A couple of months ago, I was walking one of the ‘Kunstroutes’ or Art routes organized near me. Throughout the town, there were expositions of people displaying their art. From paintings and sculpture to clothing and quilts, so many interesting things to see. It was great! One of the things I went to were two people displaying their knitted items and there was a lady spinning yarn. We had a chat and she told me that there was a spinning group nearby. So I got added to the mailinglist.
It took a couple of months for me to find the courage to join, but I’ve been a few times now and it’s great. I’m learning to spin yarn! I started with some white stuff that I’ve made into very lumpy thread. After that I went on to spin some of the fleece I have from 2010. I had washed a portion of it at that time and attempted to card it. Then met with a colleague recently to use her carding machine to card all of the washed stuff. I seem to be unable to do it with the hand carders that I have, so this saved a lot of frustration.
I’ve now produced about 100 grams of brown yarn. I’m so proud! Next step: knitting it into something…
“What happens if you separate out random partial sections of yarn and dye those a different colour?” Was the question that spurred the 28 March round of dyeing yarn. I wanted to try and see if it would 1) be possible to even separate out different parts without making it impossible to ball up later and 2) whether that would then create a more random pattern. I started with two skeins of Krypton 4ply yarn and started pulling out random strands and strand sections. The majority of the skein was dyed with a low percentage of black. It’s more grey in appearance because of that. The strand sections that were left out were dyed a nice dark green.
The second skein was Alpaca 4ply sock and got the same separation treatment. I wanted to dye this a bright light blue/turquoise colour with the contrast being navy. However, part of the skein that wasn’t supposed to be navy fell into the pot so there are some more blue spots than intended. I also had another skein of Alpaca 4ply sock that was dyed in some leftover yellow dye. Later, some orange and brown speckles were put over the top.
The first and second experiment also had some leftover dye in the pot, so I wanted to test out the Tweed Effect DK yarn that’s been hanging out in the cupboard too. I took a full skein and started it on the yarn winder until about half was into a ball. Cut the skein and had two tweed experiments. The ball was unwound gain and dropped dry into some blue dye. It did actually take on the barber pole effect that was indicated on the website. The green experiment was not as successful. The yarn came out very uneven and without much barber-poling.
After these experiments, I’ve been able to answer question 1. Yes, it is possible to separate out without making it impossible. It did take a bit longer than normal because certain bits didn’t want to let go of each other. I’ve not gotten around to question 2 though. I’ll report back once these yarns have reached either the knitting machine or the needles!
Made some baby gifts from self-dyed yarn and other happy fabric.
Baby gift time again! First up, dyeing. On the last day of 2022, the second dye project was a single skein of Chester Wool DK 115 (Worsted) 50s. It is 100% merino and has 50 grams in a skein for around 100 meters of yarn. Since I still had soft yellow dye stock left from the other dyeing I did that day, I put 20 ml of the stock in my pot. Then I added several resists around the skein and dropped the thing into the pot. When it had simmered for long enough, I took it out and dyed the resists turquoise. I couldn’t resist adding some speckles and chose orange. All in all this meant that the skein turned out extremely bright and cheerful. If you ask me, perfect for a baby.
Since there was going to be a new baby, I set out to make some baby things and settled on these two patterns: Easy Peasy Baby Ball by A la Sascha and Tiny Tot by Kristen Rettig. One is a rectangle hat with tassels or pompoms and the other is a ball. I used up the entire skein in the making of these projects, so no leftovers!
I’ve also had a bit of flannel in the stash with a similar colour scheme. There’s also some additional red and green, but I wouldn’t let that stop me. The flannel was bought to make some poppies, so I set out to do exactly that. I tried to make these somewhat symmetrical with the plaid, so the scale was based on that. There’s some difference between these two poppies, one has a green stripe near the head, the other green. One has larger hands, the other smaller, but they are still very similar.
Both knitting patterns were quick, easy to knit and went smoothly. Of course the hat is way too big for the recipient, but I guess my track record stays intact on that score. The last item for the little baby was a spit scarf. Now with skateboarders, rope jumpers and a terry cloth back. It feels very soft even if the snap is on the wrong edge.
I hope the little one will have a marvelous and colourful life!
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.
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!
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.
Coat match yarnApproximate coat match
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.
Rainbow sprinkle yarnWool winder in action
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.
Grey-diationWool winder
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!).
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.
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.
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.
Red & Yellow
Blue & Yellow
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.
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.
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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