Fixing things

Last week, I ordered a couple of Pashminas (I don’t always want to wear or worry about hand knits) and I actually got them both for free because of credit card points.  When they arrived, the gray one was a lovely medium gray which will go with anything in my closet.  The one they called pink was not pink at all.  Despite the name and the color on the website it wasn’t pink, it was coral.  I don’t really have a problem with coral, it’s pretty and I do wear it, but I felt like this coral was too spring and summer colored and I really wanted a four season pink.  (Just in case the name on the blog wasn’t enough of a clue, I think pink is always appropriate.)  Here’s what it looked like:

It was pretty, but not quite what I was hoping for.  Ordinarily I would return it and get another color, but there wasn’t another color I wanted (I had my heart set on pink) and going someplace else wouldn’t be free.  Then I thought about it a minute, pashmina is cashmere and silk.  Cashmere and silk are both protein fibers.  Protein fibers are dyed with acid dyes.  I have acid dyes in my dye bucket out in the garage.  I could over dye the pashmina!  Also, just to make this super easy, I wouldn’t have to worry about felting.*  So I trotted out to the garage, grabbed my dyepot, my big dye stirring spoon and mixed up some cool red.  I decided that since coral has pink (and orange) in it already, I just needed to tip it towards the blue side of red and it would be pink, hence the cool red.  I stirred and cooked and cooked and stirred until the dye was exhausted.

What I pulled out is exactly what I was hoping for - a strawberry red.  It’s the pinkest that pink can get before it turns back into red!  Loopy is sitting there to help the camera - his shirt is a true, pure red.  You can see how close I got to red, without quite getting there.  I love it and I’m so glad I thought of over dyeing it.  This is so much better than the original coral!

So, what did you do this weekend?

*True cashmere doesn’t felt.  If it’s been mixed with lambswool (which some cheaper things labeled as cashmere have been), it will felt, but if you buy your cashmere from a reputable source, so you know it’s cashmere, it shouldn’t felt.  I actually wash my cashmere sweaters in the washing machine on the delicate cycle.  I’ve had success with LL Bean and Garnet Hill cashmere.  I do dry it flat.

Overdyeing - Part 2

After the overdyeing I showed you Monday, I had one more skein in my stash that was planned for overdyeing, but this time, I was going for something completely different.  The Pashmina went from silver to dark periwinkle, but this time I was just adjusting the color just a tiny bit, not completely changing it.

The original skein is Kashmir (Superwash Merino/Cashmere/Nylon) from the Woolen Rabbit in the Oh Ruby colorway.  It has a lot of different reds but they were all warm, orange and brown based reds.  I loved the skein and kept playing with it, thinking it would work for me (fair, cool toned skin), but I knew in my gut that it just wouldn't.  I still wanted it to be red though and I didn't want to lose the lights and darks that were part of the original dye process.  This time around I just needed to overdye it a tiny bit, just enough to tip the red towards the cooler side of the spectrum.  I'd just barely overdye it with a cool red dye (cool red is a magenta type color where warm red is more of an orange based "Chinese red" type color).  If I used too much dye, I'd lose the light/dark variation and could risk taking the color past red and into magenta.  Also, I needed to dump the skein into the dye bath and not mess around with it because the more you stir, the more solid the color tends to be.

I put just enough water into the dyepot to cover the skein, poured in a very weak dye solution, gave it a quick stir and plopped the skein (presoaked) in.  I smooshed the skein down into the water and let it do it's thing.  Not stirring the dye pot is harder than it sounds because I'm naturally a curious person and I want to know what's going on in there.  I did pretty well though with leaving it alone and this is what I ended up with.

I now have a cool, dark red skein of yarn and while the lighter places are darker than they were originally, I still have lights and darks in the skein (they're hard to photograph well, you'll have to take my word for it).  There's something warm and snuggly and Winter-y feeling about the color now even though it's no where near a Christmas red.  It kind of reminds me of dark red plaid flannel things.  Someday, after it's dry, I will knit Vlad with it.  Because warm, snuggly, Winter-y feeling just says vampire, doesn't it?

Overdyeing, Part 1

There are a couple of projects worth of yarn that I have been planning to overdye and I finally decided to just go for it.  My reasons for overdyeing (versus just returning the yarn and getting a different color) are complicated and different for each instance.  The yarn I'm showing you today began life as Madelinetosh Pashmina in the Silver Fox colorway.  Madelinetosh is one of my favorite dyers and with the huge range of yarn bases they now have, if I had to knit from only one dyer for the rest of my life, Madelinetosh would be it.  I had ordered the yarn looking for a pale gray and that's what Silver Fox is.  My problem was that I was looking for a pale gray just slightly lighter than standard sweatshirt heather gray and Silver Fox is even lighter than that.  As you can see in the picture, it's almost like the undyed skein walked past a gray dyepot without jumping in.  It is truly the lightest shade of gray that can possibly be gray - any lighter and it would be cream.  It's a beautiful color.

So what's the problem?  My skin tone is the problem.  I have very fair skin with cool undertones.  The cool undertones mean gray is a wonderful color for me (I love gray, seriously love it).  The very fair part means I need to have color that's actually there.  I can do pastels, but they must have some substance.  Wispy, delicate, barely there color just washes me out.  I can do whites and ivories, but any actual color has to actually be there, not just maybe be there.  Silver Fox was bordering on the maybe being there against my skin and I would have looked like a corpse (lovely, no?)  If my skin tone was darker it would have worked out just fine - I don't want to turn anyone with a more normal skin tone off of this color because it should be wearable for other people.

I contemplated trying for a darker gray, but gray dyes tend to pull to one color or another (you've all seen blue grays and green grays and even warm grays) - if I was using gray, I wanted just gray, no undertones.  That meant going for a color on the overdye.  As light as the yarn was to begin with, I knew I could go with pretty much any color I wanted to and except for being just a little bit muted, it would come out pretty pure.  I decided to go for a rich iris or dark periwinkle blue.  I used blue dye with a little bit of purple dye (to swing the blue over into the periwinkle range).  I wasn't necessarily going for a solid, but it seems that that's how it came out.  I'm thrilled with my finished color and once it's all dry, I'll cast on for Melpomene, the newest Muse in Romi's second 7 Small Shawls ebook.

A Public Service Announcement

When you're head isn't really thinking straight and you have no short term memory at all, don't dye fiber.

If I had been thinking, I would have remembered that wool felts and maybe not stirred so much. I wasn't thinking and now I have 6 ounces of blue felt rope. I've got an idea or two about how to use it, so maybe it won't be a complete loss, but it certainly didn't work out how I'd originally planned.

Thank you.

Firecrackers!

I hope all the Americans out there had a fabulous 4th of July! We started the day with the parade. Leesburg does several good parades throughout the year - we've been to the Halloween one before, but this was the first time at the 4th of July parade. It was lots of fun. Of course, there are always political candidates in the parades, shaking hands and passing out stickers to the kids - by the end of the parade Caleb looked like a billboard for democracy. Except for the part of the parade where the local Corvette club went by (I think Mickael teared up a bit), we all had a wonderful time. For those of you who aren't Americans, I hope you also had a nice 4th of July, but I'm guessing it didn't involve parades or fireworks.

On Tuesday, I realized that I needed to get something knit. At this point it is a semi stealth project (this is getting bad - we now have different degrees of stealth projects), meaning I can sort of show it to you, but you can't see enough of it to see details until later. I knew I needed to start it pretty much NOW and I knew I wanted to do it in red. Fortunately, I had a few skeins of KnitPicks dye your own laceweight and some dye around here, so I tossed two skeins into the dye pot and started adding dye until I got the color I wanted. I have heard that red's are the hardest color to get right and if you've ever painted a room red, (or even your nail's red), you know that red acts differently from other colors. The red pigment is the smallest molecule of all the pigments (turquoise blue is the biggest) and it just acts differently. (For anyone who's never painted their nails red or painted a room red - reds are "runnier" than other colors. When you paint a room red, you must have primer and you'll still end up with 3 or 4 coats of paint on top to get an even coat.)

I knew I wanted almost a bright, clear true red, but I wanted it to pull just slightly towards the blue red side of the color wheel. I have pink undertones to my skin and orange reds are not a good mix for me. Landscapes Dyes have two reds: Grevilia is a cool red and Desert Pea is a warm red. I started with an even mix of the two, but then added just a bit more of the Grevilia to push the color very slightly towards the blue side. What you see above is what I got. I love it! I can't wait to start knitting with it. The only problem? I was talking on the phone to Christine* and didn't keep track at all of how much of which dye I used, so if I ever want to duplicate the color, I'll have to start from scratch. Ah, the joys of Seat of Your Pants Dyeing!

*For those of you not in Mystery Stole 3, Christine is my co-moderator. She is in charge of all things computer tech related and has organized the translation efforts. I met her when I did the first Mystery Stole, 2 years ago and she bailed me out from some computer issues. I frequently refer to her as Kato to my Green Hornet, because let's be honest here, without Kato, the Green Hornet would have never gotten anything done.

Periwinkle!

OK, does anyone else think this pile of wool resembles a flying dragon or is it just me? This is part of the fleece we got from Maryland. I realized that if we weren't too scientific about it, we could go ahead and dye the wool right after we got it washed and then only have to wait for it to dry once. (Technically, we should have washed it, let it dry, weighed it, then dyed it, washed it again, and dried it again.) So with a guesstimate on weight (which I think is high but I am really bad at ballparking the weight on anything - this weighed less than Ramius who weighs 11 pounds, but since the whole fleece only weighed 8 pounds, I was pretty sure that this part of the fleece would weigh less than Ramius. See? The dyeing of the wool, it is not an exact science at Casa Pink Lemon.

I did take really good notes and will weigh the fiber after it's all dry so that if at some point I want to reproduce this color, I can. We were shooting for a periwinkle and as you can see, we hit it! The color has a touch more purple in reality than it photographed, but you can get a pretty close idea of how it looks here.

Have a great weekend!

I finally got a chance to dye some wool!

Well, I didn't have time to play with this over the weekend, but yesterday I did get some of the Targhee dyed. This is half of it and it looks slightly lighter in the photo than it does in real life. I'm thinking about leaving the other half white and then having it blended in the roving. (Its essentially the same as having two fibers blended together, except this is two colors of the same fiber - the machines don't care.) I think I would prefer a lighter color of the blue green. This is the first time I've dyed loose fiber and the first time I've done immersion dyeing with the Landscapes Dyes. I feel like I got the color pretty even and there is no felting or clumping.

I also got the Flower Basket Shawl blocked so later today I'll be unpinning it! Pictures tomorrow with all the details!

Dyeing with the Pink Lemon

Yesterday, I decided it was as good a day as any to try some dyeing! I went stash diving and came up with some GCNI blended with 15% mohair (the GCNI is from Running Moon Farm and the Mohair is Yearling Mohair from Hill Shepard)that I had planned to make socks with. I had just under a pound so I divided it into 3, 5.25 ounce balls of roving. (Socks usually take 4 ounces of fiber, but any extra can be used for striped socks.) I decided to paint the roving instead of just trying to dye it a solid color because I figured painting it would let me use more colors at once and it might be a bit faster. (I was trying to get as much done as possible while Caleb was at school.) I soon discovered that while Caleb was safely out of the way of my little project, Finn was really wanting to help. He kept standing up on his hind legs and putting his paws on the island so he could see what I was doing. While I can't blame him for being curious, retrievers like to taste stuff and I didn't really want to kill the dog in an attempt to make pretty sock roving, so Finn went into his happy place (crate) and took a nap.
Once I had the fiber divided into the amounts I was going to dye, I set it in the kitchen sink to soak. You have to get your wool thoroughly wetted before dyeing so while it was soaking I mixed up some dye. I used the Landscapes brand of dyes. They are acid dyes, have a beautiful color range and because you don't have to add anything else to them (like a mordant), they are a little easier to use than regular acid dyes. I used Wattle - yellow, Grevillea - red, and Marine - blue for my experiments yesterday. (Let me say here that while Wattle and Marine are two of the three colors recommended for use as primary colors, Grevillea is not. I chose to use Grevillea since it was a blue red and that's my favorite shade of red.) Just as another side note (sometimes I feel like my entire blog entries are one big parenthetical after another), I did not dye anything to 100% Depth of Shade so the colors you see here are not representative of the full intensity of the dyes used. Make sense?

I covered the island in our kitchen with a plastic tablecloth (side note: for safety reasons, all food and dishes were put away or moved across the room to the kitchen table while I was dyeing), covered that with newspapers and then laid out Saran wrap. I squeezed out the first mound? clump? bump? glob? of roving and laid it out on the plastic wrap in as straight a length as I could. I wasn't sure how much to put on the plastic wrap this first time, so I divided it by eye and laid the first batch -yeah, that's the word - on two pieces of plastic wrap. Then I grabbed the Grevillea to paint it on the roving - Oooops! No foam brush or any other type of brush to do the actual painting. Not to worry though, grab a paper towel, wad it up and voila! A cheap disposable dye dabbing tool. Problem averted, I began making stripes of dark pink on the white wool. It kinda looks like a crime scene doesn't it? I decided on this first batch, to just make some pink and white stripes since pink has been my nemesis when it comes to dyeing and I figured that spun up, pink and white stripes would possibly look like a pink and white ragg yarn and really, who wouldn't want pink ragg socks? So, everything got covered with a second piece of plastic wrap (which I have almost as many problems with as tape), rolled up like a jelly roll, and plopped delicately into the steamer. Then I double checked the directions and according to Deb Menz, Color Goddess of Wool Everywhere (and also author of Color in Spinning), I should let the roving sit for a bit (30 minutes or so) before steaming. So, unroll the first batch again, set it back on the newspaper and let it do what ever its going to do (maybe this gives the dye more time to move around and soak into the fibers, maybe the wool likes to meditate on the colors it will become, maybe its so I can stare at its delightful pinkness some more - I don't know.)While the first batch thought about its deliciously pink future, I got started on a second batch. This one was painted with large blue stripes, then pink, yellow, pink, and back to blue. You can see I left white spaces between the colors. I wasn't sure what that would do, but I figured I'd find out. I also got all 5.25 ounces on one strip of plastic wrap and was able to paint the whole batch as one. By the time I finished painting this second batch, I was ready to steam the first batch, so I put that back into the steamer and moved the second batch up on the island to do its presteam wooly meditations - or whatever. On the final batch of roving I decided to go a little crazy. I had leftover dye from the first two batches so I decided to dribble the dye liberally through the roving. I started with blue, which I had the most of and drizzled it on the roving. Then I added the pink/red color, and then I made some random yellow dots. I knew not to use equal amounts of all three colors or I'd have mud (basic color theory in action).

After all three batches of roving had been steamed and cooled enough to handle, I unwrapped them from their plastic wrap and gave them a quick rinse in the kitchen sink. Then, into washing bags they went and were washed once and rinsed twice in the washing machine (soaked then spun - no agitation). I spread out the clean and dyed rovings in the bathtub to dry and...
...TA DA! On the right you see Roving Batch 1 (AKA Barbie's Dream Roving), in the center is Roving Batch 2, and on the left is Roving Batch 3. I am very excited about all three of them and can't wait to spin them up and see what kind of yarn they become.

I did learn several things from doing this. All three batches of rovings were too wet, even after squeezing the water out. Next time I'll prewet them in the washing machine and then I can spin the water out. I think I also used too much dye (not so much the dye color, but the water I mixed it with) - this could have also been related to the too wet rovings in the first place. Remember the white spaces I left when I painted the rovings? Can you see them now? That's why I think there was too much liquid of one kind or the other, or both. The other thing I learned is that we really have to work with Finn on the "Get Down" command - he stinks at that one!

Sleepy Feline Tuesday

Yesterday, as Monday's tend to be around here, was filled with groceries, housework, and things that HAVE to get done. There was no knitting or spinning so I give you Ramius. As soon as we wake up in the morning and get moving around, he comes back to bed, makes a nest, and goes to sleep. He allowed his picture to be taken this morning before he fell asleep (probably because he'd already made the nest in the blanket and it was warm).

I did get a bit of reading done last night. Remember when I said I wanted to learn to dye wool with "real" (versus food color) dyes? Well, I have ordered a few colors of Landscapes Dyes and downloaded some information about various techniques with them (there are links in the page I linked to above, just above the color listing), and now I'm trying to decide what to do. I do think white wool, and the natural sheep colors, are beautiful, but I'm easily bored by spinning any great quantity of it, and without dyeing, I'm pretty much locked into spinning either natural sheep colors or whatever is available commercially, including the smaller fiber dyers. If I get a wild hair for a certain color of sweater, made out of a certain type of wool, I either won't find exactly what I'm looking for, or I won't find anywhere near what I was looking for and I'll have to change my plans. The food color dyes work OK, but I have yet to get a stable purple or pink and I can only get an orange red, not a blue red and for my coloring, I need to wear blue reds. So that brings me back to dyeing. At some point this week, I'm going to dye something, anything, just to get my feet wet. I chose the Landscapes Dyes because they don't require you to add a mordant for them to bond with the fiber (no additional acids are needed, they are already in the dye). Have any of you used these dyes? Any additional words of wisdom beyond what is on the web? Whenever I do get a chance to do some dyeing, I'll be sure to get lots of pictures!