Scarf – Page 2 – Hopefully Creative

Rainbow Tie Scarf

An afternoon of quick knitting a rolling corkscrew tie scarf.

I’ve by now amassed a decent amount of dyed yarn in my yarn table, so I figured I should use some to actually make things. So off to Ravelry I went. I recently discovered that Ravelry also has knitting machine patterns so I looked through that category for inspiration. I found this Ringel-Enden- / Korkenzieher-Stola by Gabi gruen. It’s a really easy rectangle knit (no thinking whatsoever) that automatically corkscrews at the ends because of the nature of stockinette knitting.

So I found the rainbow and white speckle yarn and cast on 81 stitches onto waste yarn. When I had knit around 8 rows of waste yarn, I continued with the rainbow yarn. I made sure to leave about 2 meters or so. Then the machine and I just whizzed back and forth until there was again 2 meters of yarn left. I transferred the stitches from the knitting machine onto knitting needles and cast off both ends so they are symmetrical.

The scarf started to do the natural corkscrews as predicted by the pattern, but less pronounced because it’s not as wide as the original. Since I only had one skein, I cast on fewer stitches and it turned out a little shorter. I didn’t think it can comfortably wrap around my neck twice, so I found a different solution. I used some of the leftover yarn from the stripy scarf to quickly knit a tie. A white snap was applied, and I had a cute little closure. I was pleasantly surprised by how this yarn knit up. I wasn’t sure if it would be a hideous mess of too much colour, but the little stripes are less busy then I expected.

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.

Impromptu Dyeing

First batch of ecoprinted scarves this year, fresh leaves – fresh results.

I had a week of holiday recently and one day decided to go out for a short walk. Maybe to drop of plastic trash, maybe to post a letter, I can’t really remember. While out, I noticed all the green around, leaves are really returning to the trees and plants. So while walking along, I picked some leaves here and there. I came home with a hand full of greenery and a desire to do some ecoprinting. So I got all of my stuff from the dyeing cupboard, mixed up some additional iron water and got to work. The layout is fairly random with one scarf being less densely printed than the other. All leaves were placed with the top side up, which obviously gives a different effect on the mirrored bottom-up side.

Ecoprinting is still super interesting to me. I should probably take more extensive notes on what I’m doing because I can’t really predict what the outcome will be, but that has its charms too. You can see that most of the well printing leaves on the right scarf are at the top and then one in the middle. The left one is more uniform in what printed dark and what printed light. I like these results. Unfortunately, the source of my previous batches of silk no longer lists it on its website, so I’m going to have a more expensive time getting hold of something to print new projects on. Que sera sera.

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.

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.

Dinosaur Shirt and Scarves

Who loves to wear dinosaurs, helicopters, surf boards, planes and sharks on their body? Me!

Summer Graduation 2020 feels like a lifetime ago in some ways and the blink of an eye in others. During the set-up for that ceremony, we were still able to go out and enjoy the market with its fish and its fabric stalls. While waiting for my colleagues to buy their fish, I perused the fabric stall and soon found the fabric that I just NEEDED to buy. People, it had dinosaurs and helicopters on it and was a jersey, the perfect new t-shirt!

Dinosaurs, helicopters, surf boards, planes and sharks, what’s not to love?!

While at that market, one of my colleagues remarked that she would be interested in a scarf with the dinosaurs, so at the end of 2020 I set out to making this dream (and/or throw away comment) come true. The scarves, I made two, are just simple infinity scarves, very quick and easy to sew and done within the day. So why did it take me so long to write up this post, you may ask? Well, her birthday was end of January so I waited to gift it until then and second, I’m lazy.

Next to the scarves, I also made a t-shirt. This one was made with my tried and true Free Fun Summer Tee pattern (exhibits A and B). I tried to match the stripes along the side seams and that seems to have turned out pretty well. The hems do curl up a little, but that’s probably got something to with some stitching errors I made. All in all, I’ve just got a tiny bit of this fabric left and finished three projects in a day. Success!

Yellow Dinosaur!

I recently knit a yellow dinosaur! When I was browsing around Ravelry, I discovered a pattern of a scarf in the shape of a dinosaur. The pattern is aptly named Apatosaurus and was made by Carissa Browning. The idea of another wearable dinosaur really appealed to me, so I grabbed the one skein of yellow hand-dyed yarn and got to work. The only thing I forgot to keep into account was how much yarn would be needed for my dinosaur project..

So about three quarters through that skein, I determined that I was at most going to finish half the dinosaur. This meant nights and nights of looking online trying to find yarn to sort of match my existing yarn. This was going to be really difficult because the original skein from Dragon Hoard Yarn (great name!) was labeled OOAK, one of a kind. If only I’d known what that meant before… In the end, I settled on some Sticky Toffee yarn by Diva DK Star, which also had yellow in it. They do not match, but they do look quite nice together. Both yarns are 100% merino superwash, super soft and knitted up beautifully.

There was only one change to the pattern and that was to leave out a few rows in the middle because I was afraid that even the additional yarn wouldn’t be enough. In the end I had a little yarn left over, so that wouldn’t have been necessary. However, the finished scarf is very long, so I’m not upset about it. I managed to keep track of some of the progress here.

When it’s worn, the colour difference are less noticeable, but I don’t really care about that anyway. The Sticky Toffee gives more colour variation, which shows up quite harshly in the pictures but I feel is less in real life.

I wore it yesterday with a scarf pin and it makes me real happy, so yay!

Coloured Lines & Yellow Plaid

So I have been sewing quite a lot and then not posting about the exploits. That’s going to change again. This time, I’m going to tell you about more blouses. During the Great Utrecht Fabric Haul of 2019 (first described here), I got two more fabrics that were destined to become popper-tops. As per the original, the pattern is Simplicity Naaimode 9, model 59 (aka Simplicity 2255), but with smaller armholes and thinner sleeves.

I started with a white fabric with little bits of coloured lines on them. I sewed it up pretty quickly and added white poppers. However, the first time I wore it, everything itched, so I’m afraid this one is ending up in the goodwill pile.

The second one was the same exact pattern now in a yellow plaid fabric. At the market I’d spotted a completely white line about 20-30 cm in from the cut edge, so I negotiated and got that 30 cm + 1 meter for the price of one meter. I cut the shirt from the non-fault bit of the fabric. It’s very stable so that was nice. I have been wearing this one a little. Yellow is one of my favourite colours, so that helps.

The yellow plaid was also used for two other things. A handkerchief and a baby slobber scarf. I can’t remember ever using a fabric handkerchief in my life, but since we were invited for a family reunion and asked to bring a handkerchief, I thought I’d quickly sew one up. This one is cut over the fault line because, who cares. The spit scarf was the same as the ones here. Even using the same backing, since I’d cut out 8 more at some point in the past.

All in all I still have some of the yellow left, so I’m not sure yet what it will be. I’ll think of something eventually!

Even More

I went skiing in February, fell after about an hour and hurt my shoulder. The vacation still was nice, skied for two and a half more days and enjoyed the sun and the snow. However, this meant that I needed to ban myself from knitting until my shoulder didn’t hurt any more. I had no intention of getting another over-worked arm and dealing with that for two years. So no yarn-stuff for me. I have been working on things though, almost finished a pant suit that I will wear for graduation in June. It only needs hemming and elastic shortening, so I hope to finish it way before June. I also started an enormous cover top, which even in size 32/34 did not fit me at all, so that’s going to my mother.

Green scarf

This post, however, is about even more infinity scarves. I got to work for an hour and a half and made two this morning. One was dotted green with white stripes on the other side, the other black with sunflowers and red plaid on the reverse. As usual, I failed the first time and sewed the first one up such that it didn’t turn out to be a scarf. Three seams, and I manage to mess up 33%…

Sunflower scarf

Still, one ripped seam and an hour later, I finished up my two scarves, just in time for summer. Although it’s still extremely cold in the mornings and decently warm in the afternoons. That’s why I continue to wear scarves every morning and at work. These should see some action in the future.

Tag: Scarf