The not-so-hot results from part one are here.

Last we spoke, our young heroines had nothing to show for their efforts except for Amy’s perfect peacock yarn. The heroines thought, “Well, that sucks!”, and vowed to try again.

We armed ourselves with the ultimate weapon… Black Dye! We also had Red and Yellow. We’re wild, I tell you. Amy had some roving that she bought when we had our spinning lesson, and I had yet another of my little guinea pigs, some natural-colored Cascade 220.

Instead of divvying up the Cascade into smaller test hanks, I threw caution to the wind and dyed the whole thing. I had a deam of a lovely reddish-purple (but not too red) color. I mixed 60% violet, 35% red, and 5% black and threw the yarn in.

Results: Hmm. Wow. I’m surprised. That’s kind-of the color I was going for. My teeny test hank of pink laceweight turned out quite a bit darker and less red, so I’d have to adjust for that.

Amy’s original plan was to handpaint her laceweight. The plan was quickly abandoned because somebody just wanted to sit around and knit her damn orange sweater. Also, there was a boatload of dye left in the pot, so she decided to throw in some of her roving and see what happened. The roving came out much lighter, but still looked pretty cool. I, unfortunately, do not have an even halfway-decent photo of Amy’s roving.

Step 2: Dye the laceweight. I decided that a teeny bit of adjustment would be Good Enough, so 45-ish% red, not-quite 50% of violet (we ran out), and 5% black. Results: Awesome! The yarn is actually a touch more red than these photos show. Afterwards, Amy again dunked in her roving for some more sloppy dye seconds.

One remaining issue with the dyeing thing is that we have consistently had tons of dye left in the water. The yarn is supposed to suck it all up, leaving the water somewhat clear. Our water was so not clear. We weren’t not measuring the dye by weight (because my scale is el cheapo and not very accurate), but by volume - the Knitty article I found says to use 2tsp per 100ml water (for a 1% dye solution). I’m thinking that this is way wrong, at least for our Jacquard dyes.

In any case, I’m totally pleased with the results from this round. I have two big almost-100-gram skeins of the laceweight, which will become a Baltic Sea Stole and will be beautiful. Yay! More glamour shots below!