Lessons Learned - Part 2

After last week's heart-breaking debacle with my colorwork hat, I decided that it was going to be worth the time to re-skein all of the Miss Babs yarn (both the Dark Andromeda and Funny Papers colorways) and do a citric acid soak. (Read the first post.)

I compared the vibrancy of the non-treated yarn with my poor hat. You can see how muddied the colors are on the hat versus the skein. If I hadn't found this out so soon, I would have had a heart-break as big as a sweater. :-(

While the results of the hat were heart-breaking, at least it wasn't with a FULL SWEATER.

I had to take 3 cakes of yarn and turn it into skeins. I spent about 40 minutes re-skeining  and tying all of that yarn up for dye'ing. Yowza is 560 yards of yarn per skein.

 

Ball of yarn vs. skein

Then I followed the directions for the citric acid soak.

And microwaved it. The skeins were so big, that my cling-wrap couldn't contain all of it.

In addition, I put my in-progress sweater on waste yarn and repeated the process for it as well.

After all of the yarn dried, I had to re-cake all of that yarn, but of course, I still hadn't quite recovered from the heart-ache, and so I put the sweater aside for now, until I have the fortitude to come back to it.

Today, I sent Miss Babs an email about what happened. While I'm extremely disappointed, I still love her yarn and her colorways, but I'm afraid my trust is a bit broken. Any future Miss Babs yarn purchases will automatically get a citric acid soak before I start swatching for another project.

As an end consumer, I don't feel like I have to go through this step to enjoy a dyer's yarn. :-(