Saturday, August 2, 2008

I did get some dying done this weekend as I’d planned. I started Thursday night dying some yarn I got last year at the Webs booth at Stitches. It’s about 1900 yards of wool that was originally a grayish color. I’ve over-dyed it red (Schucks' brand kool-aid) and it came out exactly as I’d hoped. It’s a sort of faded brick red that will someday become a gansey-type sweater.

I love the colors and the effects of the Jacquard Acid dyes and I was very pleased with how easy they were to use. This is Chartreuse. Very Chartreuse. I’m inordinately in love with both this and with the golden lace weight below.

This was done in the remains of the orange (mix of yellow and vermillion Jacquard dyes) from below. Somehow the first batch soaked up almost all the red and left this beautiful gold for this last batch.

These were soaked in tea bags. I really love how they came out.

The lace weight

And the fingering weight

These are skeins of superwash fingering weight that I thought I would do a bright mix. They came out a little messy. For these I had 2 pots. One with yellow and one with chartreuse. I hung the skeins over the 2 pots with an end in each. Then, once those were done, I rinsed them, put a plastic mixing spoon through each end and then hung the middle of the skein into the orange mixture. I wasn’t completely happy with the colors so I did a final pass with them through another yellow pot. That made it better but it also made a bit of the mess. Next time I would do the whole skeins in the yellow and then hang it over the 2 pots, one with green and one with orange. I think that would have been a much better way to do it. Live and learn, right? I still think these will make interesting socks.

I do have 2 more skeins that aren't quite finished. I did them with theWilton cake icing dyes. One of the things I love about using these for dying yarn is that you never know what you're going to get. I started out with soaking the skeins in tea and then I was going to use a brown and a light blue to variagate them. Well, they came out as a sort of high desert sunset. The brown was beautiful but the blue broke up into blues, purples, pinks and other colors. The problem was that the parts that had been soaked in tea lost most of that color so I'm going to need to do another color along that side. I think they'll be pretty but I need to decide what colors I need to use to finish them.

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