There is a Fiber Fair in Ann Arbor every fall and I have been attending for years. I usually go just to browse and shop but this year I signed up for a class. I've really been wanting to hand-paint some warps for scarves, so I signed up for a class on hand-painting yarn and roving.
It really wasn't all I had hoped it would be. The instructor was an absent-minded woman who rambled without actually imparting much information. Her assistant was her grown daughter who insisted on interrupting and correcting her mother as often as possible. The class was unstructured, there were no handouts, and I didn't learn anything I hadn't already learned with my long-ago experiments with Kool-aid dyeing.
On the bright side, they did provide me with two skeins of sock yarn to play with and they had lots of dyes and all the supplies we needed. The sock yarn was a mystery wool and not white or cream but a soft brown. It was interesting to see how the brown yarn made the colors richer. We squirted dye onto our skeins with plastic syringes and then cooked them in the microwave.
My first skein I used lilac and evergreen and I was careful to cover every bit of the yarn with dye.
In the skein.
Wound into a ball. Not sure how it will look knitted up, but the green/purple combo is soothing to me.
My second skein I used raspberry and pumpkin dyes. The pumpkin was a hard clump in the jar and I had a hard time chipping any out. Even when I had a whole teaspoon, the dye looked way too light to show up on my brown yarn. I poured a little of my mixed raspberry dye into it to make it darker and then I stuck a portion of the skein right into the jar to soak while I painted the rest with the raspberry. I didn't like the yarn while it was wet, but it thankfully brightened up when it dried. There isn't anything there I would call pumpkin, but I stumbled into a gold-brown that isn't too bad.
In the skein. At the top you can see a section which is nearly the original yarn color - that's where I squirted on the pumpkin. The other more golden sections were soaked in the jar.
Wound into a ball.
I'd really like to cast on some socks to see how this will look knitted up, but Christmas knitting cannot be denied. I have resolutely set these aside for now and did charcoal stockinette during Sunday Night Football instead.
That's sleeve #1 to the armhole finished and sleeve #2 has passed the 5" mark. I'm going to use the sleeves as my swatch for gauge, so the body will be next. Then I'll join sleeves and body for a raglan yoke and leave the charcoal behind for some COLOR!
P.S. Are you wondering where the pictures are of my purchases from the fair? They don't exist because I didn't buy a thing! IKR??!! Just didn't see anything I couldn't live without.
Comments