Needles & hooks

Adventures in Dyeing, The Collected Works

I put all of my Adventures in Dyeing posts together on one convenient page for easy reference. I’ve also linked it to my sidebar under “Topics in Techniques”. Now you don’t need to search through archives to find the posts.

My own dye plans are progressing. I got the dyes I ordered. I got the yarn I ordered, decided the gauge was too fine, and ordered something different. That will arrive on Friday.

I’ve been sketching out different striping patterns. Trying to settle on something. I need to play with the dyes a bit, just to see what I get out of them. That should help me plan. I think I’m going for a mix of wide and narrow stripes. The wide stripes will be the base color. The narrow stripes will be accent colors. When I’m mixing my dye solutions, I’ll dye up some larger chunks of sample yarns and then I’ll line up strands as rows to play with striping ideas.

Update: Because Mari and Chris asked….I ordered some Jacquard acid dyes. And yes, one of them is purple.

Comments: 5 — Posted under: Dyeing

Sock-o-rama

So, I told you in my last post that my Rockin’ Socks were too big. That was posted from my work trip to Los Angeles. I knit to the end of the gusset on the plane and took a moment to try them on before I flew back home. And abandoned the whole thing and packed them in my suitcase. I had no camera with me then, but now I can show them to you.

You can see it bunching up on my ankle. But even more telling is this:

I pinched a good 16 stitches out of it. My gauge is spot on, and it measures 8 inches around. And so does my foot. But socks need negative ease. So I need to make them smaller. They’re good around my ankles, so I’m leaving it the way it is there. But the heel flap could be shorter. So I plan to make that smaller and then reduce the gusset more than it is. I don’t know that I’ll go down the whole 16 stitches, as that would be 6 inches around. Maybe I’ll measure some other socks first.

But I’m not quite up to ripping it all out yet.

Instead I’ll show you some things I got in the mail. First, I snapped up Rosalie from Scout. I plan to make a Shadow Shawl with it.
Just have to figure out what solid yarn I want to use with it.

Here’s a couple of shots I took of it:

And I saved the best for last….

I got my Dye-O-Rama yarn!

This lovely purple confection was created for me by Abigail. Make sure to go take a look at her Azalea colorway too. Mine, which she didn’t name, has shots of bright blue and reds in it. She says it will stripe too, so I think that after I finished the Un-Rockin’ socks, I’ll whip it up into some Jaywalkers.

Now I just gotta figure out what I’m gonna dye for my partner. Acid dyes arrived in the mail on Friday, but not the base yarn. But I think I’ll dye up some samples tomorrow to get a feel for it and play around with striping options.

Comments: 3 — Posted under: Rockin' Socks, Dyeing

Dear Rockin’ Socks…

Why are you waaay too large for me? *sigh* I hear the frog pond is lovely at this time of year.

Comments: 4 — Posted under: Rockin' Socks

Further Adventures in Dyeing: Translating Swatch to Sock

Okay, so you have a stripe pattern you want. And you know your knitting gauge and yarn usage (if not, see this post…).

Now you need to know how much yarn to wind to make the same stripes in a full size sock. Well, the circumference of your target sock is wider than your swatch, so you need to redo your calculations.

If you have a favorite sock pattern, you can use that to base your calculations on. If not, you can use reference materials. I have Simple Socks, Plain & Fancy by Priscilla Gibson-Roberts. In it, there is a table of how many stitches you need to cast on for a sock in various sizes. For a basic crew sock in women’s size medium with a gauge of 9 sts/inch, she recommends casting on 72 stitches, which translates to an 8 inch circumference.

Going back to my original calculations, I measured 18 stitches over 2 inches of knitting, requiring 8 inches of yarn. To make the rest of the calculations easier, I’m going to break this down and say that I need 4 inches of yarn to make 1 inch of knitting at 9 sts/inch.

For 72 stitches for the sock, at 8 inches in circumference, I need 4 x 8 = 32 inches of yarn per row. If I wanted stripes that were at least 4 rows wide, I’d need 32 x 4 = 128 inches of yarn for the stripe.

Of course, a number of factors will play into your plans such that the number of rows you actually get will vary a bit. When I came up with my usage calculation, I rounded up, to accommodate potential shrinking. And you could see in my finished swatch, I had closer to 5 rows per stripe, due to the extra yarn per stripe. Because I rounded after measuring usage per 2 inches, I’m building in extra yarn to each inch. I could choose to round up at a different point in the calculation and have closer to the desired amount. But knitting a little more tightly or loosely as you go will change things. As will how tightly you wind the yarn on the warp initially.

What if you change the number of stitches in a row dramatically? You’ve seen how striping changes across a heel and gusset. You may have also knit sweaters or other objects with self striping yarn and noticed that the width of the stripes in the body is narrower than that of the sleeves.

Playing with that concept, I wanted to make a swatch based on this stripe pattern:

Based on the previous formula, 8 wraps per color would give me about 4 rows per stripe. But what happens if I change the width of my swatch? If I cast off half of the stitches, my stripes would get thicker. To account for that, I did the first half of my stripes with 8 wraps per color and the second half with 4 wraps per color.

This is what my warp set up looked like:

And this is the resulting swatch:

The first 4 pattern repeats have about 4 rows per color. Then there’s a 2 row stripe (because I forgot when I was planning to cast off). Then the narrow section has about 4 rows per stripe again.

It would take calculations of epic proportions to wind yarn that keeps striping consistent across a heel gusset. And very careful knitting as well. But if you are dyeing for a specific project, you can dye separate skeins to maintain the striping in different pieces. Doing the sleeves and yarn for the yoke part of the sweater separately from the body section. Just sketch out your pattern and use the measurements of the garment to decide how you need to wind out your stripes.

Of course, something like this can be really tricky to plan for a larger project. If stripes of a specific size are important to you, then you probably should just use multiple colors of yarn.

For my Dye-O-Rama swap yarn, I’ll be planning to wind based on the women’s size medium calculations I listed above. I’ve also decided that I’ll aim for stripes that are at least two rows wide, because 1 row stripes are fussy (as you saw in my previous post) and end up looking more like randomly-dyed yarn (Koigu, etc). I don’t know quite what my stripe pattern will be yet. I have a long flight tomorrow, so after I finish my Rockin’ Socks, I might sketch out some ideas. But I ordered some acid dyes and the base yarn, and with any luck, I’ll have something to play with over the holiday weekend.

Comments: 3 — Posted under: Dyeing

Further Adventures in Dyeing: Through Thick and Thin

Until now, I’ve worked with simple stripe patterns where the stripes are all the same size and the colors repeat in a cycle. I hinted at what you might do with stripes of varying sizes.

So what about a more involved stripe pattern?

Here we have a main color with thick stripe (4 rows each) broken up by tiny 1-row stripes of some complementary colors.

The most obvious way to wind this would be to wind 8 sets of pegs. However the colors repeat, so with a little care, it can be wound using only 3 sets of pegs, one for each color.

Here’s my warping peg layout:

I put a little more space between the pegs than I did before. And I put the main color, color A, in the middle. Then I used my stripe sketch to wind the pegs. First I wound 8 wraps for A, then I wound 2 wraps for B. Then, instead of continuing around counter-clockwise to wrap around peg set C, I went back and wrapped around A for 2 wraps. After one last set of 2 wraps around B, I was ready for the 2nd half of the stripe pattern, using only A and C.

The hardest part was keeping track of where I was in the wrapping. Here’s the wrapped pegs.

I ended up with 3 sub-skeins which I dyed different colors. I had to keep track of which one was A, B, and C now because they had different purposes.

When I was done, I knit up this swatch:

You’ll notice that the single-row stripes seem to bunch up. That’s because I was knitting my swatch flat. In a sock, a color would wind around and the stripes would look more uniform. To show this, I used the second half of my swatch yarn to knit a small tube:

If the blues didn’t blend into each other and if I had dyed the white spaces between them better, the striping would be more obvious. Because it’s not, here’s a drawing that shows what’s going on.

This is what a length of dark and light blue yarn would look like if it’s knit flat. The rows go back and forth as shown. And the gauge is a little off, so instead of a nice stripe, the light blue bunches up at one side.

Now compare what it would look like to knit that same yarn in the round.

The stripes are much more obvious in the second diagram. No bunching of the light blue occurs. And there may be a little extra thicknesses at some point, but that will even out with normal gauge variations. You’d much rather have the ends of the stripe overlap a little than not meet at all.

Okay, I have one more dyeing post in me. I’ll talk about how to translate your tiny swatch ideas into something that covers a whole sock.

In the meantime, I have my new Rockin’ Sock Club socks to work on. If you want a sneak peek, click here.

Comments: 6 — Posted under: Dyeing

Further Adventures in Dyeing: Adaptation

Okay, back to the yarny goodness…

I received a number of suggestions for other items to use as warping pegs, including:

• Hex bolts (which I had considered, but rejected because I didn’t want the threads to catch on the yarn, and because I thought that attaching and removing them would be challenging)
• Knitting needles (which is brilliant! but sadly all I use are Addi Turbos and even still, who has a dozen needles of the same size?)
• Japanese chop sticks (which are round).

In the end, I was at AC Moore looking for smaller dowels when I found a package of 6-inch long, 1/4 inch diameter dowels. The holes in my peg board were slightly smaller than 1/4 inch. But an easy solution was found in the school supplies section:

I jammed them in and wound up a few more test swatches:

They work really well, the only issue was that if I wound the yarn too tightly, the pegs started to pull in. Which meant that later stripes end up narrower than earlier stripes, which isn’t what I was going for. I’ll have to take more care with the “real” runs.

One of the problems I had with my first swatch was that the dye from the solid color sub-skeins bled into the speckled sections. Sure, it looked nice in the end, but I wanted more control. So when I wound this time, I placed the “inside” pegs further apart to leave more space between the sub-skeins. Then, when I was dyeing, I left a lot of white space. This let me see how much the dye would creep up the yarn while I was setting it with heat.

After the first trip through the microwave, there was still some white space, so I applied extra color closer to the intersections. I mostly covered it and my colors were in the same palette range, so I didn’t get any icky brown. But as you can see after I knit up my swatch, there’s still a few white spots. Most obviously at the transitions between the green and blue.

I also had an accident. This is what happens when your yarn isn’t damp enough and all the water boils off in the microwave and it burns (the dark blue is Cotton Classic, not the yarn I was dyeing):

Fortunately, this was only a small swatch skein and it was practice yarn, so I’m not crushed. And the un-dyed half was unharmed, so I cut off the blue and will use the rest as dye sample strands.

In my next post, I’ll show you what I was doing with the above winding patterns and talk about calculating other types of stripe patterns. In particular, I’ll describe what I was going for with the blue and green swatch and some of the lessons I learned from it.

However, what with all this talk of dyeing and my small political foray into cross-stitch, you might think I haven’t knit a “real” stitch in ages. Not true. I’ve been making steady progress on Mermaid. I’m almost finished with the body. I think I have one more hem gusset to go and then last stripe. And I got sick of tiny needles and was inspired by Lynne’s tank fascination and started a Ribby Shell in some aqua Cotton Classic. Both of those projects have given me something to keep me occupied while caring for my husband while he recoved from a motorcycle accident a couple of weeks ago (no, he wasn’t seriously injured, and yes, we no longer have a motorcycle).

And I have a few things on the horizon. I just bought gorgeous yarn from Scout and I’m trying to keep my size 1s clear for the next Rockin’ Sock Club package that should be arriving next week!

Comments: 6 — Posted under: Dyeing

Knitters Represent!

My ITMFA cross-stitch piece ended up on the ITMFA site today. Reader Abigail gave Dan a head’s up and he posted the photo (thanks, Abigail!). I’m mailing him the original to adorn the office.

He also copied the post to The Stranger’s staff blog, Slog, where the first comment was someone blasting me for wasting my time making pretty craft pieces instead of “doing work that will create actual political change”. They signed the comment “Too much time on their hands”. You can read the rebuttals that both Dan and I made there.

There are a lot of things that bother me implicit in that criticism. That smart people can’t be crafty. Or that crafty people can’t be smart. That crafty art isn’t valid. That you have to speak with the right voice or you shouldn’t speak at all. That there’s something specific I need to be doing to create change (not that my flamer gave any suggestions). Whatever happened to “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”?

Never mind that I vote. Never mind that I contribute to causes I believe in with both my time and my money (local politicians, national politicians, and Planned Parenthood in recent months). Never mind that I did a 60-mile walk for breast cancer last October or that I’m spending 4 days volunteering as a camp grunt for the Boston 3-Day Walk this year (as a volunteer, I don’t have a fundraising requirement this time, but if you’d like to support me, click here). Never mind that I boycott Wal-Mart. Never mind that I support small businesses with many of my yarn purchases. Apparently, some people feel all that is invalidated because I chose to spend a little time with a needle and thread.

I think that you never know how someone is going to finally hear your message. Maybe it’s in a classroom. Maybe it’s on a bus. Maybe it’s on a TV show. Maybe it’s reading a knitting blog. It doesn’t always sink in the first time around. Or the second. Or until the government logs all of our phone calls and gas costs $6 a gallon. But if you spread it around in enough ways, people will start to notice, and it will be there when they finally are ready to hear it.

I think several of you heard about ITMFA for the first time by reading my blog. Maybe you’ll make your own handcraft (Kerstin is designing a knit handbag!). Maybe you’ll buy a pin from Dan. Maybe you’ll buy one of the t-shirts or stickers that others have designed. Maybe you’ll start lobbying your elected representatives. And your voices will join the groundswell and maybe the people who got voted into office and can do something about it will finally listen and start an investigation.

So, for all of that:

If you have a slight objection to the language, an good alternate is “Impeach The Massive Failure Already”.

Oh, and yes, I really did buy a copy of Styx’s Paradise Theater just so I could listen to “Too Much Time On My Hands”. I’m listening to it while I write this.

Thanks for reading.

Comments: 5 — Posted under: Musing

Group responses

To my knitting friends — I’m pleased with the positive responses to my ITMFA project. Just a warning, my pattern is a cross-stitch pattern. Don’t think I made it all that clear. But it’s pretty simple, if you want to give it a whirl. Kind of like duplicate stitch. The pattern is now linked in my sidebar. —>

To my Dye-O-Rama buddy — your anonymous e-mail doesn’t work. But I’m excited about the rumors of purple. Now I just have to stop dyeing swatches and try some “real” yarn myself….

Now, when I get a chance, I’ll re-write that post that got eaten the other day.

Comments: 1 — Posted under: Almost Random

Something a little different…

Today’s post was supposed to be Further Adventures in Dyeing. I’d written out most of the post. I was just about to make the first save so that I could go back and edit, and then I hit something or clicked something, and the whole thing disappeared. I’m no computer novice, but despite my best efforts, that version of the post was not to be. So, while I let that one rest for another day (and search for a WordPress Autosave plug-in), I’ll show you something else I made recently.

I’m a big fan of Dan Savage. He’s the Editor of The Stranger, a Seattle weekly paper. He’s also widely known for his frank and amusing weekly sex advice column, Savage Love. He’s a gay man in a committed relationship, raising his son with his boyfriend. He’s outspoken on a lot of issues, and in addition to his gay activism, he is always one of the first to point out when political actions threaten straight reproductive rights. He’s an engaging writer and I’ve loved reading his autobiographical books about adopting his son and deciding whether to marry his boyfriend.

Often people write to him asking about a relationship and it’s clear from the description in the letter that the writer is being taken advantage of. Dan’s primary advice is “DTMFA” (dump the motherfucker already). In recent months, in response to Dan’s continued frustration with American politics, and most importantly, the man at the top, a reader suggested ITMFA (I=Impeach). It’s a grass roots movement, and he encourages people to make their own ITMFA projects. He sells lapel pins and buttons (donating proceeds to the ACLU), many have gotten license plates, made bumper stickers, and designed t-shirts.

I decided that there had to be a fiber contribution:

Despite all the other things I disagree with about this administration, I find it hard to believe that an official investigation hasn’t been launched into misleading us about the war in Iraq and the mishandling of it. People are afraid to speak out because they are scared of terrorism, worried about the lives of the soldiers and civilians at the front, and are often accused of being anti-patriotic for expressing concerns and disagreements. Yet, I think these are exactly the reasons people should be speaking out. Freedom of Speech is one of the reasons given for starting the war in the first place. Our personal freedoms are being compromised in the name of fighting terrorism. People are losing their lives in the war. Impeachment is an investigation into the actions of the President. It’s time one was started.

If you want to make your own, I’ve charted the pattern (PDF).

Comments: 8 — Posted under: Cross-stitch, Almost Random

Adventures in Dyeing, Part Five: Kitchenware & Candycolors

Okay, you’ve had a few days to absorb the main points of my Adventures in Dyeing. Today I’m going to review a few of the tools that helped me along the way. Most are things that I re-purposed for dyeing. Whether or not you have the same things on hand, or run out and buy them, or don’t, I hope that this post lets you look around at the things you do have in your house with new eyes, thinking about how you can use them for dyeing.

First up, hair clips. I used them to bind together sub-skeins while I was moving them around. I removed them for the dyeing process because I wanted to allow the dye to penetrate better. And I wanted to microwave to set the dye which I can’t do with the metal springs on the clips.

Next up, no one asked about what this platform was that my yarn was laying on:

But I’m finding it one of the most valuable tools in my dyeing experiments. It’s a perforated breadstick baking pan. I think I used it to bake breadsticks only once. But because it’s flat (essentially), and has the holes, it’s a perfect surface to lay out newly dyed yarn to rinse off. I can spread the yarn out a bit and hit it with the sprayer and really force water through it.

After I rinsed off my first dye sample and let it dry, I wanted to wind it up. And after looking around, I turned a cake-leveller into a makeshift niddy-noddy:

Because I had to take a picture of a pretty skein:

I mentioned those teaspoon eyedroppers before. Here’s one again, along with some sub-skeins that I dyed this week. I used some small disposable containers (the ziploc and gladware kinds) as dyepots, squirted dye on the subskeins, and popped the whole thing in the microwave, just like that.

Finally, I leave you with the small jars I’m storing dye in. I’ve labelled each on top with what kind of dye is in it. And when I dye a new color, I toss in a length of extra yarn that I use as a sample later. I’ve tied that around the neck of each jar.

As you can see above, while I’ve been writing about this dyeing episode and posting over the last week or so, I’ve also been doing other experiments in dyeing. I’ll show you those soon.

Comments: 1 — Posted under: Dyeing