Ever since May 2018 when I saw the image below on the new Facebook page of a knitting shop that was to open in Vlissingen, I’ve been obsessed with recreating this. While I would have loved to support the shop, the colourway that they had of this was very blue and not very night-y, so I decided to wait until the next dye-run was completed. However, before I could get my greedy mitts on it, the shop sadly closed in 2019.
Months of feverish Etsy-searching on, and nothing would come remotely close to what I dreamed would be my starry sweater. Several times over the years, I went into the Etsy and google searches looking for my perfect starry night yarn. Then I decided to just take the plunge and order yarn and stuff for dyeing. I filled my online basket, got scared and deleted it all again. Cue several repeats of that too. Then came lockdown, and two months in (May 2020) I decided to give myself permission to actually spend the money and buy the things.
Type of Yarn 
The Dyeing Cupboard
So off I went to worldofwool.co.uk and got myself 5 skeins of Cheviot Superwash Aran, Eurolana dyes, some other random single skeins and a drop spindle kit (potentially more on that.. in the distant future). Once the lockdown was eased a little, I went on several haunts to the local second hand shop and got some pans, stirring things, and eventually a steamer – very good bargain there. I’d read that you really shouldn’t use the pans for dyeing for food so separate everything was needed. Hence also the creation of the Dyeing Cupboard. And then all the equipment sat on the Dyeing Shelf, sat some more, and sat some more. Until the very final day of my Winter holiday, i.e. last Sunday, when I decided I was going to Do. The. Thing. Today.
Samples 
Daylight – Colours seem more muted here
I used these instructions and set out to dye some test bits of yarn. That seemed to go well enough, so after some more general being scared, I actually dyed my first skein. I figured that the final result would only be visible after drying and I wasn’t going to wait for that, so I did all five that afternoon. I used yellow, navy and blue to create a sort of variegated night sky with somewhat random bits of yellow.
All my nicely dyed skeins 
With their handy tie-rip handles
Since I quite enjoyed the process of puttering about with dye and yarn, I bought myself some more skeins this last week and hope to get some more funky yarn dyed in the future. As for knitting this up into that perfect sweater, that’s going to have to wait until I’ve finished my current ‘fallen leaves’ sweater. I’ve just divided the body stitches from the sleeve stitches after the yoke, so there’s been some progress?
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