Dyeing – Page 4 – Hopefully Creative

Pizza Sweater?

The dyeing is just the first step, the next couple of thousands are knitting stitches and the end result is a pizza sweater.

After the New Year’s dyeing, I needed to use those freshly coloured skeins for a new project. I looked around Ravelry and discovered the Faverolle by Cirilia Rose that looked very interesting. This project by swhill80 was especially enamouring to me. So I set out to create something similar, if you want to read some of the ‘real time’ notes, the project is here. I showed the start of the project to a colleague of mine and she said it reminded her of pizza, so Pizza Sweater it is.

After casting on, I ran into difficulty with the thing being way and way too big. Took out some of the knitting but left the ribbing and started figuring out how to make this thing my size. This lead to the creation of a large spreadsheet that has just about every row in the project listed and the instructions recalculated. Following the spreadsheet worked well and knitting the body of the project was actually very quick. I got stuck a little with the sleeves due to lack of motivation and then got really bored knitting the collar insert. I did eventually get myself back in gear and once it got going, the collar was also easily completed.

The project has a saddle shoulder, which is not something I’ve ever done before but I quite like the way it turned out. What you might also notice is that there are two definite colour groups in the sweater. The sleeves and the collar inserts are more pink in hue while the body is definitely more yellow. This is to do with the different dye processes I used and I’ll definitely keep those results in mind when I dye again.

In the end, I do like this sweater and we will see how much use it gets. I’m not sure if the yarn might be a bit too scratchy or if it will be fine. The fact that the collar is relatively high is a plus because it should be nice and warm. I do think that I probably could have made it just a bit bigger than it turned out now, but my gauge apparently shifted throughout the project so it turned out a little tighter than expected. Luckily it is a knit and they are stretchy so it is probably not going to be a problem. I hope that finishing this project today will also spur me on to finish some of the projects that have languished in the box of shame… On to the future!

New Year’s Dyeing

Experimenting with yarn and different methods of heat setting, resulting in three different colourways!

After not sleeping enough with the fireworks still going for hours beyond midnight, completing the puzzle I started in 2021 and finishing up the last oliebol, I got to work on new years day. I’d been thinking about dyeing yarn all holiday week, and just.. didn’t get up to actually do it. I’d decided I wanted to try a few different things, oven dyeing, speckles and partial dip. I used three different yarns, all from World of Wool in the UK.

The one that I started with was some 56’s English Superwash Aran Weight, I have six skeins and decided to dye five of them. I kept one spare in case the sweater I want to make with this requires more than 5 skeins. I decided to try and oven dye some yellow and orange speckles citric acid speckles on it. The oven dyeing initially came from a blog post by Needles on the Move found here. The citric acid speckles from ChemKnits Tutorials on YouTube. I mixed soft yellow dye in a little pot with citric acid, and in another pot I mixed soft yellow dye and red dye with the citric acid. The yarn was put in a second hand roasting tin and the dye mixes sprinkled on top. Unfortunately, due to the water that needed to be added, this batch turned out a little bit runny, so the colours are not as defined as I would have liked them. Afterwards, I found a blogpost by The Impatient Dyer here, that talks about how to solve that problem.

I wasn’t going to wait for quite some time for the roasting pan to be free again to dye the other skeins, so I just used my dyeing pots for those. One has a steamer insert on which you can drape the yarn and then add the colour. The other has a steaming section for doing the same thing. These speckles turned out a bit clearer. You can maybe make out some small hue differences in the skeins that are hanging above. The two right most ones are more muted with speckles that were less clear.

The next type of yarn was sock weight, Merino Superwash / Bamboo Sock Weight. I decided to go for some blue and turquoise but with lots of white. The dye was mixed with citric acid, put onto the yarn and then the wool went into the steamer pans. I think it looks cute and I am looking forward to see what it looks like knit up into a project. In case that project will be socks, I ball them up into two ~50 gram balls that are still connected to each other, so that I know for sure how long my sock can be without running out of yarn.

This last yarn was an experiment. The base is Merino Superwash Sock Weight Singles. I wanted to dye a skein partly grey with some speckles of orange. So I dumped an amount of grey dye in the water and partly hung the skein in that dye water. The remainder of the skein was draped over a steamer inset and speckles were applied. Some grey with citric acid and to create the orange I mixed some red and yellow dyes in the citric acid.

When this skein was rolled into two ~50 gram balls, it changed the look a lot. The skein has a dark section whereas you can’t really see that in the balls. I’m really curious to see it knit up. To turn the yarn into balls, I use this weird contraption that I got from a secondhand store for 3.50 euro – maybe used for spinning? In combination with a small empty bottle to allow for a centre pull ball. While it takes forever to wind up over a kilometer of yarn, I was very happy once it was all completed. The yellow/orange yarn is already being knit up into a project that’s about 90% complete, so I hope to finish that soon. There are no intentions for the two sock weights as of yet.

Rainbow Spot Socks

Using your self-dyed yarn to make some socks is very satisfying.

So next to having a stash of yarn just pre-dyed, I now have also accumulated a stash of undyed yarn. There was a temporary stash of self-dyed yarn, but I’ve knit most of that up by now. It made the starry night sweater, the red-black neck warmer and this new addition: rainbow spot socks. I chose some yarn called Blue Faced Leicester Superwash / Nylon Sock weight for my new sock project. The yarn was dyed using this tutorial by Nicole Frost.

The plan was to create a yarn with different coloured spots on a black background. So 10 cable ties were wrapped on the dry yarn, which I then dumped into some black dye in my pot on the stove. I let it simmer for a little bit and then put the newly dyed yarn onto some plastic wrap. The cable ties were removed and different dyes were squirted onto the still white spots. Red, yellow, green, turquoise and blue and those repeated. It worked out really well. This sock yarn was then wound up into two little connected balls and left to languish in the hoard for a while.

Recently, I decided that I did want to knit it up and see if I can still knit some socks, this time preferably some that I could actually wear. At some point in the fairly distant past, I bought the Fish Lips Kiss Heel by Sox Therapist. It’s basically a recipe for making a heel in a sock and uses a cardboard cutout of your foot to get the proportions right. I paired it with Two at Once, Toe-Up Magic Loop Socks by Knit Picks Design Team for the details on how to make a toe and cuff. First time, I knit about halfway up to my foot, tried it on and it was just too big. So I frogged the whole thing and started again. Sweet spot for this yarn seems to be cast on 10 stitches per 3 mm needle (20 total), and increase to 22 per needle, around 50-55 rows before the heel. These ones are a tiny bit loose in length, but perhaps some laundry will be helpful for that. I have worn them for a day and they were comfortable so I’m pretty happy. They did only take about a quarter of the ball of yarn, so I should have enough to make another pair – that I’ve totally already cast on… Hopefully I get those sorted soon too!

Silk-dyeing Again

Getting some more scarves finished, I now have fifteen of the things.

I really, really enjoy eco printing silk scarves. Not sure why it’s so nice, I normally don’t gravitate towards projects with an element of surprise and these have been full of surprises. I never know how it’s going to turn out. So far I’ve dyed up around 8 meters of silk. I found a webshop that sold 3 meter lengths of ‘silk crepe for dyeing’ and I got 6 meters of it. I then cut that into 1.8 meter lengths and 35 cm widths to get 12 scarves out of 6 meters. Had some leftovers for some more experimentation and decided that I didn’t yet have enough of the silk dying experience, so I ordered 6 more meters and have since made four more scarves.

The first batch you’ve already seen, but I’ve now actually hemmed them with a ‘rolled hem’ on the serger. From that batch, I learned that the bramble and what I think is a maple worked really well. The second batch had less stellar results. Most came out so light that you could barely see them, this included some weeds from outside my house (my plant determination app thinks its Vinca major?), leaves from the tree outside my house – invisible and therefore destined to be overdyed, one unknown tree and something that I just completely forgot.

Roof Terrace Fruit
Strawberry, apple, pear, red currant & white currant

The third batch, however, had some really good ones. chestnut leaves from the tree at work, hazelnut leaves from my hometown, something from the road to work with thorns and a collage of fruit plants from my roof terrace. The only one that was slightly disappointing was the fruit collage as only the strawberry gave a very clear print and the rest was quite blobby.

Then there was some more experimenting but that didn’t turn out so well, so I only finished the one where I put flowers on (Common ragworth). This resulted in a bit of a polka dot effect, but much darker than I expected. Not sure it’s as lovely as I’d imagined, but at least I now know what it would do if you put this type of flower in an iron bath.

So at some point last week, I decided that it would be a lovely idea to actually know which plants all my scarves came from. So I set out to collect leaves from all the places that I’d harvested them from initially to determine the species and dry them. This also meant that I couldn’t help myself and I got more leaves. I opted for a few that worked the best (more chestnut!) and some that I found along the way.

*Aesculus hippocastanum* – Horse chestnut

I collected some chestnut leaves because they make the best print. Then while cycling around, I found some really cool looking leaves with five leaflets that turned out to be Virginia creeper close to the original Ginkgo. While passing another big tree next to my former home, the leaves from a Red maple were collected. The Black poplar was the last I took with me. This one has an alternating pattern of back/front of the leaves and you can sort of see that. This one is also a prime example of how folds leave blank spaces in the print.

Conclusion is that I’ve really enjoyed this dying process and with winter starting, I don’t have many more opportunities. The only problem with this hobby is that it produces way more items than I actually personally need. There’s only so much gifting I can do to get rid of them. Sometimes I wish that my hobbies didn’t amount to so much stuff… Ah well, at least these take up way less space than plushies.

Unseasonal Neck Warmer

Knitting a self-dyed gift that is slightly out of season.

Last January, my father was not super content with the weather. It was cold out and that made his neck and/or shoulders act up a little bit. So I decided to knit him a cowl. Contrary to my own popular belief, I didn’t actually start or finish this project in time for the winter weather. It also quickly turned distinctly un-wintery, so the project got put back on the ‘to start’-pile.

Cue the emergency-more-yarn-purchase in June, and I decided that I might as well buy some nice yarn to dye for this cowl thing I’d been planning. I got two skeins of Merino Superwash/Tussah Silk Chunky Weight yarn. Since my dad likes wearing red, I decided that I would dye them red with black. There was no real pattern, just alternating red and black sections. When steamed and dried, it turned out that here were still some white-ish parts too, but it still gives a lovely effect. I then set out to find a pattern. I chose Biker’s Cowl / Dickie by Elaine Phillips. There were only a few changes in that I used fewer rounds in the neck and in the body as I didn’t have enough yarn to do all the pattern suggested.

The knitting only took 6 days. It was pretty much smooth sailing even if I did have to frog the last few rounds in order to get the finishing started before the yarn ran out. I actually manged to finish it right in time for his birthday. However, because I didn’t actually go over to see him that day, it had to wait until last Wednesday to finally be presented to him. We’ll see if it is nice come winter, if we have a cold spell this year that is. I am happy with it though, and to me it felt real soft and smooth.

Night Holly

That elation that you feel when you complete a 3 1/4 year long project and end up with a lovely night sky sweater.

I cast on my starry night sweater on the 22nd of May (2021) and finished it today! So about three months of intermittent knitting and a rush dye job in the middle and the project that got conceived in 2018 (backstory here) is finally done! Must say that it feels very rewarding to complete something that has been on the ‘to make’ list for such a long time.

The pattern I chose was the Holly by Anna Bell, which is out of print but can still be found on the internet archive. I chose to deviate from the original a little, mainly in the length and amount of stitches. My gauge was wrong so I recalculated certain bits to fit better with the gauge I was achieving. I started with the front and back at the same time so I could be sure they were of equal lengths. When both the front and the back had a complete ball in them, I started on the sleeves. To my surprise those also took a complete ball each. Cue some ‘waiting for another skein to be delivered’ (so frustrating) as I wasn’t sure I could make both the top of the front and the back and the neckline with the one ball and change I had left.

Turns out that that was a good choice because by the end I had 97 gram leftover. I’d have lost yarn chicken if I tried it. Waiting for the yarn to arrive when the sweater had been completely done would have been worse than in the middle of the project as it was now. I added a button to the neckline because it matched the yellow in my yarn. I think I probably added a little too much yellow while dyeing the yarn to achieve the exact effect I was going for, but I still really like the result and so far it’s been nice to wear for this afternoon. I think it will be a success!

Adventures in Eco Printing

At the end of the instruction video for Adventures in Dyeing, the instructor showed some examples of eco printing. A method of using natural materials, like leaves, to make impressions and dye fabric. After getting a few more newsletters and watching another livestream with her showing some eco printing results, I decided to splurge and purchase the course. It came with a number of instruction videos, a booklet of leaves that do well and a starter kit with two silk scarves, two pieces of cotton fabric, 100 grams of iron sulfate and 100 grams of alum.

The process involves soaking your fabric in something (water, water with alum or water with iron sulfate), then placing leaves (in some cases you dip these in water with iron sulfate first) on your damp fabric, rolling the fabric tightly and then steaming the whole thing for a few hours. I’d recently purchased a sample of silk chiffon and I decided to use that for my first try. I went out into the wild, picked a number of leaves – my botanical knowledge is next to 0 so I have mostly no idea what anything is – and placed them on my fabric. Because of the nature of the fabric, which was very crinkly, I didn’t roll it very tightly and it shows in the result. Most of the prints are quite faint.

Scarves

After this first try, I decided to try to print some scarves that each only had one type of leaf. The first one used something that I assume is an oak(?). The most fascinating about this one is that you can see a clear difference between the back and the front of leaves. They leave very different impressions. I put the one column face up and the other column face down on purpose, and then folded the fabric over the top and rolled it up in a plastic sheet. It was steamed for about 2-3 hours. The pre-dip was just water.

The second scarf has some other leaf, which printed very nicely. You can see the darker edges around all the leaves, which I like a lot. These leaves were all put down with the same side up and there are some small differences between front and back but they are less pronounced. Im not sure why the one side has so many more dark spots, but I do like this effect.

For the third one, I used Ginkgo leaves. In the test version these came out very faint, so I decided to try something new and pre-soak the fabric in iron water too. This made the scarf much more yellow in base colour. I also dipped the leaves in iron water before placing them on the fabric. I seem to recall that Ginkgo was quite nice to use because the leaves are quite flat, which is helpful if you’re trying to roll the fabric onto a stick. However, the results are still a little faint. I do like this one though.

Ginkgo leaves leave spots on the one side and just edges on the other

The last scarf was dyed with wild brambles. These came out quite red in the test version, so I steamed it a little shorter to hopefully keep some of the details. For this version I chose to randomly put leaves face up or face down, and I think the effect was very nice. You can again see clear differences between the front and back of the leaves. I’m pleased with the results.

Fascinating differences between front and back

Here you can see four of the scarves together. They still need to be finished along the edges and I hope to teach myself how to roll hem at some point in the future to be able to have some true completed scarves. I don’t think I’m done with this process though. I still need to watch a few of the videos and try to use some of that alum that I currently possess and have done nothing with so far. I do find it fascinating that a similar process begets such different results.

Very different results while the two on the left and the one on the right have identical methods

On to the next adventure!

Adventures in Dyeing

More adventures with different colours and natural materials.

Last June, I gifted my mother two ‘dye your own silk scarf’-kits. The plan was to get together some day and dye our scarves as a nice bonding moment (or something). Having brought to kits to my house in December, we didn’t get round to it, but last weekend we finally managed to get our dye on. The kit had a silk scarf, two packets of acid-dye (red/yellow or blue/yellow), latex gloves, a roasting bag, a tie and 0 instructions. Turned out in December that those kits were supposed to go with a webinar that I had completely missed. So in January I signed up for the new webinar, wrote down all the instructions and then we could get to work.

We wet our scarves, folded them some way that would make the dye go approximately where we wanted it to go and then sprinkled on the powder. Some kneading, some more water, some hopeful guesses later and we put our tied off roasting bags in boiling water. Once they’d steamed for a while, we rinsed our projects and finally got to see our still wet scarves. I used red & yellow, and my mum had the yellow and blue. She wanted to have some green in it, but that didn’t really work out it seemed. Still it’s cool to see what folding and dye can create. I wanted mine to have the same colour at each end, while my mum wanted the one end to be blue and the other end to be yellow.

While waiting for the scarves to steam, I also decided to dye one of my skeins of yarn that I bought during the first haul. This time, I chose green, turquoise and blue dye. Just randomly sprinkled it on and I’d see what it turn out as. Compared to the thin silk scarves that were dry in less than 2 hours, this skein had to hang for like a day and a half before it was dry. It reminds me a lot of the sea and I really like it. It’ll probably be a scarf or hat of some sort in the distant future. I enjoyed it though, even the uncertainty of not knowing how it will turn out.

I’m Dyeing (Wool)!

The first step of the journey to make a night sky on my body with yarn.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Category: Dyeing