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. :-(

What's Cooking?

The other day, I decided to get some dye'ing done on the stove top. I had two things that I wanted to dye -- my Hemlock Blanket (which is an oatmeal color) and a lovely white silk velvet scarf that I picked up from Dharma Trading Company,

So, I grabbed my dye'ing pots and my Jacquard acid dyes, and started dye'ing! For the hemlock blanket, I used a combination of green, black, and blue to give me a darker green.

For the silk scarf, I used a combination of red & black to give me a (hopefully) dark blood red color.

When you dye fabric, it usually seem pretty dark while in the dye pot, but will dry a lighter color than what is seen in the pot. So, sometimes, it might take a few dye'ing sessions to get the color you want, or you have to go "darker" in the dye pot in order to get the shade you truly want. If you have extra of a given fabric, you can do a  "dye swatch" some of the fabric and try out different measurements of dye. I've done this with silk ribbon that I've wanted to match specific outfits. It takes a bit of time, but really worth it, if you need to match color.

This time, however, I winged it, because I didn't care about the color matching and only wanted an approximate color. (Plus, if I didn't like the color, I could always overdye it darker).

The one thing about dye'ing that I like is that it is "fairly" maintenance free one you have everything set up. I mixed the dyes in the pot, added the fabric, and let it 'simmer' for a while; checking on it occassionally while I got other housework done.

I took some photos of the in-progress dye'ing projects. I love how these cam out.

Here's the hemlock blanket on my blocking boards, before pinning. I'm really liking the color, which looks somewhat "teal" in the dyebath, but is a lovely green. I forgot to take a photo of the scarf, which I'll post about later.

Dye Job

I had some left over Blue Moon Luscious Silk Singles from my Mondo Cable Pullover. It's a lovely shade of red (brick or tomato).

As much as I loved the yarn, I was "done" with the color of the yarn. I could have traded the yarn, but decided to just simply overdye the yarn to a color more to my liking.

So, I got out my Jacquard dyes (Fire Red + Jet Black) and my dye pot, and set to work.

And the resulting yarn was a lovely shade of burgandy.

The Dye Pot

This past weekend, I got out the dye pot and worked on about 8 oz white merino I had laying about. The first batch was a green/blue/brown combination. It didn't quite work out how I wanted, but it still looks quite nice.

4 oz of merino

I dyed the other half a motley of purple & blues. Although I think I might have felted parts of it slightly. *sigh*. I think I might ply the two together, and call it "Lilac Bush".

Bits & Pieces

On the train, I finished the back piece of my very first cardigan. Then proceeded to cast on one of the front pieces. As it's an asymmetrical front, I have to do it piecemeal versus steeking it.

I'm sorely missing having a pair of socks on the needles, and will probably cast on a pair tonite at one point.

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This past weekend, I dye'd up some superwash roving that I had. And discovered that the crock pot is *just* a wee bit small for 2 oz of largish dth wroving. The coloration wasn't as consistent as I wanted (being white splotches in places), but still the final product looked kinda neat, and should spin up nicely.

What's nice about crock pot/kettle dye'ing is that once the dye is mixed in and the roving added, you pretty much leave it alone until the dye is completely absorbed, which can take several hours.

It's like a stew you have to only check on every now and then to make sure it's going well.

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The mohair I started spinning last week was starting to become a severe PITA, and I haven't even gone through the first 2 oz! It's starts out nice to spin, and then it turns on me, and I start not to like it as much.

I had to put the project down and started spinning the sky blue roving I dye'd last week JUST to give myself a break from the mohair. I finished the sky blue roving this past weekend, and am going to trudge back into the mohair.

I think that while I kinda like mohair, it'd be better for me to have it in a blended roving with a lot of wool.

Once I'm done with spinning the next 2 oz of mohair, I will probably ply it with either alpaca or merino. I keep waffling between the two.

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For fun, I took apart the sweater I picked up at the thrift shop last week. It took a while to pick out all the seams, but it wasn't too bad. Then I discovered that it was knit double-stranded.

The yarn is a beautiful soft chocolate tweed. The back piece, I simply kept as two strands and will knit something out of it like that, but I'm trying to separate the two yarns on the arm pieces (each strand is probably a fingering - sport weight) and being a swift PITA.

I finally put it down after a bit of frustration.

The sweater was *huge* and I will hopefully get a thousand yards of the yarn out of it. Unfortunately, I accidentally cut outside of the seam, so there's one skein that has a whole bunch of little knots that I'll spit splice later.

Fiber!

I dragged my DH over to Purlescence yarns today in order to pick up some more generic Louet wool so I can show W how to use the drop spindle. They only had a superwash wool, so I picked that up (1/2lb).

Why the 1/2 lb?
Because I also wanted to try my hand at making a 3-ply sock yarn and keep in the theme of the Spindler's group Sept. challenge -- the night sky. I don't know if I'll be able to spin up 1/2 lb of fiber in 1 month, but I'm going to try!

So, I got it home, and started the dye'ing process.
I broke up the whole thing into 2 oz lots, and then went ahead and dye'd them separately

Lot 1: Colors: dark red/burgandy, dark blue.
Lot 2: Dark blue / sky blue
Lot 3: Black & Blue
The last 2oz are being saved for helping W learn how to drop spindle.

I used the crock pot I had gotten at the thrift store several weeks ago, and I've discovered a small problem -- it's too small. It was fine with smaller amounts of fiber or just yarn, but this fiber is really "thick" so I had to really push it down into the crock pot.

All of the fiber didn't fit well in the pot, and after removing it from the crock pot, I noticed all the white splotches of undyed fiber. Being an "organic" type craft person, I decided to just let it ride, and hung up each lot to dry. We'll see how it spins up.

A bit of Sewing & Dye'ing

I had gotten some scrap leather from a very good friend--scrap for him, but *more* than enough to do things with for me. So, I took the strips of leather (gold & red) and started making a waist cincher for myself.

The cincher is an easy project; I've already got a complete and fitted pattern. Plus there was *just* enough leather for the cincher, as the leather came in strips and scraps.

I pieced together the strips of leather to be able to cut out some of the the pattern pieces and used some of the scraps for others. This is the *first* time I've actually worked with leather for anything. the scraps allowed me not to worry about "ruining" a whole hide of leather. I was "winging" the overall look of the cincher with the scraps, but it managed to pull itself together really well. I had enough left over red pieces to even make little decorative buckles.

I had fun putting that together. I went through two leather needles making the whole of the project. It's done, except I still have to do the bindings and the grommets. The leather binding is going to be a pain since I'm going to have to hand-sew the inside of the binding. UGH! THAT might take me a bit of time and effort.

While I was busily sewing the leather, I had a pot of blood red dye on the stove on low heat and dye'ing up some of the handspun I had finished at least 1-2 weeks before that were sitting resting. (I *really* need to get some used thrift-store crockpots for this!)

There was some generic long wool (unknown sheep), one skein of fawn BFL, and one skein of tawny Corriedale. I added the long wool and BFL first, then several hours later added the Corriedale. After about 5 hours, it absorbed all of the dye, and is now hanging drying in the spare bathroom.



The then-wet colors looked absolutely brilliant although I know that they'll dry a bit lighter, so I'm waiting to see how it looks when finishing the drying process.

In between all of it, I got a bit of spinning done. I started on some dark grey Icelandic wool, which, while feels a little scratchy as the roving, feels really nice spinning. Of course, it'll might knit up a bit itchy.