Overboard

I've been working on a spinning project over the last months.  Well, since I got my Country Craftsman.  I was reading in one of the CC groups where they made the comment that this spinning wheel loves to spin lace weight.  Lace weight?  I LOVE lace weight.  I had some gray Corriedale fiber I'd bought at Yarn Barn on one of my trips to my Mom's.  I had gotten it for a specific purpose but the shade of gray wasn't quite right so it was waiting in the bull pen.  But I knew it would be perfect for a lace experiment with my new wheel.  I've only worked on it intermittently, a strand of fiber now and again.  But I finally got it finished this weekend.  I'd thought the variations in color would be interesting but once I got it spun up I discovered, not so much.  I also had a skein of Clun Forest hanging around that I'd sort of thought of dying up so now I had 2 skeins.

A word about the Corriedale.  Both the yarn and the wheel proved to be overachievers and I was very happy about the final product.  I'd spun it with a z twist for the singles and then plied it, of course, s twist.  But I did the plying on my Fricke wheel because the bobbins are much larger than the CC.  The CC bobbins only hold about 2 ounces.  Even so, I barely got everything plied to fit my Fricke bobbin.  But with my Fricke I knew, not only that the bobbin would be big enough, but that I could get a sufficiently high ratio to do the plying.  I'm a notorious under-plyer.  Really.  If there were a rogue's gallery at the post office for under-pliers, my photo would be there.  But the higher ratio of the Fricke (I used the highest ratio on the wheel) did the trick. I ended up with just under 4 ounces and about 630 yards.  I think I figured that it works up at about 2,000 yards to the pound.

Back to the dying.  I pulled out my dye pot this morning, chose emerald green and saphire blue Jacquard dyes, got my water cooking and my dyes mixed.  I was going for a ocean-y blue green.  What I got was, I think, the results of my not getting the dyes mixed well enough in the pot.

First batch:

It's a much darker green (a green that I'm so in love with) than just the emerald green dye so it picked up a little of the blue.  The Corriedale is on the left and the Clun Forest on the right.  The Corriedale is just a little bit deeper, just because the yarn I started out with was a light gray.  The CF was a natural cream color.

But my dye had not even begun to be exhausted.  So I had some generic white wool roving.  In it went.

Second batch:

The roving picked up the rest of the green in the pot and turned into a nice pale green.  I was very happy to find that the roving didn't felt at all so this should be fun to spin.

But the dye pot still wasn't exhausted.  So I got 3 skeins of KnitPicks superwash fingering/sock weight wool and stuck them in the pot, hoping they would come out kind of an icy green color.  Ha!  Oddly, this batch turned out a completely different color:

Third batch:

Turquoise.  Pure turquoise.  Two of the skeins didn't get mixed well so they are speckled turquoise and white and the bottom skein came up with the pure color.  Hard to believe that all 3 of these shades came from the very same pot of water and dye.

Be honest, do you think I went a little overboard in the amount of dye I put in the water for my 2 little skeins...?

Dyed in the wool

I just got word that all 3 classes I proposed to Lincoln Land have been taken up so I will be teaching the following classes this fall:

September 19 & 26 - Knitting mittens and gloves
October 10, 17 & 24 - Learning to knit socks by knitting a Christmas stocking
November 14 - Knitting Jewelry Wire & Beads

The catalogue is supposed to be out in early September but if you're interested in one of the classes or know somone who is, you can click here to see the LLCC contact information. To get ready for the mitten/glove class I've been dying yarn. It's a bit of work but it's lots of fun to see how they all come out. Here are some samples of what I've been doing:

I've used a variety of dying methods and dyes including Kool-aid (the red skein in the middle of the 3rd picture), Jacquard dye (blue skein and rose skein in the second picture)from KnitPicks, and Wilton icing dye (for the rest). I love the Wilton dyes because they will often break up and you get really interesting effects. For instance, the skein of aqua and purples in the last picture was done using the Wilton black icing dye. The purple/green/aqua mix in the first skein of the second picture was done by mixing the Wilton black and Wilton teal. I'm never sure exactly what I'm going to get but because the colors have been mixed for a certain effect, you can be sure the colors will blend in the skein. These skeins are all worsted weight yarn but I also need to do a few skeins of fingering weight. The mixtures from today have certainly given me some ideas for other mixtures!

State Fair

I've been cruising along thinking I needed to get my things out for the State Fair because it's coming up. Look at me cruising along and almost missing the whole thing (not like it's the first time that's happened). I did start pulling things out last night but was going to work on tagging, etc. this week, mistakenly thinking that I had to have them in on Friday. I just happened to look at my sheet this morning on the way out the door and discovered that they were actually supposed to be in yesterday or today!! It's just as well I have such a nice boss who let me take some time this morning to take care of it.

I had to mount the doilies on light card (which meant a trip to Hobby Lobby) and a hunt for all the staples in the house and then attach labels to all the items. I had 7 entries this year, mostly purses and doilies (and one very treasured Danish sweater).

I finished my Mom's gloves because I was going to enter them but I didn't get the 5x5 sample I would have needed to submit them for the category I was going to enter them into. Never mind, I finished them and am very proud (although tired of the pattern) of them.

I got many of my dyed skeins of yarn balled but I did also get another batch dyed. The Jacquard dyes come in a deep purple that's very exciting. I did 2 skeins of sock yarn and 1 of lace weight with the purple but I think I'm going to put them in one more time - there were some imperfections in the color of the sock yarn and the lace weight didn't get quite dark enough for me. I experimented by putting the 2 skeins of sock yarn in the bottom of the pan so they would have most access to the color and then put the lace weight on the top, with some of it barely in the water. I did like the way the lace weight took on the dye inconsistently so that there are quite a lot of color variations but I don't know if I can live with the lighter purple color. See what you think.


I also decided I like the "desert sunset" yarn and balled it before getting a photo but I'm going to do a gauge swatch to show the colors and will post a pic when I get that done.

Oh, yes, word to the wise. While it's a good idea to buy kool-aid when it's on sale, it can get hard if stored for a long time. It will melt in the water but it takes some attention when mixing before putting the yarn in. Voice of experience.

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.