Dyeing – Page 2 – Hopefully Creative

Knitting Machine Scarf

Dyeing and knitting a stripy scarf.

Since the knitting machine entered my life, I’ve been looking for things to use it for. Recently I watched a tutorial about knitting a very pretty scarf on a knitting machine. It’s by Ingunn Hvatum and can be found here. The pattern itself is not very difficult, so it seemed like an interesting challenge. It did take a little bit of learning to achieve the eyelet edge smoothly, but that’s what practice is for!

You start with three stitches and every second row you create an eyelet and make the scarf that little bit wider. This is done until you are halfway through your yarn (in my case), or if you follow the instructions until you have engaged all needles. Once you are halfway, you knit 4 rows and then start decreasing one stitch while still creating an eyelet. Once you have three stitches left, you bind off.The last instruction is to crochet a chain and thread it through the eyelets.

For this scarf, I used one skein of self-dyed 100% merino wool (Quarter round by Chester Wool), which is around 400 meters. The skein was dyed a light grey while keeping a small section out of the dyebath. After the grey had set, the white area was overdyed with a mix of navy and green dye which resulted in a sort of petrol colour. Some orange transfer can also be found from the rainbow skein that was dyed at the same time. The aim for this one, though, was to do dark green, but I do like this end result. At some point, I accidentally cut through a thread so I ended up with two balls of yarn, one about 97 grams and one 10 grams. After knitting the scarf, any yarn that was left over was dyed with the petrol stock to make the crochet chain for the eyelets. All in all, a happy accident.

Once the scarf was knit, I had to block it because it was rolling over on both the eyelet and the neck edge sides. I thought it would be a right angled triangle, but while blocking that turned out to be wrong, so the point is a little more obtuse than I figured it would be. I still like it a lot. Once the crochet chain was attached, I still had a little bit of yarn left over, and I decided to add tassels to the points. Not sure how they will do if this thing ever sees the washing machine, but that’s a concern for some other time. For now, I’m just going to enjoy wearing this cute triangle scarf.

Cake Yarn Dyeing Experiment

Experimenting with colour gradients.

I’ve been interested in trying to see if I can dye a skein gradually transforming rainbow colours from the start to the end. What I mean is that I don’t want the rainbow to repeat, just that the one end is red and migrates through orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and ends up as violet. So I decided to try and see if it was possible to wind up a skein and then divide it into seven and dye each of those pieces. While playing around with the yarn winder, I discovered that this was not really possible because it needs to continue turning the other remaining parts otherwise I assume tangles. So I gave up on that plan for the day and just continued winding the ball. It turned out very loose, so that gave me a new plan.

I put the new loose cake in a bath to soak for a little bit and went upstairs to the dye cupboard for a pan, a metal basket and the first leftover dye stock I could find. This turned out to be something I’d scribbled ‘blue-grey’ on, so I guess this experiment was going to be blue-grey. Once the cake had soaked enough, I put it in the basket to leak a bit of the water. The dye stock was added to the pan with more water and some vinegar. The basket was lowered into the water and then simmered for 30-40 minutes. After that, it was left to cool. The yarn was Natural Boo DK, a merino and bamboo mix.

The reason it’s an experiment was because I wasn’t sure how the dye would be soaked up by this loose cake. Would it have lots of white spots? Be darker on the outside or underside? Would it turn out very light? Would it even work? Turns out that the bottom was indeed much darker than the top, which still had some white remaining. When it was dry and I balled it up again, inside out, it turned out much lighter than to start with. It reminds me of the colour of jeans, perhaps it’ll be a fun scarf!

Dyeing with and without a Plan

Adventures in dyeing, with and without a plan.

Last Friday, after some very busy weeks at work, I needed to take the day off. First some sleeping in, but then I decided to actually go do something. The plan was to dye a skein in the colours of my Momiji coat so I could knit some sort of neck covering. I grabbed some superwash merino aran wool and put some tie wrap resists on it. The plan was to dye the skein (dark) blue with white spots. Then I could syringe some brown/orange dye into the white spots. The skein went into the pot dry and immediately soaked up some of the navy/blue combination dye. This means that some areas are lighter blue than others. It’s also a little darker than the aim, but I hope it’ll still look good once knitted up.

While I was waiting for the dye to set, I decided to experiment some more. The second plan was born quickly: lets make some rainbow yarn! It’s a superwash merino sock yarn that was soaked beforehand. I put it all on some plastic and prepared my dye colours: red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, blue and purple. However, when I started syringing the ‘orange’ dye on my yarn, it turned out that it was red – always label things, don’t just guess (fail 1). I added some actual orange next to it. Then I wanted to put on some yellow, but I put it on the red side, not the orange side (fail 2). So I quickly put purple dye over it to keep some sort of rainbow. Less ideal. Next step, the blue that decided to squirt all over the still white part of the yarn (fail 3). I sighed, added the turquoise and green and then decided to just use the remaining white bit for colour speckles. So I put some of the leftover dye in the white area. This skein turned out partially rainbow partially speckle. We’ll see how insane it’ll knit up.

I still had two more skeins soaking without a plan – I guess I started the day a little ambitious. Luckily there was still something that I’d wanted to try for a while. A sock weight skein with colour gradation, by leaving it in longer in some areas than in others. So I put some grey dye in the pot, and added tie wraps through which I could jam wooden sticks to keep an amount of yarn out of the pot. I set a timer for three minutes and lowered a little more yarn into the pot every time it went off. I did forget to take off the tie wraps, so I accidentally added resists. However, I’m happy with how it turned out, so that’s not a waste.

The last skein was just.. put it in an oven dish, add water, squirt leftover red and orange dye on top and heat set it in the oven. No rhyme, no reason, just bright colours. Not sure what I’ll end up doing with that. I think it is aran yarn, so it should knit up pretty quickly once I get around to it. All in all, I really enjoyed my day of dyeing! However, dyeing eventually leads to having to wind up the yarn, and that’s never super fun. So today I set out to buy myself a helpful tool. This yarn winder thing is so helpful, much quicker and easier than when I play around with a plastic bottle. Of course, it still takes forever when there’s a knot, but I did manage to wind up one of the aran balls in about 10 minutes (win!).

Forgotten Socks

Recovering a lost sock project and finishing it in three days.

Sometimes I take a look at my works in progress in Ravelry and decide that I have too many on. I then go to search around for projects that I either feel like completing or that need to be frogged. In this case, I frogged three and found one project that was already 80% or more completed. I’d forgotten I started them a day after completing the previous sock project in October 2021. It also uses the same self-dyed yarn but uses a different pattern. This pattern is called Hexenzirkel by Sonja Köhler and has a very cute zig zag cable pattern. The Ravelry project can be found here. I chose to do the pattern on the side of the foot.

When I recovered the project, it was in a bag with a print out of the cable chart with tick marks. Past me was more organized than current me expected, that’s for sure! I decided to complete a few more rounds of the chart and then start the 2×2 ribbing. It didn’t require much time at all to complete and I’m unsure why it ended up in a bag in the bottom of the box of shame. Hopefully I’ll get around to wearing these every so often, however, I expect a fate similar to the other ones. Nice to look at, very few wears because I’m just not used to hand knit socks.

Karen Scarf & Dyeing Yarn

Dyeing some yarn and knitting a zebra scarf

A while ago, I’d invited my former colleague Karen out to do some yarn dyeing. We picked out some yarn (a DK zebra yarn and two merino sock weight yarns) and set those soaking. Then we needed to decide on some colours. We’d early on decided that it was mostly about playing, we wouldn’t be able to fully predict the outcome so it was mostly about seeing what would happen. The plan for Karen’s sock yarn was to make it half blue and half terracotta coloured, possibly with some speckles over the top. The terracotta was made by combining orange and brown dye and letting about half the yarn sit in that while the other half was coiled on some metal objects in the pan. It worked remarkably well and I was in love with the colour. We then put blue dye in the pot and put the other half in the dye. I look forward to seeing what it will end up being!

For the zebra, we used some blue dye stock and then added magenta and violet speckles over the top. The yarn already has partial strands of black in it, hence the name ‘zebra yarn’. We weren’t sure at all how this would turn out, but it was really quite nice. I decided to ball it up and start knitting a thin scarf. I first tried December is for Stephanie by Lorena Haldeman, but then switched to a modified January is for Karen by Lorena Haldeman. The name was pure coincidence but I did appreciate it a lot. In contrast to the original pattern, I only did one repeat of the center pattern and tried to make it more symmetrical. This meant I had a total of 23 stitches, including 2×3 edge stitches. My modifications are available here.

The last sock weight yarn ended up a mid muddy. I used a roasting bag and just added colours in. I think it included yellow, red, orange, but also some grey. The plan at the moment is to try and knit some up to see if it looks nice. If it doesn’t, I’ll overdye it with something else. No use in having yarn that won’t be used.

The day itself was lovely and I really enjoyed just trying some things to see what would turn out. It’s great to be able to play with some colours and having lovely chats with a friend.

Rainbow Socks

Double experiment with dye and with a knitting machine.

I recently acquired a Knittax S knitting machine and to thank the original owner, I am making him socks.

The yarn I’m using is Alpaca 4ply Sock: 60% Superwash Merino 20% Superfine Alpaca 20% Nylon sock yarn, purchased from Chester Wool. This yarn is so soft, I love it. It was hand dyed by using it as the ‘cleaning tool’ when making up some pots of citric acid with Eurolana dyes. The spoons that were used to put the dye in the pots, was wiped on the wet yarn. The distribution of colours is basically ‘which bit is still too white’. Colours are black, brown, grey, orange, yellow, soft yellow, red, magenta, violet, blue, navy, turquoise and green. They came out quite muted, but I do like them. When knitted up, they are more obvious than on the ball.

As for the socks, the instruction booklet for the knitting machine came with patterns in the back so I chose to make the basic socks for men. The pattern is in the images (in Dutch, translation for the image below). For the first try, I cast on exactly as intended, but chose setting 5 on the machine. These socks turned out quite large so I frogged them and started again on a setting 4 on the machine. The length that came out on setting 4 matched the book, so that seemed to have gone well. I’m not sure if I’m seaming them right, they feel quite bulky and I’m not sure that’s nice on the foot. I’ve also discovered that knitting takes about as much time as the seaming. The knitting is very quick, this machine goes a hell of a lot faster than I ever can by hand.

Image translations (left). *Hiel*: heel; *Ondervoet*: bottom of the foot; *Teen*: toe; *Bovenvoet*: top of the foot; *Beenlengte*: length on the leg; *Naad*: seam; *Verkorte toeren*: short rows; *Open steken*: provisional stitches.

After finishing one sock, I brought it to the original owner to try on. He claimed that they were indeed the right size and that the ridges of seaming wouldn’t be annoying. As he’s been wearing machine knit socks like this for a long time, I’m inclined to believe him. So then I set out the knit the second sock with the same settings. It took me a few goes and a lot longer than it should have but in the end, sock number 2 was finished. Before seaming it together it does look really strange and not what you expect. Once the seaming is finished however, it does look like socks. I’m amazed.

I really enjoyed the process, can’t wait to make more things on this machine!

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!

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!

Tag: Dyeing