Dyeing, Knitting, Felting, Visiting...

First, my sister came to visit. Too much fun. Her (early) Christmas present is dyed yarn. Much more fun if she dyes it herself, so she flew down and away we went.

photo taken by Knittx. And there are pleny more pics. Just click and go.

Acid green and purple, a colorway entitled "French Whore" that's the look Jeannie was going for. Here's the end result caked up. Pretty.

For her Sterling skein, Jeannie used other people's leftover dye to create this fabulous cake of yarn. It has just the subtle bit of bling. She calls it, "OPD" for other people's dye.

I dyed the Sterling a Christmas colorway. I wanted red with pink undertone and a pretty, complimentary green. The green was nice. But the red was too pink. People thought it was a watermelon colorway and they were right it was. I decided I need a redder red so I added lots of red dye. Then the red ran into the green and green and red make brown. I was very unhappy. Then Lorelei, sweet woman, told me the color wasn't set until it heated up. So we took a hose to the yarn and washed out the red and the green came back. Yea!

In the end, I'm pretty happy with the result. I cast on (10 stitches on each needle) a toe-up sock last night on size 1 needles. So far the look is great. I plan to do "I Love Gansey" from the six sox knitalong.

I do not love the purple. After the debacle of my Christmas yarn, at that point I didn't think I was going to like it, I threw caution to the wind and went purple. I was going for a semi-solid look. That's not what I got. However, I do think this is salvageable.

When the yarn dried, the difference between the lightest color and the darkest color was even greater than when it was wet. The current color range is a 1 to 10, with 1 being the lightest and 10 being the darkest, I'd prefer a range 7 to 10 or 8 to 10. So I'm going to overdye the entire skein with a lilac color. I may buy the actual jacquard dye or I may buy Wilton's cake coloring - the violet is pretty. Stay tuned for more about that one.

We received our Socks that Fit yarn on Saturday as well. It was a co-op buy thanks to Grace. I wanted something that reminded me of the Caribbean. In the picture above the yarn does have the feeling of water both in color and in the way it's laying. Maybe not exactly as I had envisioned it, but it is definitely growing on me. I may have to cast on pretty soon just to see how it looks when it's knit up.


I put the yarn into two balls so I could knit both socks at the same time. The color isn't very accurate here. It's better in the first picture.

I've made progress on Baby Girl's stocking, the Red Scarf project Corrugarter scarf, Connie's clogs (those have to be felted by this Friday) and my Christmas socks. And Jeannie helped me felt Marshall's clogs by turning on the washing machine - yea! Jeannie. And he is happy. They fit great and look great. I'm just charging up the batteries on the camera so I can take pictures.