Odds and Ends

I skeined the last yarns from Monday's dyeing session. I tried the yarn cake method but my cakes were a little too loose and fell apart in the dye bath. I used a Slate Blue dye bath to dye two yarn cakes and two skeins. I'm pleased with the results obtained. Two of the skeins I overdyed, one with red and the other with yellow. The cake dyed with red has shades of red, purple and blue reminding me of berries. The skein dyed with yellow turned various shades of green from deep almost black green to a lighter almost green yellow like the colors found in a deciduous forest. One of the blue cakes wasn't overdyed and reminds me of acid wash jeans.


From left to right: Deciduous Forest, Berrylicious and Acid Wash

I dyed two more skeins of the Kona Superwash Merino a vibrant orange color named Cantaloupe. I'll use this for the Nebula socks. The color isn't shaded as it appears in the picture it is pretty much a solid orange.


The Sunshine socks are coming along well. It didn't take long to develop a rhythm with this pattern. The repeat is very easy to remember and execute. I think the ribbing is too narrow for mom's big calves. I've lengthened the leg by one repeat and will be keeping an eye on the amount of yarn I have left.


And as always at this time of year I leave you with a little beauty from the yard.

From the Dye Pot

Last year I purchased several colors of Pro Chemical One Shot Dyes. Well 26 colors to be exact. I experimented a little last year, but this week I decided to bring the dye pot out again. I had accumulated several skeins of undyed sock yarn for this purpose namely Trekking XXL and some Henry's Attic Kona Superwash from Miss Babs. I was planning on using the Henry's Attic for a guild project but given the tough economic times I wasn't in the mood to be asking for a reimbursement or figuring out a charge for the cost of materials so I dyed 4 of the ten skeins.

I focused on solid/semisolid colors. Each skein was dyed a single color with the exception of the one skein which was an electric Wild Iris. This skein was overdyed by sprinkling the Deep Purple powder directly on the skein.



From left to right the colors are Pine Green, Autumn, Desert Rose, Raspberry, Key Lime and Cornflower using Trekking XXL Undyed. The remaining colors are Teal, Turkey Red, Gold and Wild Iris overdyed with Deep Purple using Henry's Attic Kona Superwash Fingering. The Cornflower blue is deeper than the picture depicts. It's closer to a Royal Blue and Raspberry is a gorgeous deep berry color. Overall I am very pleased with the results and the little color nuances that some of the skeins contain can only be appreciated in person.

I have a tendency to purchase variegated sock yarns and dyed these to add a few solids to the collection. There are several Cookie A patterns that I plan to knit and due to the heavily textured patterns they look best in solids or semisolids.

I'll be exploring this craft more this summer along with picking back up some former hobbies that have languished for a while. It's time to branch out a little once again. I'll still be knitting but in the process I'll take a little time out for something else.