When You Start Knitting a Gift the Day After the Baby Arrives

I finished the dyeing I wrote about at the end of my last post. I was going for a tonal (that's fancy dye talk for uneven) blue/green result.

I ended up with a tonal green. I started with a full immersion of the hank in green to get a base. As soon as that dye was absorbed, I pulled hank out of the water and let it cool enough to be handled.

Then I twisted it into a skein and dropped it into the water with some packets of blue KoolAid. I left that on the heat for a while and then to cool overnight.

The next morning I looked at what I had and it was not enough color, so I untwisted it and then twisted it again so different parts of the hank were exposed. I also twisted it more loosely so more yarn would be exposed to the dye.

After that cooled, I decided there still was not enough color even though I really liked the highs and lows of the blue. I decided to untwist it and dye the loose hank in another round. But I didn't have enough blue so I added more green to the final dye.

It turned the whole hank green. The blue KoolAid only has Blue 1. The green KoolAid has Blue 1 and Yellow 5. It's amazing to me how much influence the yellow has even though it "should" be a relatively weaker color.

But green is nice so ok.

While working with the yarn, however, I noticed that it was very easy to pull it apart. It hardly took any strength at all. That got me worried that this wasn't the best yarn for socks. (Of course, I've already made two pairs out of the sleeves and sent them to WoolAid. All I can do now is hope that they last.) And, of course, I can not repeat what might be the same mistake.

Also, my coworker's wife had her baby on Thursday and I was thinking maybe I should get working on a gift for them. I already had found this book

for them (we work at a haunted house, remember) but kept thinking I should add a hand knit as well. But they were having a boy and sorry boys, you're just not as much fun to knit for.

On Friday evening, however, while reading the forums on Ravelry, I saw someone's version of this sweater:

and I decided it was cute enough to make it worth the effort. It's Baby Sophisticate by Linden Down. I'm using the free version, but she also has a full version (more sizes, better tested) available for sale.

This morning, I picked up the green yarn and started to knit. After a couple inches, I decided the fabric was too stiff and my gauge was too small. Rip, rip, it went. Then I started again on a larger needle. After four rows, I decided it still was too small and went up another size (without ripping).

I'm still not quite at gauge, but the fabric feels good, so I'm going for it.

Besides the cute result, I also decided to start this sweater because so many Ravelers who made it said they got it done in a weekend!! Challenge accepted!

Here's what I have so far:

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have some more knitting to do...

Not Quite Christmas Colours

I recently finished the pair of socks I've been working on for Wool-Aid. You know, the grey pair. And I decided No More Grey.

How about some orange and green?

I took the other sleeve from the same grey sweater and attempted to dye it in a self-striping pattern. I split the ball into two halves (by weight) and wrapped each on my niddy noddy, which yields about 2 yard/meter loops. I put half the loop in one dish and the other half in another dish and added the dye:

There are two hanks of yarn, one on top and one below.
Half of each hank is in the orange and half is in the green.

I used five packs of Mango for the orange and four packs of Green Apple for the green.

After not very much time in a 200^ oven, the dye looked exhausted, but the wool wasn't coloured enough.

So I added three packs of Orange to the Mango and four packs of Ice Blue Lemonade to the Green Apple and put it back in the oven.

I let it cool down at least over night and here's how it looked out of the water:

After it was dry, I had this:

Apparently I still didn't use enough dye because there are still areas where the blue/grey is showing:

But I can live with it.

Here it is wound up:

I was trying for an orange with the green and didn't quite get there. It took me a while to come up with a positive word for the colour, and I ended up with "rust".

I made sure to get some socks started before taking a road trip.

This pair of socks will not be grey!

Merry Christmas, all!

Dyeing for Wool-Aid Socks

I finished my second pair of socks for Wool-Aid.

These are the ones where I added sock wool in the foot and heel. Things went smoother up the legs when I dropped the sock yarn. Less yarn to deal with (I had four strands going since I was knitting two at a time), and a nicer, more comfortable gauge.

These came out 8.5", a little too small for me, a little smaller than the last pair. I used the yarn from the sleeves of this sweater:

It was 88 grams that I knit doubled. I knit to the very end of the yarn. I have a larger ball from the yarn of the front and back. It's 115 grams and I plan to make a larger pair of socks. But I couldn't stand the thought of working with more grey. So I popped it in the dye pot.

I threw in 10 packets of mixed berry Koolaid and heated it to 180. Left it at that temp for 10 minutes, then let it cool down in the water. Blue dye doesn't take up quickly and I've learned it's best to let the yarn cool in the water. The next morning it was still warm--I couldn't believe it. So I let it sit until that night and then the water was clear, meaning all the dye had been taken up.

I hung it to dry and then wound it into a cake and then tried to take pictures.

I was not able to capture the colour. It's more blue than these pictures show with a strong teal component. It also has a lot of depth and complexity that I also can't capture.

I was surprised how much green there was in it considering I used only blue-coloured Koolaid.

Even if I couldn't capture it in pictures, the colour delights me and it will be much more enjoyable to knit the next pair of socks! Casting on soon...

If at First You Don't Succeed, Dye, Dye Again

I interrupt this parade of finished objects to share some yarn I dyed and am really chuffed about. For those of you that don't read my posts, but only skim, I will make it easy for you. I went from this:

to this:

Ok, for those of you who are still reading, here is the long and winding road...I started with an alpaca/wool blend that I bought at a church Christmas bazaar last year. It's from a local alpaca farm and I thought it would be nice. (The yarn was only about $1 cheaper than buying socks made from the same stuff (but thinner), but I like to knit so there you go.)

It's not dyed at all and I like the idea of working with a yarn that is the natural colour of the wool. You may recall I knit a sweater for Troy from the Rowan Purelife British Sheep Breeds in one of their undyed colours. But I may be doing some traveling in the next couple months and I started to think of what projects I could bring along. (Always my first question.) Socks are always a good travel project, but I just couldn't stand the idea of knitting with this "boring" colour. Showing the project to people who ask what I'm making and having them say, "huh" or some other less than enthusiastic remark. I mean, if you're going to be knitting, it's nice if it's something you can talk about. So I decided to dye it.

I wanted multicolours, and ideally something that gradually gradated from one colour to another. So I tried something I had read about. I re-balled the yarn by hand:

The idea would be to drop it in some dye which would dye the outside of the ball and make its way into the ball, but not all the way to the centre. Then roll the yarn up in the opposite direction and drop it into a different colour of dye. Hopefully you would get one colour on one end gradually changing to another colour at the other end.

Also note...when I made the ball of wool, I grabbed both ends of the cake and wrapped it doubled. This means I will have two identical strands of wool and my socks will match.

Ok, first thing to do to the wool to dye it is to soak it so the fibres will be ready to receive dye. I dropped the ball into a pot of water,

and it floated. It would not stay down, but I figured once it was wet and all the air was out of the middle, it would stay under water. So I sat another pot on top of it:

That worked ok, but it was still about an hour before the ball was saturated. [That could have been my first clue of what was to come.] Then I added the dye and heated it up. I let the dye exhaust and then was curious to see what I had. But I had to wait for it to cool down. And wait. And wait. When I couldn't wait any more, I dropped the ball into the sink and started to undo the ball and make a new ball. I didn't get very far when I started to see this:

The dye didn't penetrate past the first few layers. The top layers acted like a resist and prevented the dye from getting in. Boo! I ended up wrapping the yarn on my niddy noddy to make a skein again and hung it to dry.

It was not pretty.

Well, the red/orange colour was pretty, but the skein was not.

That was about two weeks ago. Although I was a little sad the method didn't work, I was not overly upset. It would be easy to overdye the splotchy red parts and dye the rest to salvage the yarn. After a little further reading, I have learned that even when the method works, you don't get the result I was hoping for. You tend to get a solid on one end, then a splotchy mix of the two colours, and then the second colour at the other end. The two colours don't actually blend very much. And of course, it's hard to get the dye in there.

So yesterday I moved on to method two. I gave up on the idea of a gentle gradation and decided I would be happy with several colours. I split the skein into several sections (making sure they were actual serial sections, not just random clumps) and got them soaking in some canning jars.

I made sure the red stayed together even though that was a larger section than the others.

I then started mixing some KoolAid:

Blue, Orange, Red and...well the last one was a mistake. In addition to the blue and orange, I was intending to make a jar of red mixed with orange and a jar of red mixed with blue. But when I poured some of the red into the fourth jar with the other powder in it, it turned a horrible brown. What I figured out after the fact is that I must have poured both the orange and the blue powder into that fourth jar and then added the red. I should have added just one of the colours.

Fortunately I had lots of KoolAid, so I just mixed up a fourth jar and got the colours I wanted. But then my brain started working on a new idea...

||Flashback||
I recently joined the "What a Kool Way to Dye" group on Ravelry and feel like I have entered a whole new world. These people talk about KoolAid colours like...well, I don't know what like. But they are obsessive about them. What flavours make exactly what shade of red or green or blue. How to get the perfect purple. They trade them and hoard them and celebrate the limited edition flavours. (Did you know there was an "Invisible" flavour of KoolAid? What the hell colour would that be???) And getting back to relevant issues, the board exploded recently because some of them had found "GhoulAid" (a limited edition Scary Blackberry flavour) at Big Lots. It's not a very attractive colour--usually coming out grey or bluish or purplish--but it is coveted for its ability to "tone down" the KoolAid colours so that they're not so vibrant and/or clownish and to add dimension to the colours. Looking at my ugly brown, I realized that I had made my own version of GhoulAid. ||end Flashback||

...and I added from four to ten tablespoons of that ugly brown to the other colours to change their tone:

It worked perfectly!

The next issue was heating the jars. My mind had been working on complicated ways to do this on our oil stove or in the oven or even in the microwave, but when I decided to dye the different sections in canning jars, I realized I already had the perfect way to heat them--my pressure canner:

(I know this seems really, really obvious. But you saw the jars first. I had been thinking of a lot of other ways I could have applied the dye to the yarn.) Anyway, once the wool had soaked for a good 20 minutes and I had the dye colours I wanted, I dumped the water out of the canning jars with wool in them, put them in the pressure canner, poured in the dye and filled the pot up with water.

Then I let it heat up. The red colours take up very quickly. The blue takes a lot longer.

I think you can see in the picture above that the liquid in the blue jar is still very blue while the other jars have pretty clear liquid. When it looked like the yarn was pretty much saturated with the blue dye, I turned off the heat even though the water wasn't clear. I've since read that blue can take a long time, so it's better to just leave it overnight. While the yarn is cooling, it will usually take up more of the dye. But I was (a little) impatient and when the yarn was cool enough to handle, I dumped it into the sink:

Once the water was squeezed out of them, I hung them to dry:

Aren't those some pretty colours!!

Once dry, I put it on my swift,

and wound this puppy up:

Et voila! A lovely ball of yarn just waiting for my big trip.

It's still wound with a double strand and I plan to knit socks two-at-a-time straight from this cake.

Now when people ask about my knitting, I feel like I will have something to talk about. "Aren't those colours pretty?" Yes, yes they are.

Details for those who dye: 1. The red was a 1/2 pack of Black Cherry with a pack of Orange with just a couple tablespoons of the brown mix. (This was added to the section previously dyed red.) 2. The orange was two packs of Orange plus 10 tablespoon of brown. 3. The purple was a pack of Grape and a pack of Black Cherry plus a couple tablespoons of brown. 4. The blue was a pack of Ice Blue Raspberry Lemonade with a pack of Mixed Berry and about half a dozen tablespoons of brown. I believe the brown was a 1/2 pack of Black Cherry, a pack of IBRL and a pack of Orange. The ball is 100 grams, so that's about one pack per 12.5 grams.

_______________________
PS: Want something to drink with that?
When I mixed up the KoolAid colours I forgot to take into account how much volume the wool itself takes up in the canning jar. So when I poured in the dye, I had left over KoolAid mix. At first I was figuring I would dump it all out and was thinking "Oh well, it's not that expensive" when it occurred to me if I could do the math, I could just add the right amount of water and sugar and drink it! So that's what I did and now we have a rainbow of canning jars with KoolAid to drink in the fridge!! (I did dump the brown KoolAid. No thanks.)

Re-Dyeing: Two Fixes

Determined not to let my less than ideal dyeing results sit around for a long time waiting to be rescued, I set about re-dyeing them about as soon as I could.

I don't think I showed a picture of the purple after the first dip. Here are the three skeins:

 They're a little uneven and as this closeup reveals, the blue showed through a lot.

Besides being uneven, I think there just wasn't enough dye to "cover" all the yarn. A quick trip to the local grocery store on "Black Friday" restocked my KoolAid supplies, and I dyed the skeins again.

I undid all the ties on all the skeins and re-tied them in different places and much looser. Then soaked all five skeins in the same pot while preparing two dye pots. This time I heated the water and then poured in the Koolaid mix. (Three packs of Black Cherry for the red and nine packs of Grape for the purple.)

I then added the yarn to the pot. I didn't want to pour the dye over the yarn and have it stick more in some spots than others. I also kept the temperature low before I added the yarn and heated everything together. It seemed work.

When I hung the skeins, they were a true mess since I couldn't tie them tightly and stirred a little more aggressively this time to make sure the dye got everywhere. See the one on the left:

What is the cure, you ask? You get to hold the skein by one end and whip it around and twack it against the side of the tub. It was very therapeutic. Not that I really needed it in the middle of a four-day weekend. But it was fun anyway. Two or three times (changing where you hold it) and it is smooth and well-behaved. (See example on right above.)

I was relieved to see no more blue spots in my red yarn, and when it was dry, I twisted it up all pretty like:

I can't promise that picture shows the exact red colour, but it's much nicer than the blue. Now I'm debating what to make from it. I think something for around my neck. Loose and flimsy delicate or thick and chunky? I'm not sure. I'll have to explore what I can do with this yardage.

And the purple? It is much, much better:

No more blue showing through and a deep even colour. I have one skein of white in the same yarn and am looking forward to pairing the two colours in some unknown future project. Maybe a really big, chunky cowl because this stuff is bulky yarn.

One story...two happy endings! :)

Fix it Friday: Foray into Dyeing

So you know I buy sweaters in order to harvest the yarn they're made of. And often they're not exactly the colour you want. Or the colour was fine, but it was popular a decade ago and just isn't anymore. I've been intrigued by dyeing with Koolaid for quite a while and hear all about it from the Unravelers group on Ravelry. The main advantages (for me) are that it's readily available and doesn't need to be specially ordered, and it's food-safe so I don't need to have a separate set of pots and utensils for dyeing.

I told my sister that I was finally and definitely going to try a batch Thursday or Friday of this long weekend. I said it out loud, but I didn't really believe it. I have some sort of mental block to dyeing. It seems like lot to set up and do. But I woke up Thursday morning and apparently was determined enough to get it started. It's fun to surprise yourself, isn't it?

My first project was going to be this pale blue cashmere:

The colour isn't really ugly, but the yarn's been around long enough I realized I wasn't going to make anything from it. It's very pale and lifeless. I bought the sweater it came from at a yard sale for $2 so there was very little on the line if this didn't work. (Plus I only dyed the sleeves so I still have yarn from the front and back to try something else.) The yarn itself is very nice so if I could improve the colour, it would be very worth it.

I brushed up on my Koolaid colour theory from this site. (It's well-worth a quick look at that link...135 colours from combos of Koolaid flavours!) This page from the same site had basic instructions for the dyeing process itself. They use a microwave to heat the yarn, but I knew from other reading that you can do it on a stove top. I was doing enough yarn that I didn't want to try to fit it into the microwave.

Step 1: soak the yarn in water for about an hour:

Ok, step 1 isn't so hard.

Once the time was close to finished, I heated some water on the stove (in another pot) and mixed my Koolaid. They recommended 1-2 packets per ounce of yarn. I had 2.6 ounces and used three packets of Black Cherry (the only red flavour I had in the house). I mixed it in 8 ounces of water:

I thought there might be enough light by
the window to let you see the colour,
but there wasn't.

Ok, I can mix Koolaid.

Then I dumped out the water the yarn was soaking in and squeezed most of the water out so I didn't drip all over and added it to the water being heated on the stove.

Um, I can do that.

And then I poured in the Koolaid mix:

And then poked at it with a wooden spoon to mix up the colour and get it all over the yarn. (You shouldn't really stir or agitate as you may well felt the yarn):

That's not hard; I can do that too.

Then I let it stay hot on the stove (but well below boiling). You're supposed to let it go until the water is clear, indicating that all of the dye has been absorbed:

[I think I let it go a lot longer than necessary because the water still looked red. When I finally dumped it out, I realized it was just the colour being reflected. Oh well, no harm done.]

Then you let it cool down. Easy-peasy.

I was so encouraged excited by my apparent success, that I grabbed another yarn I couldn't stand the colour of

and started the process again. Pre-soaking:

I had a lot more of this yarn (3.5 oz x 3) so I needed more Koolaid. I decided to hit this one with purple instead of red. I had only five packs of Grape, though. But then I figured I could use Mixed Berry (blue) and Black Cherry (red) to make my own purple. I had two packs of each, and that would give me a total of nine packets, which would be a good start for that much yarn.

I mixed the Mixed Berry:

and added Black Cherry to make the purple. Here the mixed purple is on the left and the Grape mix is on the right:

I can't see a difference; can you see a difference? I know, I know, this picture isn't very conclusive as you can't really see a thing in the dark jar, but I found it encouraging nonetheless.

Yarn in heated water:

 Pour in Grape:

 and then the mixed purple and then spread it around:

Can you see a problem compared to the other yarn after it was mixed. Yeah, there's a lot of blue not being covered by purple. You can see it even better here:

You can also see that the water is blue. I think the red dye is absorbed more quickly, and I think it all started a little too hot so when I poured the dye on, it took really quickly where it landed and there wasn't enough to dye the rest of the yarn. As I understand it, this is considered normal for "kettle-dyed" yarn, which is essentially what this is. That's why Malabrigo yarns, though beautiful, vary widely from skein to skein, even in the same dye lot. Or it could just be that this is alpaca and the first batch I did was cashmere. I'm not sure.

In any case, I decided to finish the process and evaluate things then. I didn't get a picture, but the yarn is more even than I expected, but still shows a lot of blue through the purple. Troy likes it, but it's not what I want. I'll be buying more Koolaid and overdying it to even out the tone and maybe darken it.

By the time the second batch was done "cooking," the first batch was cool enough that I could finish it up. I dumped it out:

 and squeezed out all the water, and then hung it over the bathtub to dry. That's when I found a problem:

In the places where the skein was tied too tightly, the dye did not make it to the yarn and I was left with blue spots. I made sure to tie the skeins very loosely and I think this was from the original ties that I left on the yarn. That was a mistake.

As a side note, here are the ties that I used:

Some are acrylic and some are cotton. You can see that Koolaid has no effect on them. As far as I know, it works on animal hair/wool and silk only.

I was surprised that the cashmere was dry by evening and I could twist up the skeins and compare it to the original colour:

Big improvement, don't you think? I wasn't aiming for any particular colour and I figured any kind of red would be good. I'm very happy with it. Except these blue spots:

I guess I'll be buying more red Koolaid with my grape and then I can do a second Fix it to this particular Fix it Friday. But now I know, it's not hard and I can do it. (And tie it loosely!)