I joined the Twisted Knitters knitalong, which involves dyeing roving, spinning it, then knitting up into something. I have a bunch of natural roving from the spinning lesson oh-so-long ago, and was itching to dye it up. So I invited some peeps from the Houston Stich and Bitch over and we dyed and bitched.

Staci decided on dip-dyeing her sock yarn. This makes your arm very tired. Katherine dyed some peacock-teal yarn, and overdyed some fugly lavendar and black-gray yarn red, which made it berry-and-black colored. All were looking good.

Amy dyed her yarn screaming red, then over-dip-dyed it with Violet. Turned out awesome! Her arm was also very tired.

Sharron and Jennifer went the traditional handpainting route. Both wound up with some lovely jewel tones, although Sharron’s yarn felted (she had the sole non-superwash yarn, oops). I dyed my roving, which is still drying. Still! We dyed the yarn yesterday! All will be revealed tomorrow, when we have some natural light.

ETA: Ok, we have some natural light!

The colors came out a touch on the blue side, but you get the general idea. The purple can best be described as Intense. Hoo, boy, that’s purple. I really like the pink in there, I wish the rest of the roving was a bit lighter to match. In my defense, things didn’t look that crazy bright when I was dyeing it up on Sunday. It’s a bit reminiscent of the Punched in the Eye yarn. Ah well.

Yay, Socktoberfest! I don’t (yet) have any size 0 needles for my Yarn Pirate yarn, so I’ve started knitting the hand-dyed Punched in the Eye yarn. It looks much less bruise-like once knitted up - my camera really wants to accentuate the crazy reds and blues in the skein, but it looks much more monochromatic in real life. And as always, yarn enjoys a tasty Flat Tire.

My plans for Socktoberfest are two, possibly three pairs of socks. I was planning on all sorts of sock knitting this evening, but was pulled away by beer instead. All in the name of Socktoberfest! The purple socks (Rib and Cable from Interweave Fall 2005) are for Rob’s mom for xmas. His dad will also be getting a pair of Manly Man socks (possibly Trekking. we’re still exploring our options for Manly socks). The Yarn Pirate is all mine, baby! I’m kind-of waiting to see if Lolly will get a full pair of kneesocks out of her skein - if so, then kneesocks it is! They’ll likely come in useful for the season that Houston calls Winter (also known as Fall in other, more northern, states).

This weekend I made a deal with Amy: I would knit 4-6 inches on Sarcelle in exchange for a completed Swallowtail Shawl. I totally finished my end of the deal - Sarcelle was 9 inches into the knit-straight rows on Friday night, and thanks to a movie night and some chill-out time on Saturday, is 13 inches long now. I seriously put some good knitting energy into the thing, so I’m pretty pleased with my progress. Amy has not finished the shawl, so BOOO! Hopefully we’ll see a finished Swallowtail at the Thursday Stich+Bitch!

Another dyeing session - this time venturing into handpainting. There’s an extremely useful tutorial at All Buttoned Up - go check it out. I had a few skeins of the Knitpicks dye-your-own yarn that we used - I must say, the superwash sock yarn was pretty damn soft. Softer than the 100% wool laceweight. Amy snapped up the laceweight and dyed it the same peacock color as last time, and was happy (no photos, though).

I’m calling this colorway Punched in the Eye. As soon as I mentioned that on Thursday, everyone started reminiscing about bruises. Great. I used a mix of red and dark blue dyes, and it turned out much darker than I intended. Water down the dyes a bit next time, Kelly. I also dyed another skien using the leftover dye from Amy’s peacock color, which is absolutely impossible photograph accurately.

Mo also joined us, and it her yarn turned out AWESOME. The colors looked crazy bright when she first dyed it, but the reds spread out and darkened/toned everything down. And look at how happy she looks at the results!

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!

Part one of a series where Kelly makes fugly yarn bearable.

I had picked up a couple of skeins of yarn at Staci’s yarn swap, knowing that they Needed Work. First up was a skein of beautifully handpainted laceweight wool. However, the yarn was a light shade of bright-as-hell pink. Not good. The other stuff was some poo-brown marl. I did not choose the yarn, the yarn chose me. Unfortunately I forgot to snap any before photos of the yarns in question, but there’s a crappy shot here on flickr.

Evasive action needed to be taken, stat. I enlisted Amy for help in this mission, and a quick trip to Texas Art Supply armed us with all the Jaquard Acid Dyes that two girls could want. We also purchased a myriad of supplies, including $3-for-two pots (score!) to cook our yarn. Lastly, we armed ourselves with some natural-colored Cascade 220 to fuel our tests.

In case you’re not hip to the dying thing, you basically fill a pot with water, dump in some dye, throw in the yarn, simmer for awhile, add vinegar to set the dye, and voila! Beauty! At least that’s the plan. My main mission was to make the pink yarn not so pink, while hopefully preserving the variegation.

Step 1: Blue + pink makes purple, right?

Wrong. 2/3 Violet, 1/3 what-we-thought-was-Sky Blue. Eww. Amy: “That is straight up fucking cobolt. There’s nothing sky blue about that.” Always classy, that Amy.

The yarn is a bit darker than in this photo. The poor pink yarn looks as cobolt-ey as the Cascade 220. The poo-brown marl is tinted blue, but has stayed stubbornly poo-brown. Ugh, I think that it’s acrylic.

It seems that we accidentally mislabeled our blues, so we had in fact used Royal Blue, aka ugly blue.

Step 2: Let’s not make it so ugly this time.

100% really-Sky blue. Not bad, but eh. The pink looks a blah shade of blue. Poo-brown marl looks angry and still pretty poo-brown. Definitely acrylic.

Amy overdyed her straight-up-fucking-cobolt blue yarn with Emerald Green and got a beeeeautiful peacock color. We ooh and ahh over this.

Step 3: Make It Work.

We needed something to temper down all that blue. The colors we were getting are waaay too bright. Unfortunately, we had only mixed up the cool colors (my rationale: I don’t want 10937 jars of leftover dye rooting around in my fridge) and didn’t purchase any neutrals. 90% Sky Blue, 10% Emerald Green. Results: better, but not great.

Amy dyed some more peacock and was happy.

I really do have an understanding of color theory. Had I been thinking even a little bit about this beforehand, I would have concentrated on getting true, primary colors rather than Royal Blue and Sky Blue. Bleah. Also, we desperately needed some black dye.

Stay tuned for part 2, where we venture into the land of warm colors.