And Again

While surfing through my Rav queue yesterday, I came upon this--Tinder, by Jared Flood. I immediately had to have yarn this exact color for this project. I had this in the stash:


It is Bartlettyarns fisherman 2-ply in a color that was supposed to be "Rust" but is really salmon pink. Not a bad color, but not the greatest color in the world for me. I decided I could overdye this with orange and brown and get something close to the color I wanted.

I recently bought some dye in "Burnt Orange." It turns out, however, that when I pulled the container off the shelf, I did not read the label. The container was incorrectly shelved, so I had actually bought..."Salmon." Overdyeing salmon with salmon didn't seem all that productive to me.

Not to be deterred, I decided I could come up with my own burnt orange based on the dyes I already had. Not a bad idea, really, since I have red, yellow, and brown. So don't ask me why I decided that red and brown together would turn salmon pink yarn into orange yarn. I have no idea. In my defense, it was late in the day and I was distracted. But rest assured, red and brown do not make orange, no matter how much one may want them to.

Instead, they make this:

It is a truly beautiful deep cranberry--which is, as usual, not what I was trying to achieve, but still lovely, and it will be excellent for Tinder, if that's what I decide to use it for. I had seven skeins of yarn, which is way more than I need, so I left one the original color, with the vague idea that it would make pretty trim for the cranberry.

Maybe facing for the collar? Edging for the cuffs and bottom? Not sure, but I like the colors together, so perhaps I'll work something out.

Yarn Play, Part 4

Are you getting tired of this yet?

I'm not. In fact, I'm having a great time pulling yarns from the "sell" pile and dyeing them to get new yarn for my stash!

This is the latest candidate:

What, you think that's kind of pretty? So did I, which is why I bought it. Then I knitted a swatch:

It almost makes my eyes bleed. It's not even clown barf. It's what clown barf would look like the morning after an all-night bender. I'm pretty good at coming up with good uses for questionable colorways, but this one? Yuck.

The yarn, however, is merino bulky from handpaintedyarn.com, which is, I believe, the same as Malabrigo Merino Bulky. Well worth saving, in other words.

I didn't think there was any color that would cover this virulent combination, so I went with good old dark brown. I was hoping it would just cover everything. It didn't. I even added more dye to the dye bath as it was dyeing. Twice. In fact, I ended up using the entire jar of brown dye. No dice. There really is no color that will cover this. (Anyone else remember the country song "John Deere Green"? That's what I hear in my head when I look at this yarn.) Here is what I got:

It's not bad, but definitely not what I was going for--it's kind of a toned-down version of the original. I may try to overdye it again with more brown, once my new order arrives. My husband likes it the way it is, though. Maybe it will become something for him.

Yarn Play, Part 3

Although the last round went to the KG and her supreme sense of irony, I still count the dyeing experience as a success: I was able to obtain the color I wanted and to duplicate it on subsequent batches. Since I have lots of yarn--a surprising amount of which is in colors I don't really like--and not a lot of money to spend on yarn, I returned to the stash for another lot to send to the dyepot.

It didn't take long to settle on this:

This is a lovely merino/silk blend in a dk weight. Unfortunately, as beautiful as the colors are in the skein, I have learned through hard experience that I don't at all like the way variegated yarns look knit up. In fact, the sweaters I've knitted from variegated yarns have mostly found their way to the dyepot after the fact.

To add to the problem with this yarn, the skeins don't match. Two are pretty similar, but the other two are totally different. I don't alternate skeins. It makes me crazy, and I don't need any more crazy in my life.

The vastly different colors limited my choice of possible colors for overdyeing this yarn. Almost any color I picked would result in some areas of brown because of the color combinations. So I knew I needed to choose a color that would work with some brownish variegation. And because I wanted to mostly cover the existing colors, I wanted something dark and saturated. I settled on dark plum. I love the color, it looks good on me, and I had the dyes to accomplish it. I knew going in that I would not end up with a solid color, but more of a tonal yarn, because of the underlying variegation. That's okay with me; I like tonal yarns, heathery yarns, tweed yarns...just not strongly variegated yarns. I was hoping for a variety of shades of plummy colors.

Since I knew I was going to dye all this yarn as a single batch, I didn't need to be quite as careful about measuring the dyes. I don't need to duplicate the color later. I decided to start with Vermillion (I use Jacquard acid dyes), which is already a dark red, and add some Sapphire Blue to give it a purple tone. For no reason other than that it seemed about right, I mixed four parts Vermillion with one part Blue. This made a really pretty berry color, but I wanted something darker. I added one part Jet Black, and the result looked pretty good, so I went with that.

Here is the yarn drying (because I like to look at yarn drying):


And here it is all dry:

It came out mostly as I had hoped. There are some small areas that didn't really overdye, so there are spots of yellow and green and orange among the purples, but I think I can work with those. I'll either cut the yarn when I get to them, or leave them in. They're small enough sections that they may create an almost tweed effect against the more solid purple. I won't know until I knit it up.

In any case, I like it much better than the original colorway, so I'm counting this one as a win.

But shhh...the KG is listening!

The KG Bites Back

So I took my beautiful, freshly-dyed, blue-green wool up to my knitting room to put it away. I organize my yarn by color. Guess what I found?

An entire afghan's worth of gorgeous blue-green Beaverslide wool. Does the color look familiar?

How about now? The one in the front is one of the skeins I dyed. The one in back is Beaverslide.

How about a closeup? Beaverslide on the left, mine on the right.

Yep. I now have enough beautiful, blue-green, aran weight wool to knit a house cozy.

And the KG wins again.

Yarn Play, Part II

It's been a while since my last dyepot adventure, so yesterday, as I was squishing all that lovely, natural wool between my fingers, I decided it was time for another one. I want to keep that beautiful Marr Haven yarn undyed, but I have other undyed yarns in the stash in shades that don't excite me.

Like this yarn. I picked this up in a Rav destash a couple of years ago (I stalk the destash board): fifteen 1oo gram balls for little more than postage. It's an undyed, lanolin-rich basic wool. Not the softest yarn I've ever felt--not like merino, anyway--but certainly several orders of magnitude softer than Bartlett Yarns or Briggs & Little, both of which I've tried really hard to like. I'm not a fan of scratchy wools. Anything rougher than, say Cascade Eco Wool is just too rough for my tender hide. This wool feels like a lanolin-y version of Eco Wool. About the same gauge, too, so quite a useful yarn. Just...bland.

I've pulled it out several times to swatch and always put it back. I'm not a beige kind of person, and this is a really, really flat beige. No heathering, no variegation, no depth. Just...beige. Which made it perfect for the dye pot. I've been wanting to try dyeing some darker toned wool, because it provides such a rich base for the color. And lately I've been a somewhat interested--okay, obsessed--with acquiring some heathery, blue-green wool. Something like this, or this, or this.

Since I had a color in mind, I didn't follow my usual leap-before-you-look approach to dyeing, and instead decided to dye up a practice skein or two first. I skeined up the first ball with my trusty niddy-noddy and got to work.

I put the yarn in some warm water to soak while I prepared the dye bath.

Since I wanted a blue-green, I knew I'd need to mix yellow and blue. For my first attempt, I decided to shoot for the "1 teaspoon of dye powder to 100 grams of yarn" recommendation I found on the Knit Picks website.

Mindful of the need to duplicate the results for subsequent skeins, I even measured the amount of each color. I did not, however, consider in advance exactly how to achieve the color balance I wanted. I figured, the yellow is lighter, so naturally I need more of it than of the blue. I mixed three parts yellow to one part blue, mixed like crazy, poured in a glug of vinegar, and dumped in the wet yarn.

Almost immediately, my beige yarn turned dark green. Really dark, dark green. Not blue green. Not heathered. Really dark, solid green. The kind of green Robin Hood would envy. But it wasn't like I could stop mid-dye, so I let it play out. And I got a hank of forest green yarn.

Since I realized early on that my first attempt was going to be too dark and too green, I skeined up another ball, put it in to soak, and thought about the problem a little. I decided, since blue-green is a mix of blue and green, and green is a mix of yellow and blue, I should really have three parts blue to one part yellow. Not very scientific, but hey. It's supposed to be fun, right? Math is not fun for me, so I don't do it.

I mixed up a new dye bath, using the new formula and half as much dye total. The color of the dye bath was much closer to blue-green this time. But again, within moments of putting the yarn in the dye bath, I realized it was much too concentrated for what I had in mind. The yarn immediately became a dark, solid teal. Beautiful, but not what I wanted.

So I went for attempt number three. But since I am not the most patient person in the world, I didn't do another test skein. I concluded that the shade would be perfect if I just used the same amount of dye but three times as much yarn. I'm good at talking myself into things like that. I mixed up another dye bath using the same amounts of yellow and blue, but more water and vinegar, and tossed in four more skeins. I know, I said three, but I wanted to dye twelve total, and that would have been four more lots, and by now it was getting kind of close to when I needed to start dinner, so I cheated and put in four.

This was a mistake. The yarn came out a little too light--kind of washed out looking. Now, I'm sure a professional dyer would, at this point (assuming they were careless or lazy or clueless enough to have gotten into this situation in the first place), have done something totally professional to fix this situation. I, however, added "a little" more of each dye powder in the same ratio as before, poured in a bit more vinegar, and tossed the yarn back in.

Worked perfectly.

The yarn turned out exactly the soft, watery, blue-green color I had in mind. "Ah, hah!" you're thinking, "but how in the world will you duplicate those results with the rest of the yarn?" Well, I'll tell you how: for the subsequent dye baths, I measured the same amounts as I originally put in for each color, then put in "a little more" again, and tossed in the yarn. I figured, "a little more" is probably going to mean almost the same thing to me each time, and the yarn is going to absorb all the color whether I dye it once or twice, so.... And you know what?

Worked perfectly.

Sometimes my own recklessness in the face of the Knitting Goddess's wrath makes me a little breathless.

Here is some of that lovely yarn drying on hangers in the backyard:

And here is how it looks today:

Which is exactly what I wanted.

I love it when I'm successful in spite of myself.

WTF?

I'm pretty sure I've used this post title before, but sometimes it just applies.

I ordered some sock yarn online. I don't really have an LYS. I have a not-so-L YS, but I only go there once a month for my spinning group (it's more than an hour drive round trip), so when I get impatient, I order online. No driving, less waiting. The only problem is, since the gratification is not instant, I tend to...um...keep ordering until stuff starts arriving. I'm not sure exactly how much sock yarn is on its way, and I won't know until the postman stops knocking, but the first of it arrived today.

Here's where things start getting interesting. When I first started ordering yarn online, I was often shocked at how...dissimilar the yarn looked in person from how it looked on my computer. I have yarns in the stash that no one in their right mind would buy in person, but they looked pretty darned good on my computer screen. As I've become more experienced at online ordering, I've learned to read the descriptions carefully and check photos of the yarn I'm interested in on multiple sites to get the best idea of how it really looks. I'm rarely surprised or disappointed anymore. Sometimes, though, I still open a box and think, "WTF?"

This is the yarn I ordered:

Pretty, huh? It is described as: "A Subtle Combination of Creme, Beiges, Dustings of Cinnamon & Rose Hues". I think that's a fairly accurate description of this picture, and I like it. I like the golden tones and the green and beige and just generally the whole thing. You know what I don't like, though?

This:

This is the yarn that showed up in my mailbox, and yes, the colors look accurate on my screen. I would describe it as "A nasty combination of greyish mauve with a dusting of puke green." No resemblance at all to the picture or the description of the colorway I ordered. And before you ask, yes, I did check the tag and the colorway is the one I ordered.

So I won't be casting on any socks today. I will, however, be breaking out the dyepot for some creative overdyeing. Stay tuned for the results!

Here We Go Again

Remember this?

This was my ill-fated Autumn Leaves. Great yarn, great pattern, not so great together. Like ketchup and peanut butter. After taking this picture, I buried it at the bottom of a stack of sweaters and moved on. But I find it difficult to accept failure, so I thought I'd try at least fixing the color. I threw it in the dyepot with some brown RIT dye. Oddly, the dye didn't cover the existing color; it just sort of darkened and toned it down. Here's the after:

I think it's...better. Here's a closeup of the new color:

I'm still not sure about the style. I can't decide whether it's sort of cute or really frumpy, like a housecoat.

Any thoughts?