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 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!

Petunia

Warning: picture heavy post

Last week I finally got ahold of some acid dyes. I've been tossing around the idea of dyeing my own roving for a while now, prompted primarily by the high cost of hand dyed roving and my apparent inability to resist buying it. So yesterday, I decided to give it a try.

I had a pound of this lying around:

I wanted to try to make it look more like this:

For the record, this is roving I bought already dyed on Etsy. You can see how the undyed compares to the dyed roving here:

According to my research, the first step was to turn my mound of roving into smaller roving balls for soaking and dyeing. This is about eight feet of my roving wound into a ball:

And here it is with all of its siblings:

I put all these in a tub of hot water with just a little dish soap and let them soak for about half an hour. While I was waiting, I prepared my work surface, otherwise known as the kitchen counter.

More is more here. I cannot stress this enough. Lots of newspaper is critical, unless you really want rainbow colored counters. I covered every square inch, and then spread out long strips of plastic wrap for wrapping the roving after dyeing. [I never realized how difficult it is to spread temperamental plastic wrap out in neat, eight-foot long strips. At one point, I looked like I was attempting some sort of marital enhancement role-playing. Fortunately--or maybe not--there was no one here to witness it.]

Once everything was completely covered in newspaper and plastic wrap, it was time for the fun part--mixing the dyes!

What's that? There's no newspaper here? No plastic wrap, either? Wow! You're right! There is, however, a handy dandy paper towel, whose main purpose is not, as you may think, to keep the 20 ounces of concentrated dye off the stone counter top, but instead to hide the dollar sized blue stain I made when I knocked over the pot of powdered dye onto the one part of the counter I hadn't covered in newspaper. Which was, of course, where I had decided to mix the dyes. Not to worry, though, I wiped up most of it...with my bare hands, which are now a lovely shade of periwinkle, and will likely remain that color for the next several weeks. I did put on the gloves right after that, though.

Once the dyes were ready, I carefully removed my little roving balls from the hot water, squeezed out most of the water, and spread them out on the plastic wrap.

Aren't they pretty? I will admit to a long, long moment of second thoughts as I prepared to pour dye all over a sweater's worth of beautiful, natural merino roving. One might almost think a test piece of roving would make more sense for a first attempt at dyeing, wouldn't one?

But patience has never been my strong suit. Instead, I used a couple of those big eyedroppers you get at the pharmacy for squirting medicine in a baby's mouth and went wild with the green and purple. Yes, I did say green and purple. The roving I was trying to copy was green and purple. I know it sounds awful, but the roving I bought was really pretty, sort of olive-y and plum-y with bits of white and brown. I left white patches between my colors, not really wanting to find out what color you get when you mix green with purple. I also ran out of dye halfway through and had to mix more. Which, of course, proved impossible to do with any accuracy, so I squirted the new colors so they mixed with the old colors and looked at least somewhat more deliberate. Or so I thought.

Once I had the rovings colored to my satisfaction (more or less), I sprayed them with a generous amount of white vinegar, using a standard household spray bottle. When they were well wetted with vinegar, I rolled them up in the plastic wrap like nice, fat sausages.

I don't know why they're all different sizes and shapes. I could have sworn they didn't start out that way.

I put the sausages into a large (improvised) steamer pot with a couple of inches of water in the bottom, not touching the steamer basket, and turned on the heat. I simmered the pot for 45 minutes, then turned off the heat and went to the gym.

When I got back, I unwrapped the sausages, rinsed out the roving, gave it a quick spin in the washer to get out as much water as possible, and hung it out to dry.

Nope. Nothing like the roving I was trying to copy. At all. The green is grassy rather than olive, and the purple is more grape than plum, even though they looked the way I planned them during the dyeing stage. My white patches pretty much disappeared during the steaming, and some of the colors separated a little. This roving is still wet, though, and the colors may change again when it's dry. It's hard to say how this will spin up; I am notoriously bad at predicting what roving will do when it's spun. It could turn out to be the world's ugliest yarn. In the meantime, though, I'm calling my first handpainted roving Petunia, because it reminds me of these:

Not quite so ugly when you look at it like that, is it?