FO: Petunia Roving

Thank you all for the great dyeing (and clean up!) advice yesterday. I did get the blue dye off the stone counters with Clorox, which also got most of it off my hands. To answer a couple of questions posed in the comments (which I can't answer directly because Blogger won't give me your email addresses):

CraftyLzrd, roving is a long strip of wool that is already washed and combed and prepared for hand spinning. You can buy it by weight from lots of different suppliers in all sorts of fibers and colors, and there are lots of Etsy sellers who offer hand painted roving. It saves the spinner the time and effort of starting with an unwashed fleece. It also creates wool in which the fibers are mostly aligned in one direction, so that you end up with a smoother, firmer yarn than you usually would with hand carded fiber, where the fibers are kind of jumbled.

Tracy, I sprayed the roving with vinegar because that's what the directions I was following said to do. I have found other directions that recommend soaking the roving in vinegar water before dyeing, and still others that indicate you should mix the vinegar with the dye. I'm sure any of these ways will work; the important thing is getting the vinegar and the dye both onto the fiber, since the vinegar (which is the "acid" in my acid dye) acts as a setting agent for the dye.

Here's my dyed roving, all dried and braided (there are seven braids there; I just wound them around each other for the picture). The color looks pretty accurate on my monitor.

I spun a bit last night to see how it would come out. So far I'm not in love, but I'll post a picture when I have some plied up.

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?

Swallowing

Could this possibly be?

It looks like...successful lace in progress. I don't want to jinx it or anything, but that is what it looks like, isn't it?

I'm on the first of three border charts. The good news is, I can count the number of rows left to go. The bad news is that every other row requires a truly appalling number of p5tog's. I never, ever want to p5tog again. I had to switch from my KnitPicks Harmony needle tips to my Options needle tips for fear I was going to break a wooden needle. It takes me as long to execute a successful p5tog as it does to knit half a row. Never again.

Here's a close up of the yarn:

I wish I could get a more accurate picture. This is dark teal, not blue. It's really pretty in real life. It's so pretty, in fact, that I want more.

So I've been spinning this:

(Again, apologies for the less-than-stellar photo.)

On the left is some more handpaintedyarn merino roving; on the right is some more hand dyed merino-tencel. Obviously, the merino-tencel is much lighter, but it's the same colors. I think the two will look good plied together, and will give me enough 2-ply to make another shawl or maybe a top of some sort.

Here's a sample of the merino singles:

And one of the merino-tencel singles:

I'm already done with the merino-tencel. It was such a treat to spin that I finished up the entire four ounces in one sitting. The merino is more difficult. I won't order this again; although I love the colors and the yarn from handpaintedyarn.com, their roving is really hard for me to spin. It seems to be semi-felted and is really tough to draft, even with serious pre-drafting. I originally ordered three four-ounce rovings. The first went into the yarn for Swallowtail, I'm spinning this one now, and I have one left. They're all a pain. Not to worry, though; I've already ordered more handpainted merino-tencel rovings from Etsy, so I won't be without lovely spinning fibers for the spring!