yellow/orange. When it was in the jar being dyed it reminded me of canned peaches!

I would need to handcard all of them before spinning which would be quite an ordeal. and then I can spin it. I could do a one ply like Noro or for some more stability and strength I would navajo ply it to get a 3-ply. I hope this crazy idea works out!

With all this sock yarn lying around, I really need more sock mojo to knit them up. But currently, I have none of it. I attempted to cast on a pair of socks on Sunday. Attempted being I got out the winder, wound a skein of sock yarn into a center pull ball, went to my Ravelry queue to find a suitable pattern. Casted on 56 sts on #2, frogged it, casted on 64 st on #1, frogged it, put the whole ball of yarn and the idea of knitting socks aside. Sigh. Knitting socks are not for me right now.

Eye candy

08.05.07 | Tags: Fun with dyes, Spinning | Comments: (0)

My order from The Sheep Shed Studio finally arrived. All three pounds of fiber, two skeins of sock yarn, plus a bonus saffron colored superwash roving! I absentmindedly ordered one skein of each color of sock yarn thinking each skein would make one pair of socks. I need to conjure up a way of using these two very different colored skeins. As for the eye candy, I dyed up about 200g of the roving in a blue and purple colorway. Its actually more purplish than in the picture but I can’t figure out a way of capturing it.