The dude got his cast today. I’d show you a picture, but he’s already in bed. It’s light blue (the better to be signed) and it is cast below the elbow. This is very good news. It gives him way more mobility of course, and it will allow him to play his trumpet. Plus they said it wasn’t a bad break at all and that he only needs the cast for a month. So some good news out of the bad.

I re-skeined some yarn tonight. The man is a genius and he helped me rig up the swift sideways. Made for much easier re-skeining if I do say so myself.  I can’t tell you the names of the yarns though, because that will ruin the surprise! I’m very excited about this. These two skeins are my most recent experiments. Using my preferred dyeing process and my preferred base yarn. Squee!

…fire burn and cauldron bubble.

When I’m dyeing I alternately feel like a mad scientist or a witch leaning over her cauldron. But it’s always fun. Today I finally got up the guts to throw my last 2 skeins of “the base” into the dyepots. To test my method and see how it works. It worked pretty well.

I know it doesn’t look like much. But once these cool off I will rinse and give them a nice shampoo and they will be ready to dry and re-skein. They turned out really pretty. I had one issue where color didn’t saturate a certain point. But I fixed it up right quick, and I’m very pleased that the fix worked. I love learning new things. And the dyeing stuff is just fascinating. I love being able to predict results and knowing how to fix things if anything doesn’t go exactly as planned.

I had planned to move my dyeing operation (yes, you can laugh) out to the garage. The man has cleared the bar for me and there are plugs and running water and a sink.

But it’s too danged cold out there!

Mock me if you must. Yes, I know I live in Florida. Yes, I know half the country has been blanketed in snow and ice. But right now it’s under 30 degrees here. That ain’t right. I think we have had more freezes this year than in all the other winters that I’ve lived here combined. And I don’t have a proper winter coat. It’s not good.

So I’m hoping for warmer weather and keeping warm by the steam of the dyepot!

I’ve been turning my fingers blue and purple and green these past few days. Oh and yeah, some of the dye actually made it on the yarn. I’m doing a study at home dyeing education class. Well sort of – I mean I’m really teaching myself. Basically I know the recipe – fiber, dye, mordant/acid, and heat. I can make some things happen. But I’d like to do this small business wise so I need to know with at least a small level of certainty that A + B+ C + D = pretty yarn. At least most of the time. I’m considering moving the dyepots out to the garage, but for right now, my kitchen counter looks like this:

I thought about doing it with big pots on the stove, but I kind of love the safety of the crockpot. It takes no time to set things up, and I walk away for awhile and let things go. A few hours later I have something beautiful, or at the very least, something interesting. Plus I feel safer with crockpots with my kids in the kitchen than large vats of nearly boiling water and dye. This is what my back deck looks like:

From left to right: DK 100% superwash merino in a bright blue, sportweight 75% wool & 25% nylon in greens, bulky 100% wool in scarlet (aka the foaming yarn), sportweight 75% wool & 25% nylon in lighter blues, fingering 100% merino in pinks, and fingering 75% wool & 25% nylon in darkest purples.

All of them are good except for the last two. The pink and the purple refuse to rinse clear. I know I put too much dye in the purple pot. But since then they’ve cooked for quite some time in a solution that was 50% vinegar and it still won’t set. Someone suggested putting some roving in a pot with them to soak up the excess dye, but I don’t have any, and I don’t want to waste any of my practice yarn on stuff that I’m tired of screwing with. So the pink and the purple are trash. But they were done earlier in the week and I’ve gotten more precise with my dyestuffs, so I’m chalking it up to experience.

I have 400 more grams of undyed yarn and I’m probably going to work through two of them today to re-test the method that I liked the best – which is the one that produced the lighter blues. And then I have two skeins of the base that I think I will use for my first for sale yarns and we will test the results of all of my mad scientist experiments.

I think I might need a labcoat. Or a Dr. Horrible get-up.

I want to be seen green
Wouldn’t be caught dead, red
cause if you are seen green
It means you got mean bread

Whenever I do something crafty that is green, I run around the house singing that song. Yesterday it was dyeing. I’m teaching myself dyeing and figuring it out as I go along. What works, what makes effects that I like, the whole rigmarole. So the last two days I’ve been experimenting. Today’s experiments in blue and purple are still on the back porch. But here is yesterday’s green experiment results before re-skeining.

Crazy side note of the day: I get my most “true-to-life” colors when I take my pictures, sans flash, in the kitchen under the huge fluorescent light. How is that? I don’t get it. Anyhow, I dyed three 50g skeins there – but only 166 yards each. Two of them came out mostly the same (the front two), but the back one is lighter and is missing any hint of the blue-green you see on the other two. Not sure why that is. Today I tried semi-solid dyeing with one color by submerging dry yarn and wet yarn. Interestingly enough, the effects don’t look that different. I will check them out tomorrow when they are dry. I still have a small stash of natural colored yarn though, so the mad scientist experiments will continue.

Crazy question of the day: What makes a cherry tragic? I asked this on Ravelry once and this was the answer I got: “The mere fact of its existence, which is rife with disappointment and despair.” Ok, if I was drunk I could probably spend a good hour or so pondering that before I fell asleep. But sadly, I am not, so I will share with you a cherry that is not so tragic…

Yes, I know it says it is tragic, but it is not. It is beautiful. Now I’m not sure exactly what the Dizzy Blonde will have in her shop tomorrow when she updates, but her stuff flies off the proverbial shelves and you will be very sad if you miss it. So tomorrow at 11am PST, you should go check it out. Buy stuff. Beautiful yarns coupled with a snarky sense of humor. What more could you ask for?

It’s November. Holy hashbrowns, it’s November 6th already. We have a new president, and those Christmas store displays that I’ve been ignoring since September are starting to look like the portent of doom. Belts are tighter here at Chez PicnicKnits, but I think the culprit (private school) is well worth it. I don’t really do November decorations, but there seems to be a lot of leftover mini pumpkins floating around.

I think there are like 20 in that bowl. Oh well. I’ve been playing with dyeing and my brain is bursting with color and ideas on how to automate the whole re-skeining process. Lots of work going on. And since we are working, we have tools…

And from the other day, I came up with some nice yarn. First up, the over-dyed Louet kit. I’m calling it Black Cherry.

And then we have the pinky-orange, the pseudo-Jaguars, and Velma Dinkley. All waiting for re-skeining.

But they will have to wait. Because tonight I need to get in a few inches of sock to make sure I loves it, and then it’s pattern writing time.

See? That’s the awesome thing about dyeing and blogging. The word dye is just begging to be used in quotes and pithy sayings. In fact my head is full of them.

For my very first experiment with acid dyes, I think it went pretty well. I added too much dye to the pot, but that might have been because my crockpot was smaller than it should have been. Anyhow, for whatever reason the yarn turned out exactly like I pictured. The plan was this: one skein of natural malabrigo combined with chartreuse, gun metal, and royal blue acid dyes produces something that looks like Blackwatch for a hat for the man. Are you with me so far?

I added the soaked yarn, I added the green, I added the blue. And then I freaked out when I saw this:

So I never added the gunmetal. I was afraid that the yarn would turn so dark that it would not be visible with human eyes. Only dogs would be able to see it. So what did I do? Well, I put the crockpot on high, slapped on the lid, and walked away. Truth be told, I drove away. I went to the store and got some more dyeing supplies.

The absolutely fabulous end to this story is that I came home and pulled this out of the crockpot:

Which turned into this:

Which when dried and wound up, turned into these various incarnations:

So color me impressed. I actually made what I set out to make. Alert the media.