Yarn Dyeing: Downton Abbey Exploration

As you know, I’ve been part of a Downton Abbey swap via the Subway Knits podcast since the end of January. As such, I knew that I wanted to dye some yarn for my swap partner that was inspired by her favourite character. I happened to have a random undyed skein in one of the yarn weights she likes that I bought at a sale back when I was still just thinking about perhaps getting started in yarn dyeing, so I didn’t even have to acquire anything . . . except dyes.

I’d fairly exhausted my options when it came to the Jacquard acid dyes and while I know now that I can mix many colours to get what I want, I didn’t know that when I started thinking about colourways. Each of the Crawley women has always had their particular colour (or colours in the case of a few) to me and I knew I wanted to represent them as such. So I spent some time on the Dharma Trading Company site, at the recommendation of someone . . . though I couldn’t say who at this point . . . and found that they had the perfect colours for what I wanted to do: A peach, sage green, rose pink, and a lavender purple. I ordered them immediately and began the wait. After shipping issues (caused by my inability to type numbers in the correct order) and a phone call to Dharma by Jonas (in exchange for ice cream, as per our standard agreement) the order was re-placed and sent with newer, more expedited shipping. I received it last Friday and after acquiring new tester yarn last Saturday, I was on my way.

I first used the test yarn to just find out what the colours were when I mixed them straight, then I began building my colourways. I had a vision for all of them and with minimal mixing/effort on my part, I had produced colourways for Lady Edith, Lady Sybil, Countess Cora, Lady Violet, and Lady Rose by the end of Sunday. I had a brilliant time and everything was filled with fun and magic and I wished ever so much that I could just make this my life full time.

It took me a bit longer to get the yarns finally listed on Etsy (they still need better photos and not all of them have example swatches), because I do actually have a real job and a real life that needed handling, but those five (plus another that I’ll write about later) are now available for sale in my new Etsy shop that will be dedicated to my hand-dyed yarns from here on out.

Here’s a few teaser photos to entice you to purchase!

Yarn Dyeing: Buy All the Undyed Yarns!!!

After my morning in the textile centre dye lab on Friday, I convinced the lovely Jonas to take me back there on Saturday morning. Not for dyeing this time . . . but for a related cause.

I’d gotten an email, I remembered after getting a verbal reminder, that the textile centre was doing a fundraiser on Saturday morning/afternoon. Apparently they’d gotten an incredibly large donation of yarn and fibre from an estate and they were selling it en mass to raise some money for the centre. I had thought about going, but then immediately forgotten that it was happening until the instructor in my dyeing class mentioned it. She went to scout what was available and let us know that there was quite a lot of undyed/white/light coloured yarn on offer. This, of course, piqued my interest, and I asked Jonas if he would mind driving me back over there the next morning so I could see if I could replenish my stock of tester yarns. I’d previously (when I first started dyeing) bought a bunch of yarn on super sale from my LYS that I used as colour testers and practice skeins, but I’d run out and now if I wanted to test a colourway I needed to dye a full skein or else sacrifice a skein that I could be selling as a tester, and neither of those things tends to gain me any money back for a skein. I get that this is part of business, but if I can get non-marketable skeins and use them to experiment then more’s the better, right?

Jonas agreed, because he’s amazingly supportive of my somewhat ridiculous hobby that I pretend is a business, and drove me to the textile centre at 10:30am on a Saturday morning. We got our number and waited for the sale to start, then immediately rushed to the table labeled “wool” in the yarn section. There was far less there than in the “cotton” or “other” sections and far less yarn than fleece and of course far less undyed yarn than already dyed yarn, but! What I found were two LARGE bags of undyed or very light coloured wool for $3US per bag, a box of various skeins of silk for $5US per skein, and a FULL BAG OF 100% SILK SKEINS for $50. There are probably 10 skeins of pure silk in there. Since I’m working on a bunch of Downton Abbey yarns and I figure the Downton ladies would love to be represented in silk, I decided to buy the bag and another tester skein that I can split into 5 parts and try to create the Downton colourways in a bit of luxurious 100% silk. 

The process was quick, painless, fun, and $65US later I came home with this:

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Yarn Dyeing: Adventures in the Dye Lab (Part 1)

Hi all. First, sorry for my somewhat prolonged absence. It’s not that nothing is happening, in fact it’s quite the opposite and ALL THE THINGS are happening and I can’t stop and catch my breath long enough to tell you about them. I’m queuing up a bunch of posts now, so hopefully there will be some content to keep you updated while I try to keep up with life.

First, I want to start with my adventures of a week ago now (wow, it doesn’t seem like that long). I’m fortunate that in my city there’s a fantastic textile centre (which also houses the weavers’ guild and I believe at least part of the knitters’ guild) and that said textile centre has a dye lab. That’s right . . . an entire room dedicated to dyeing fibres. And if you’re a member and have taken the requisite courses from them (yep . . . they teach dyeing and other fibre arts, too!) you can pay a small fee and rent it for the day. Which means that I don’t have to dye yarn in my kitchen all the time and can instead have a dedicated space that I can check out that never, ever, ever, ever will have someone’s food prepared in it!

Last Friday, I took the second of the two requisite courses that will allow me to check out the lab, Colour Wheel in Wool. Now, the class presumes that you have no familiarity at all with acid dyeing or dyeing in general, and of course I do have some, but everything I know I read in a book or online, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to have someone who’s actually researching for a book on dyes teach me a few things. And I was right. The crux of the course was that we had 12 pieces of undyed wool (fabric, not yarn, but the idea is the same) and 3 colours of acid dye (magenta, yellow, and blue). We started out by learning to mix larger quantities of the dyestock and then how to mix various levels of these pre-mixed colours to make 12 different colours.

It was hugely insightful for me, because everything I’d read says that the acid dyes don’t often mix well, so I thought I was more or less stuck with using the pre-mixed colours to do my work. But according to my instructor, even the pre-mixed colours from the various companies will mix with one another if you use this process and are careful to stir/shake the final blend together well enough to distribute the colours. Probably if I just dropped two different dry powders together in the water it wouldn’t mix, but she says that this process will work just fine. So now I have some things to think about while I experiment. And experimenting I am, as you’ll see in the next few posts.

It was a great morning in the dye lab and I came out of it with a ton of new ideas and insights into my craft. I was renewed and inspired and invigourated, and it’s hard to beat a morning like that.

Here’s a (not all that awesome) photo of my creations. I’ll try to take a better one for you this weekend so you can get a better idea of what I made. The teal is the most perfect colour for me ever and it was only because I had more profitable endeavours that I didn’t just immediately go home and drop some of my personal stash of undyed yarn into a pot of that teal and start making myself something amazing. Rest assured, though . . . it will happen someday. Hopefully soon.

WIP and Project Reconsideration: Prairie Butterfly Socks

About half an hour ago I was going to sit down to write a short post to give you a quick check in on the sock I cast on (and then promptly knit the whole foot of over the course of the weekend) on Saturday. But now things are different.

As I was just rounding 3" of the cuff after finishing a toe after figuring out a heel turn I'd never done before (having to knit back about 3 times in order to get it right) I decided that I wasn't enamoured with this sock. It's not the pattern, per se. It's more that my stitch count is such that the pattern repeats aren't working out the 100% best and I don't think the pattern is coming through the way I want it to. It's working, but it's not working like the socks in the pattern photo and that's making me love them less. Ordinarily I might not care, but this yarn is special to me and I want to be sure I absolutely adore the socks,

Resolutions Check-In: January

It’s a few days past the end of the month, but weekends tend to get away from me moreso than weekdays, so my first “2015 Resolutions” check-in post is a few days late.

I hope to do one of these at the end of each month this year to see if I can measure the progress I’m making toward my goals and resolutions that I posted at the start of the year. Hopefully it will help keep me accountable, if nothing else.

So. Let’s take a look.

FO(s): High Tea Cuffs and Jabot

Hi all,

I have one totally finished object today (blocked and the ends woven in) and one that is completed, but hasn't been blocked or had the ends woven in, so I figured I'd talk about them together. They are a set, after all.

If you've been following along, you know I've been working on the High Tea Cuffs and Jabot by Andrea Jurgrau from the Unofficial Downton Abbey Knits 2013 for my swap partner for the Subway Knits Downton Abbey swap. Well...they are done. 

The jabot was easy and basically took the lace motif from the knits, applied a second panel of the lace motif that you attached over the top, then knit the scarf in the twisted ribbing for a desired length, then repeated the lace motif. It's a nice construction and very straightforward. Again, I was using the Knit Picks Imagination Hand-Painted Sock Yarn in the Ruby Slippers colourway, and I am no less enamoured with it than I was at the start. It's beautiful yarn and has a really nice hand and just the littlest bit of the alpaca halo. The hand-painting is gorgeous and I think it made a really beautiful end product.

The cuffs were also easy, but because the Imagination yarn (never stops being funny) is fingering weight instead of lace weight, it did require me to do a bit of math and chart fudging. I knit both the mitts and the scarf on a size 3 needle instead of the size 1 called for by the pattern, which meant I got the row gauge right, but not the stitch gauge. I thought I'd calculated my gauge right, but apparently I hadn't because the first time I made the mitts they were far too small to fit any adult-sized hand, so I re-knit them. Thankfully they're a very quick knit and once you're out of the lace section it's just 20 or so rows of the twisted stitch ribbing with a few decrease rows and check points and they go pretty fast. So I re-knit them with 3 pattern repeats instead of the 2 I started with and the 4 called for by the pattern, and they are slightly large on my very tiny hands pre-blocking, so I think they will fit just fine. Here's hoping. The scarf is probably skinnier than it's supposed to be because of the gauge things, but it's working out okay for me so I'm going to leave it. It's a scarf, it doesn't exactly have to "fit" a particular size as long as it's long enough.

So, this part of the swap package is done. Still much to do, but it feels good to have the knitting over with. The added bonus of this project is that I can count it toward the Stitch Red KAL that Geknitics and Knotty Knerd at Knerd Girl Knits are running! Hooray for one project serving two purposes! I love it when things come together like that.