Double Rainbow Dyeing February 4, 2013

It’s rare that I have a chance to just dye some fun yarn for a personal project, or really work on a personal knitting project. But I have a niece or nephew arriving in a few months, so I wanted to kick it off to a good start by dyeing a great bulky superwash wool in bright, fun kiddo colors!

I took out all of the dye I had ready to go and started coming up with a plan. After taking inventory of my colors, I knew I wanted a rainbow!

I didn’t want pastel baby colors, I wanted a rich, saturated, true visible spectrum rainbow. Something that would capture any child’s imagination.

I started off by dyeing the three primary colors on 1/6 of the skein each, with some undyed space between.

Then I started filling in the secondaries of green and orange. My purple was not purple. It was navy. And I realized this about 2 seconds before I was bout to put the yarn in the dye bath. Since I hate wasting dye, I threw in a spare skein of BeerSox yarn to soak up the mistaken navy and it made a great denim-y skein. I mixed up a fresh batch of purple by mixing the iris with magenta to get a great warm yet vibrant purple for the last secondary color. The small overlaps in color allowed for some tertiary color sections.

I loved that I could dye all 5 skeins at once with my little kettle dyeing method. They’re not exactly alike, but they’ll all work great as a whole!

Dripping and then drying them is necessary in Houston!

To get wonderfully fun yarn that makes me smile every time!

Cheers,

Katie

Peruvian Adventure! Dos October 25, 2011

I had the opportunity to meet with a representative from Michell while in Peru. I walked in to the shop and was immediately in a land of a knitter’s dream.

Walls of cones of Alpaca!

Some of which I had to have because Alpaca in the states doesn’t come cheap. And when you’re in the Alpaca nation, you stock up.

I ended up ordering and getting delivered almost 8 kg of alpaca and baby alpaca and baby alpaca/silk yarn in lace, fingering, and DK weights.

I’m already planning a shawl for my aunts which they ordered at my brothers wedding.

Swatching:

I’ve been looking for ways to expand my BeerSox production because I am limited in my capacity for large orders. So I also met with a couple reps from handknitting companies, but I’m still gathering information, so I won’t tell you too much about it except that it’s promising and exciting!

I’ll leave you with the newest shifting stripes shawl in a rather fun and bold colorway. Still a work in progress with a goal! I’ll have a booth at the AIGA Ctrl + Art + Create event on Saturday, November 5, 10am-2pm. Come by the Heights Theater on 19th street and support your local arts!

PS registration for my November-December knitting course is open! Register Here

Peruvian Adventure! Uno October 24, 2011

Did you miss me?

I totally missed writing posts. But I had zero free time while on my trip, and multi tasking time was low.

But, I WENT TO PERU FOR A WEEK!

From 6 am to 6 pm, Monday through Friday, I was in a project management course for my work. Yarn stores in Lima are few, you can find mostly knitted, crochet, and woven accessories rather than yarn. But I was undaunted and I had done my research.

So let’s start at the very beginning. I packed and brought samples and projects enough for the week.

On the plane, I finished a seed stitch shawl. However, I made the mistake of starting the shawl with the color that had less yarn. This means that I ran out of yarn halfway through the bind off.

But it’s okay, I had the second color to bind off with to meet in the center.

And I had this tiny amount left of Socks that Rock lightweight yarn. I completed two seed stitch shawls with two skeins of yarn. Talk about waste not want not!