Dye Oops!

Sorry I haven't posted in so long again! I really will start trying to post on a more regular basis. I thought today would be a good day to dye some roving that I've had sitting around for a while. It is 4 oz of a wool/bamboo/nylon mix. (I have discovered that it takes about 4 oz of fiber to spin up enough yarn for a pair of socks.) For a while I have been trying to decide what colors I wanted to use. This morning I decided to try something new and go with orange, brown and green. This part always scares me because there is no turning back with dying. You can unravel knitting but there is no turning the roving back to white. (Although sometimes you can over dye and get a decent result which I will show you in a later post.)

I decided to go with the slow cooker method so I put the roving in with some water and vinegar to soak for a while.

While that was soaking I mixed up some Wiltons icing coloring to use as my dye.

After waiting a little while I added them to the pot. Green first,

then orange,

and brown last.

Not my personal favorite colors but it was looking like it would be promising. Especially once it was spun and all the colors kind of blended together. So, I put the lid on and let it sit for a while.

When it was time to take the roving out I felt really silly. I had just thought that the dye would make it all the way through to all of the roving. It didn't. So, now I essentially have a white roving with scattered chunks of green, orange and brown.

At this point I feel like I have 2 options:

1: Just let it dry and spin it up. Maybe once it is spun and plied it will look ok?

2: Lay it out so that the colors match up again and hand paint it. This would make it more like what I was originally going for, but I don't know if it's worth it.

What would you do?

Merry Christmas Part 2

So, you already saw what the Moms got for Christmas. Well, the guys got some hand-knits too. My dad got a hat and socks made from hand-spun alpaca/silk. When I got the fiber it looked like this:

The white parts are the silk and the black is the alpaca. Once it was spun it looked like this:

I used a general top-down boot sock pattern for the socks.

 

It worked out well that my husband and dad have almost the same size feet, so my husband was constantly trying on the socks to make sure they were the right size. (Thanks!)

For the hat I used the same yarn, started out with a knit 2, purl 2 rib and then switched to stockinette stitch for the rest of the hat. Again, my husband got to keep trying on the hat.

Since alpaca is even warmer than wool, these are super warm.

For my father-in-law there was a pair of socks in Green Bay Packers colors. I am not so great at dying yarns that actually turn out the colors I want them to so for this yarn I turned to Etsy.com. I found a shop called GalianaCreations that had some Green Bay colored sock yarn. She didn't have as much as I needed, but was willing to dye some more for me. The colors turned out amazing, and the yarn was so soft!

I used a general sock pattern with a short row toe:

 

Since my husband is also a Green Bay Fan, he got a pair too. Basically the identical pattern with minor changes such as a wider foot.

It turned out that there was just enough yarn left over to make one more small pair of socks, so I got my own pair. These were a toe-up, short row heel sock.

Now, we will all have toasty feet for Packer Games. :)