emchick

02/02/2006

harmony in red

First, the finished Harmony in Red skein:

69 yards, 2 oz Targhee. I had a difficult choice to make when after splitting the roving in half, one finished single came out to be 68 yards and one came out 95. I considered joining them and plying from both ends of the ball, or adding some of the second skein to the first, but in the end decided to leave them alone and ply them as is. The skein is still longer than my other fun ones, and the two skeins are uneven in kind of a nice way, where the first is more thick-thin and the second came out much more evenly thin. I'm very happy with the finished result - I got the deep red I was after, and the light blue comes out, in tiny bits, making for a nice change and a nice contrast to the deep red.

The Targhee is also more squooshy and soft than the Corriedale I've been using, but was harder to spin. I think my predrafting was to blame, since I have a new skein started that's going along much much better. Here is the painting and inspired roving:




Van Gogh, Irises. White, light gray blue, and dull green-blue. I'm psyched.

19:59 Posted in dyeing , spinning | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this

01/30/2006

inspiration

At the MOMA yesterday, overwhelmed by all the colors, I remembered reading something about finding inspiration for a fair isle design in a favorite painting. I figure, the same thing can be done with dyeing roving, right? I collected some JPGs online last night of some paintings with beautiful color palettes, and today I dyed up my first choice:

Harmony in Red, by Matisse. I isolated the colors I wanted to use on my template:



and mixed up some colors. The dark red turned out a little more brown than I wanted, and I don't think the blue will show up nearly as much as I wanted it to, but it's a start. I'm really excited about the deep red/light blue combination. I even think I did a good job of matching that almost-orangey yellow, which isn't easy, since lemonade kool-aid is decidedly not bright, and any red I have is very overpowering. I dyed 2 oz of my latest roving purchase, Targhee. What could that be?? It probably won't be so soft, but neither is the corriedale I've been using, and that's totally fine by me. I am just a beginner after all!

08:40 Posted in dyeing | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this

01/19/2006

tasty delight

So I spun up all of the Manhattan roving and wasn't so impressed. The colors are really washed out - I could definitely do better. The hank was still so pretty though, and so so soft. I wanted to actually try plying it. There were only about 54 yards of yarn, and ending up with 27 yards if I spun it to itself seemed depressing, so I put two white hanks I made a while ago together to make one hank that could be plied with the Manhattan one. White was too boring, so I dyed it Ice Blue, and plied my little heart out.

Yay! My first finished hank that doesn't suck. The plying isn't great, but I think the spindle is partially to blame. When I made that 54 yard hank initially, it was the most I'd ever made at once on my little crappy sprindle. Plying was kind of a nightmare - there was twice as much yarn, plus I'm just not that good at plying in the first place. It was miserable by the time I was halfway through...I'm definitely going to need a better spindle, both for plying and for making longer skeins.
Still, I'm thrilled with this finished hank. 56 yards (I don't know how that happened - maybe because the Manhattan yarn was a bit overspun and maybe curled up on itself in places?), bulky and super soft. It makes a good necklace. I don't know what I'll do with it (besides showing it off to everyone I know) - can I make a hat with that little yardage, if the yarn is so bulky? I doubt it. Oh well!

09:45 Posted in dyeing , finished objects , spinning | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this

01/18/2006

manhattan

Last week, I turned off the lights in my room to watch the movie Manhattan with a friend. My room lets out onto a little terrace, so I have a huge double-door window. Looking out, I noticed that at night, the city isn't the colors I expect - a black, or dark blue sky, with dark brown/black buildings. The sky was a deep pinkish mauveish purpley color, and the buildings were a pretty chocolate brown. With the lights on in certain windows glowing yellow, and random white lights coming from the tops of tall buildings and buildings in the distance, I thought it made for a very beautiful palette. I worked it out on the paint program on my computer and came up with this:

Then this weekend I went home and raided Pathmark for a ton of new packages of kool-aid.

28 packets, with many duplicates of blues and grape since I could see myself using those a lot. I'm only sad I totally forgot to get some orange. And I wish they had more greens.

So yesterday I had a free afternoon (since I'm on break from teaching and classes till 4:30 this afternoon) and decided to try to dye some roving in these colors. It was a big challenge - those colors, minus the yellow, are decidedly NOT bright, and kool-aid is decidedly...neon. I played around, trying to figure out the difference between the grape I had in the fridge since last time I dyed roving, and the mauve color I was trying to reproduce. They really looked the same in the little cups I had them in. It's also hard to tell how dark or how bright a color will come out - my grape stock looks like a bright, deep purple, and has since I first made it and it had much more grape in it, but poured on the roving it comes out a very light, gray purple. I also was too excited to wait to try Ice Blue, and made some light blue to add to the set. I'm pretty satisfied with the brown I came up with - it's a warm brown, but NOT bright. Here's what I had, dried and ready to be spun, this morning:

In hindsight, the colors could have been a lot brighter. They're looking very pastel as I'm spinning them up. I've been working on the technique of spinning that's not spinning from the fold, since it makes the different colors stand out from each other more. I don't love this technique; the other was much easier for me. I don't know if practice will solve that. Pre-drafting helps a lot, though. And is actually super fun.

I hope to finish spinning this roving in the next few days. I'm really getting to the end of my white roving supply. Perhaps an order to webs is in order? I'm trying to hold off on more purchases for now, since I might not have time for this stuff with classes and student teaching starting this week. I'm nervous about being so busy again - I've gotten quite used to going to the gym in the morning and doing absolutely nothing else all day. On Thursday I actually have to be somewhere at 7:45. 7:45! I hope that's not going to be a daily sort of thing (my schedule has yet to be worked out).

Ooh, and with my knitting. I have to put the IK Ballet Wrap Cardigan on hold. Something about working on it hurts my arms - I think it's the needles. I'm going to see about borrowing needles from someone, or maybe just buying new 10 1/2s. I don't know what needles would hurt less though...and maybe it's just that the needles are so big? If that's the case, it doesn't bode well for me working next on Teva Durham's Lace Leaf Pullover.

09:15 Posted in dyeing , purple wrap cardigan , spinning | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this

01/12/2006

more dyeing adventures

Here is the second batch of roving, before going into the oven:

The colors didn't run, which was great. Unfortunately, my color selection kind of sucked. The pinks and oranges took over in a gross way when I spun them up.



The color is kind of an orange-y peach. I'm not a big fan. This hank is my biggest yet, though - 46 yards. I don't see how I could go any bigger on this spindle, unless I made a lighter weight yarn, which I don't want to do - I had a bit more roving to spin, maybe 5-10 yards worth, but just couldn't deal with it anymore. The spindle was spinning horribly! I'm happier with my spinning, though; it just keeps getting more even.

I think I'm going to hold off on spinning/dyeing the white roving until I get a better choice of kool-aid colors. I'm left right now with reds and orange, and I don't want any more colors like this one. I also want to figure out how to make the yarn have longer spaces of one color. Right now it's looking like a candy cane. I think I can dye appropriately, but I don't want to try with these colors. I also want to work on making some thicker single plyed yarn.

09:45 Posted in dyeing , spinning | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this

01/11/2006

Dyeing adventures!

Bored with spinning my white roving, I decided to try to dye my roving, according to the instructions found here. I used kool-aid instead of real dyes, and no vinegar or anything like that.

First, I soaked the roving and made up 4 colors of kool-aid. I only had reds, orange, and grape left, so my color palette was limited.

Next, I poured the colors randomly onto the soaked roving, and put the pan in the oven until the water was almost boiling.



I made the mistake of putting the roving PLUS water into the pan before this began, which meant all the colors ran together a bit. Here's what it looked like after the oven:



I let the roving sit in the pan for a while, then transferred it back to the sink to rinse it out.



The roving dried Very Very fast - it came out of the oven at around 11, and was mostly fine for spinning by 6 or 7. I spun it all up and am now extremely addicted to the process - this stuff was super fun to spin! Here are some shots:



I initially thought the color was like Fruit Roll-Ups, but now, in the daylight, it seems like something else. It's more of a brick, orange red. Like that lipstick you can't wear because it's so trampy. I'm still so proud of the results - it's 39 yards, 5 more than my last attempt, and I think I could have gone on longer. I'm getting way better at spinning evenly, slightly better at not making everything overspun, and much better at winding the yarn around the spindle efficiently so I'll be able to hold more on there and have longer skeins. I made a new batch this morning, not making that mistake with the water, so the colors didn't seem to run. Later I'll be able to spin it! eee!

09:35 Posted in dyeing , spinning | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this

01/06/2006

dyeing felted tweed

A while back, I wanted to knit Salina from Rowan's Vintage Style. As usual, I was getting a bit ahead of myself, not really thinking about patterns and yarn and what I would really stick with and what I would really want to wear. Still, I bought enough Rowan Felted Tweed for the project, way on sale of course, in Corn.

Corn. Corn! What was I thinking here? I don't understand. Was I thinking Corn meant "pretty green" or "soft blue"? Rowan has some interesting ideas about naming colors, but Corn is pretty straightforward. Yellow. Murky yellow. The color isn't so awful, really, and the yarn is so pretty with flecks of blue, black, and white. But I would look awful in this color, and I can't think of anyone who could get away with it. I thought about making something striped, or something with an intarsia something in the middle, like a Weasley sweater. But what color would go with Corn? Maroon? Green? Blue? I can't imagine not hating the Corn no matter what other colors surround it.

So when I wanted to test my skills in Kool-Aid dyeing, I had a perfect candidate. Initially, of course, I looked all over my neighborhood and couldn't find the little sugar-free packets of Kool-Aid I'd heard about. So I dove in and bought a small jar of sweetened Grape Kool-Aid. How could sugar hurt? I dyed some pink yarn I had, some pink wristwarmers, and some white Lamb's Pride. The pink yarn barely changed, since I didn't add enough Kool-Aid. The wristwarmers because a deep maroon-purple color, and the Lamb's Pride because a deep purple-ish rose color. (I used it for a sort-of fair isle project I hope to document soon.) The problem with the sweetened Kool-Aid, I found out, is that there isn't a sticky gooey mess, as much as all the yarn becomes...stiffer. It was a bit sad with the Lamb's Pride, made very little difference in the pink yarn, but I no longer have any interest in the wristwarmers. (This may be a blessing in disguise - I really should stop wearing fingerless glove guys when the weather is cold and snowy.)

I decided to try a bigger supermarket when I went home for break recently, and was well rewarded. Pathmark had a huuuge selection of unsweetened packets. I took a few in each color, more in the blues and greens I was most excited about using for the Felted Tweed.



(This represents only some of the colors I used, since some packets were thrown out.)

I made some long hanks of Felted Tweed to look for a good color to dye the rest of it. I ended up making four samples that way before deciding that I just would not be able to decide on a color, dye the rest of the yarn that color, and find one project to use it on. There just wasn't enough yarn, and I didn't have the faith in the dyeing coming out the same.



These are the first four samples, from left to right: Ice Blue Raspberry Lemonade, Arctic Green Apple, Grape (the unsweetened kind), and Slammin' Strawberry Kiwi. Something interesting and great happened, that you can sort of see in that picture. Apparently, the flecks of color in the Felted Tweed are not wool, so when I dyed the yarn, those flecks remained. I can't change their colors, but I like that they're there. I especially love the color of the Grape one, it's way nicer than when I used sweetened Grape. I also liked that dyeing the yellow yarn blue turned it into a nice greenish turquoise color, all the way on the left.

My next attempt was to make yarn two colors - half of each of the two on the left. I burned this yarn on the side of the pot - I think maybe because I didn't remember to soak the yarn before dyeing it. I had more success trying a self-striping technique with some more white Lamb's Pride Bulky I had lying around (to be safe I rigged up a system involving wooden spoons and a teapot to keep the yarn away from the sides of the pot). The colors came out too bright, though, so some overdyeing is in order.

I'm not sure what else to do with this dyeing stuff. I don't really want to buy new yarn to try more self-striping stuff, and I don't know what I want to do with the rest of the Felted Tweed. For now I have the rest of the Kool-Aid selection stored away, and maybe soon I'll try other colors and make something stripey.

10:25 Posted in dyeing | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this