Dye Job (and what a job)

Once again, in an effort to clean up a corner of my house, I end up in the middle of a bigger project.

The goal was to clear off a window sill of two sweaters that have been waiting to be pulled apart in order to harvest the yarn. After a day's work, I had some nice yarn:

 Wool/angora/nylon from a Carole Little sweater

 and a kitchen-sink blend from Ann Taylor Loft:

 The yarn felt great, but I really didn't think I would use it in this yellow colour.

So I thought I would dye it before I put it away. I set the yarn to soaking and started to concoct plans and sort my supplies. I'm mostly off of KoolAid dyeing these days because the Wilton's dyes offer a lot more control and options.

I mixed up jars of icing dye, water and vinegar in yellow, pink, blue and red.

Once the yarn had soaked, I laid it out in a baking dish:

For the first skien, I poured a little dye from the jars and "smooshed" it into the yarn to make sure there was enough coverage. This looked a little muddy from the colours mixing so for the next skein, I applied the dye mixture with a toothbrush. That took a little too long and there wasn't quite enough coverage, so on the third one I did a mixture of both. Then, on only the third skein, I added some drops of straight yellow and pink icing dye in an attempt for more vivid colours.

Once the yarn was covered with dye mixture, I laid it into a casserole dish with a lid. There was enough liquid from the dye that I didn't have to worry about the yarn drying out during the heat process.

I popped the dish in the microwave and did 2 minute heat and rest cycles. The first two skeins only took three cycles (6 minutes of heat) before the water was clear and the yarn appeared hot enough (~180^).

Here's the yarn fresh out of the microwave oven:

Once it had cooked enough, I set it aside in a pie plate to cool in its own time.

After I had cooked all three skeins,  it looked like I had a weird pasta dinner going on the counter.

Once they were cooled, I rinsed them and the first two skeins were hung to dry. The third one wouldn't stop bleeding yellow, so I ended up rinsing it a lot of times. I assumed it was bleeding excess dye because I added drops of straight colour. When the rinsing wasn't really working, I put it through two more heating cycles as well. Finally it stop bleeding colour.

The colour of the rinse water was yellow or orange, but the extra processing somehow washed out all of the blue dye and caused the colours to spread and mix. The yellow was overwhelmed by the red and pink. Here are the three skeins after they had dried:

Skein 1:

The colours are muddier because they mixed more in the baking pan.

Skein 2:

Applied with a toothbrush, instead of being poured, the colours are more distinct.

Skein 3:

The colours are saturated, but all of the blue is gone and the red and pink overpowered the yellow.

That was the end of phase one.

Phase two was to overdye the skeins with blue while leaving spots of the colours from the first dye. I decided to only overdye skein 1 and 3 because they had similar yardage and it would be enough for a pair of socks.

So I tied some tight cords around the skeins every 6-8 inches or so:

You can see here, that in places I split the skein and tied the two parts in different spots:

I was trying to tie up the particularly bright spots and I wanted to make sure that all the spots wouldn't be spaced the same. (I didn't want them to "line up" when I was knitting them.)

The overdye with blue was a lot of work. Blue is a tricky colour anyway--it doesn't seem to set during the heating process. You have to let the yarn cool in the dye water and the dye seems to set more during the cooling process than during the heating.

So the actual dyeing in a pot was easy enough, but the yarn would not stop bleeding blue. Once again, I'm not sure if it was excess dye in the pot (I used quite a bit because I wanted a dark blue) or if it just wasn't sticking to the yarn.

I did multiple rounds of soaking the yarn, rinsing the yarn and heating the yarn. Finally the rinse water started to clear up.

Skein 3, which came out with the stronger blues:

and Skein 1, which was more on the teal side:

Presumably the strong yellow tones in skein 1 shifted the blue more green

And now it was time for the unveiling...what would the yarn look like under the resist ties?

I unwrapped the white yarn and didn't see much of a difference:

Before I had a chance to get too worried, I opened up the tightly wrapped yarn and saw that there was still lots of colour inside:

Here's a picture of skein 1 (left) after it was re-hanked (to mix the colours up) and skein 3 (right), where you can see the colour blocks because it was not re-hanked:

And in case you can't get enough, here they are again:

And a close up of skein 1:

Isn't that so pretty!! The colours are pretty subtle, but I think they'll add just the right punch to a pair of dark blue socks.

Still want more? Ok, here it is caked up:

This is skein 1 and 3 caked together (double stranded). Even though the two skeins came out quite different colours, they will make a beautiful blend as I knit with a strand of each held together.

Here is skein 2 caked up:

Since it was an odd yardage compared to the other two, I left it after the first dye. I decided I would use it for contrasting toes and/or heels on the socks.

In fact, here is the toe of the sock I couldn't resist casting on:

I've chosen a subtle textured pattern for the body of the sock which will be done in blue. Not too detailed since you wouldn't be able to see it on the dark yarn, but something that will break up the plain field of knitting. The scattered purl stitches should highlight the pops of colour in the blue.

And that, people, is how you clean off a window sill.

What Happens When I Try to Declutter

Two years ago I started a sweater for Wool-Aid. Remember them? I haven't been knitting much for them. I think it was getting stuck on this project that kept me from doing anything else for them.

I'm using a pattern that's more like a recipe. You provide the measurements and it tells you how to get there with your gauge. I had a bunch of Lopi that my sister found at a second hand store and I figured out a way that I could use the different colours and have enough (I hope) for a sweater.

I liked the various colours (teal, plum, light purple) and I liked the tweed colour and thought it would be good for a stripe between the colours. But the "oatmeal" and "light brown" weren't going to contrast with the tweed enough.

So I tried to dye the light brown to a green with KoolAid. It was not pretty. It was mostly green, but the brown came through as an orange undertone and highlights. Really not pretty.

And the project sat for two years because continuing meant I had to figure out what to do about the dye and included the risk of ruining the yarn for this project.

In the meantime, I had purchased some Wilton icing dyes, something I had read a lot about from others who have dyed with KoolAid. Being an icing dye, it's still food safe and can be easily handled in my kitchen. But it also comes in many more colours and the liquid ones can be combined in many ways to make even more colours. It's also a little more complicated because you have to add acid separately to set it (unlike KoolAid which contains the acid).

So just recently, (probably when I was trying to clear up some clutter and found this project bag in a corner of my living room), I decided to give it another try. I took the horrible green and put it in the pot with a recipe for a deep brown. I took the "oatmeal" and put it in a pot with Wiltons Juniper Green.

Besides adding more green to the pot, I was very happy with the results. The colour was very even and deep. The tone is not perfect with the other colours but is within the acceptable range.

Here's the brown:

And the green:

And so I picked up my needles again and was able to continue the project.

It's a very thick wool being knit into a dense fabric, so not the best summer knitting, but I like to be warm so it's all ok. :)

I'm also happy to say that I kept good enough notes that I could decipher them and think I know the plan for this sweater.

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!