Dyed by Me!
For my birthday my lovely Mumsy sent me to a yarn dying class at the Sweet Georgia studio. I am a BIG fan of Felicia’s colourways so it was amazing to learn to dye from someone so creative. I leared to do some imersion dying (all one solid colour) and I chose an emerald green colour and some silk.
For my second feat of dying I tried kettle dying and I think this lovely tealy colour is my favourite. I dyed 2 skeins to make a pair of socks. They are going to be rockin’!
I also tried my hand at hand painting. I made a sort of citrusy, sunsetty colourway in a Malabrigo Silky Wool (I realize I made up both of those words). I also handpainted some angora in a beautiful bright pink with hints of a purlply-grey.
I think the key to dying (at least at first) is to have an idea of what colour or look you are going for but to always be ready for a surprise. I was so pleased with all of my work at the end of the day, I can’t wait to try some more. Thanks Felicia for a great day!
Failure
Sometimes, despite our best knitting efforts, things go horribly wrong. Although I have knit many socks now in many different ways and patterns (although none toe up yet, that’s next), sometimes a project can still turn out a failure. I don’t want to say that I am a failure but it does seem that I have failed to correctly assess the size a sock will need to be if it is knit stranded, instead of just regular.
Let me back this up. I recently bought a great little sock knitting book: Knitting Socks with Hand Dyed Yarn by Carol Sulcoski. I loved this pair of socks with solid heals, toes, and cuffs but with stranded knitting (k1 and k1) for the rest with one semi solid and one variegated yarn. They were lovely! I decided I would knit them in crazy colours, purple and yellow, with purple as the dominant colour.
I was off and running, turned the first heal and was on the home stretch of sock number one when I finally decided to try them on….. This is where the problem began. Although I am sure the sock would fit once it was on my foot, it could not fit over my heal. My sock would not even go on. Not even if I pleaded with it, stretched it mercilessly, or cried. Nothing would get that sock on my foot. I had failed to calculate how much bigger the sock would need to be since stranded knitting just isn’t as stretchy as regular knitting.
I suppose I will frog my unfortunate failure. I can’t decide if I should try something else with this yarn and try the lovely sock pattern again in a different yarn (and a bigger size of course) or if I should give it another go, as originally planned. I definitely want these awesome socks, I just don’t know if I can bear knitting the exact same thing again only bigger. It might be too demoralizing.
