One of the many many many perks to having my own dye-it-yourself business is all the wonderful dyers I get to meet! As a result I find myself with a small stash of handdyed yarn that I didn’t dye! Didn’t see that coming. Its a true blessing to have these yarns to play with to get me out of the rut of always working with my stuff. Good for the mind. And friends like this, good for the soul.

Clockwise from top right corner: Stone and String’s Under Your Spell in Shivasana merino/cashmere/nylon sock yarn; BuenaSuerte’s Caramel in Charm merino/tencel fingering; BuenaSuerte’s Sick in Jinks superwash merino fingering; Stone and String’s Carrots in OM Toes sock merino/nylon sock yarn; BuenaSuerte’s unnamed in silk noil lace weight.

I also have a little visual for those of you who didn’t get to come out to Kid N Ewe last month. Here’s my new display model! I like it very much.

For my birthday I dyed a pound of targhee, my friend Emily spun it into fulled laceweight singles for me, and I knitted it up into this shawl.

It’s Dracula’s Bride pattern, and I’m calling mine Insight. It has Dragonfly beads from Earthfaire. It’s squishy and drapey and wonderful to wear.

After finishing it I pretty much immediately cast on several mindless projects, and am busy prepping for Kid N Ewe in November. But never fear. I’m here, churning out the colors and textures that we all know and love. And thinking of you all.

But always I want more. So, now and then I have a brainstorm and giddily start throwing dye and techniques around and bullying fiber to try to force it to take more more more. Here’s the results of a few experiments I’ve done lately.

I posted this same picture in the last Blog post, but what I didn’t say was what it was. Its two bits of bamboo that I used in testing. Both bits used the exact same method, same amount of dye, and processed in the same way, for the same length of time. The only difference is that I added kosher salt to the darker bit. Needless to say when I rinsed these I was extremely excited. I went ahead and used the same method on every single other fiber I work with. I didn’t see any difference at all in how much dye was taken up when working with protein fibers (which made me sad for my mulberry silk dreams) but it made a difference on all the cellulose I tested except Tencel. I think Tencel already takes up dye so intensely that there isn’t really room for more.

Every time I look at this picture I get completely giddy. It may be difficult to tell from the picture, but that is black merino streaked with green and purple tencel. As you may know I really only work with top, so part of the challenge for me as a dyer as been trying to figure out how to get the fantastic depth and variety of color that people who use a carder to blend their fibers. But now, I have this fun method. By dyeing in two stages I can apply one dye to the tencel, then another dye to the wool. I’ll be playing around with different color combinations on this one because the mind boggles, but this was my first. I was so happy when I managed this one that my husband even posted to his Facebook about it. Now that’s love!

I will say I overprocessed it a touch and as a result it was more compacted than I was willing to sell, so my friend Emily got the boon of getting a full pound of it all to herself, since she was willing to tease and fluff it up enough to spin. I’m sure there will be pictures soon of the finished yarn. She’s calling it Oil Slick for the time being which seems pretty perfect to me!

One of the other things I’ve decided to do is to go back to 8 ounce dye lots. I’ve been doing a full pound for most dye lots this last year and its been great. But with the smaller batches I have a bit more control over some of the techniques I use. The result is this.

These are colorways that I’ve done previously on (from the left) milk, mulberry silk, and bamboo rayon. Macaw, Coffee Toffee and Night With Her Stars on Targhee, then two lots of Merino/Silk. I really enjoy having the same colorways on my proteins and my cellulose fibers, even though each takes up color a bit different. I’m thinking that by combining the salt with the cellulose fibers my options have expanded greatly. I’ll need to be careful though otherwise everything in my shop will wind up looking like Macaw. I’m such a sucker for blues and greens.

The decisions we make day in and day out can be overwhelming if we try to look at them all at once. So sometimes, you just have to break it down to the basics and take one choice at a time.

Do I have today’s coffee cold or hot? Hot. With chocolate.

Do I wash laundry or dye more fiber? Fiber.

Then clothes. No I’m not showing you a picture of my dirty clothes.

Quiet for the morning or music? Pandora. Who plays Be Here Now by Ray LaMontagne for the very first song.

I think I may be on to something. Surely I can step this up a bit.

Now, knitting or spinning.

Oops I may have overreached myself.

Back to the beginning. To get out of bed or …

This post brought to you by day 53 of 100+ degrees. Brain cells cooking. Send kiddie pools full of ice!

Anyway, back in March or April I dyed up this pound of Cormo using Wilton’s Cake Dye and it did amazing and magical things.

I’d mixed Teal with Royal Blue and got this great turquoise/aqua with splots of darker teal/blue and splotches of violet purple where the royal blue broke. Oh how I lusted after this fiber! But the deal I’ve made with myself is that I am in business, and I have to at least try selling everything first. So this with went me to Yellow Rose. A full pound of this cormo that I’d named Magic.

Oh dear readers, how terrified I was! I just knew that someone would see this at the festival and fall in love with it as I had, and I would HAVE TO SELL IT TO THEM! The horror! And indeed people did see it, and people did comment on it, but somehow (magically) no one bought it. Four different braids of 4 ounces of this amazing stuff and no one bought it. I brought it home and immediately claimed it as mine. It was meant to be!

I spun on it some, but then Tour de Fleece came along, and I’ve spun on it every single day.

It’s still doing amazingly magical things. Making me love it more and more. I’m down to the last 4 ounce braid, and am almost sad to be seeing it come to an end.

Except that’s part of the joy. Even once I’m done with spinning it, then I get to knit or crochet with it. So really, I’m not even close to being done with this yarn.

And that makes me terribly happy. Sweaty and sticky and heat exhausted, but happy.

Back in February I posted about the Eire silk I was spinning.

I was a bad bad knitter and never measured the second skein, so I only have the estimate of 1,200 yards for a finished amount. Anyway, since then I’ve been working on a pattern with this silk. I’ve got the draft done, AND the first shawl. Well, kinda. I messed up on knitting part of it and as a result didn’t have enough to fully finish it symmetrically. But its still a very very happy making item.

I’m now working it up in KnitPicks Chroma and will be submitted it to their Independent Designers Program. I’ll let you know soon as its available. It’s be designed for any striped yarn, especially hand spun which can often have odd yardage amounts.

This was approximately 1,200 yards of handspun mulberry silk singles.

I’m extremely pleased.

Have I mentioned that we don’t use Central A/C? This year we’ve put window units in the bedrooms, but that’s it. *thud*

My friend Emily had recently finished this really cool crocheted shawl, which had reminded me that “Oh yeah! I like crochet!” so I went looking and found this extremely cool looking pattern called Cape Shawl (Ravelry link). It called for laceweight on an E crochet hook, but I had fingering weight so I went up to a K hook. I knew it would effect the size, but figured as long as I didn’t run out of yarn that would be fine.

It was a very close call.

Whew! I did have to modify the final row just a teeny bit to have that much left over, but it worked. Then I stretched it out on the floor and though “Oh My.”

Those shoes are mine. Size 10s. For scale. Yowsa.

I thought about leaving it the original colors. I rather liked it, and at this size it was mostly going to be a curl up on the couch and be warm wrap (yanno versus a go out to dinner wrap) so if the color was a little odd, no biggie. BUT I am a dyer after all, so over-dyed it was. And what shade did I go with?

Fire Red!!!! Bwahahahahah!!!

It did rather fascinating things, it turned the blue more purplish is, the brown went more chocolate covered cherries brown. And the entire thing … GREW!

Just for scale, I am about 5’8″, which means the size of this shawl is …

Epic