Pattern: Seeded Mitts by Heidi Buekelman, Yarn: Happy Feet by Plymouth, dyed by ME
This was my first experiment in self striping yarn. My mama-in-law asked for some nice sock yarn for Christmas and so I decided that was an excuse to dye some nice sock yarn for her. Happy Feet is my favorite base. I have seen it dyed up by many dyers and I just love it. I love the way it takes the color, I like knitting it and it makes me happy.
So I did some research and it seems that in order to dye something that will self stripe for a sock, you need a section of yarn about 30 inches long. In otherwords, each 30 inch section you dye equals one row of your sock. Fingerless mitts are about the same as a sock, so this means that for each of the stripes you see, I had about 3+ yards of that color.
How do you accomplish that? It is MANY steps. Not hard, but fiddly for sure. I used a warping board because I have one. A warping board (if you have never heard of one) is a giant peg board used by weavers for measuring out warp ends for weaving. I put my original skein on the swift and wrapped it round and round the pegs to make a new giant skein and added lots of ties with scrap yarn to keep it from getting tangled.
My warping board is big enough that I could make a new loop of yarn that when I stretched it out it was about 5 yards. (Imagine a letter O that you grab from both sides and pull apart to make a big squished loop.) I have a huge long table at the Dye Lab at work. I soaked the skein in citric acid and then I laid the skein on top of plastic wrap the whole length of the table. The dye is Dharma Acid dyes added with a sponge brush. 4 bright colors mixed half and half with grey. On the table I painted it in 4 quarters – pink, green, red, blue.
Once the yarn was saturated with the dye then I folded the saran wrap over the sides toward the center and rolled the whole thing up like a snail shell. Pop it in to a ziploc bag (unsealed) and into a large steamer pot for about 1/2 hour. You can tell when the dyes are set when the liquid in the ziploc is basically clear. Then I pulled it out and tried very much to ignore it while it cooled off. After rinsing and hanging to dry in the shower then it was time to re-skein once again. This time I stretched it between two chairs in the dining room and walked between them winding it on to my niddy-noddy. The niddy-noddy makes a skein that fits back on the swift and from there I could wind it in to a ball for knitting. Each stripe is about 4 knitted rows. Once I got going it was so fun to knit that these mitts took me just a couple of days of the polar vortex weekend to finish.
Nuts, huh? Totally super cool yarn is completely worth it.
So cool! I can’t wait to try one of the balls you gave me – when I finish garnet Multnomah!