New Colours

For Christmas my aunt gave me some gift money to enhance my craft supply stash, and I used it to buy more colours of Jacquard Acid Dye, which I use to dye yarn.  These are dye tests on recycled yarn of various sorts; white alpaca, tan merino, light brown merino, and light blue cashmere.  From left to right in the picture, these fibres were overdyed with my 4 new dye colours: aztec gold, brown, magenta, and turquoise.  They form quite an amazing rainbow, as each yarn took the dye differently, and the way the dye colour interacted with the yarn’s original colour created many different effects.  I love colour!

 

Pi Blanket and some dyeing

I’ve started a pi shawl, that I intend to eventually be blanket-sized. I’ve wanted to start a GIGANTIC project like this for some time, and I finally cast on. The yarn is a recycled 100% merino which is absolutely lovely; it’s about DK weight or so; and I’m knitting with US#6 needles. I was mostly inspired by the pi shawl blanket that Brooklyn Tweed made; once I saw it, it stuck in my mind and eventually I had to make one! The pattern is by Elizabeth Zimmerman.

On the rawer fiber front, I’ve been up to my elbows in dye, and the results are these 3 colorways of polwarth roving, all dried out and ready to spin. And on the spindle are some initial tests of how the colors might spin up if I draft them together. I am especially happy with the reds/pinks/mauves/browns/blacks I achieved in one of the rovings. The others didn’t really turn out as planned at all; the BRIGHT orange was supposed to be mostly deep reds with a bit of orange, and the intense blue/green/yellow roving was to be a fairly consistent turquoise… well that didn’t happen. But the orange is very exciting, and the blue-greens will likely make a beautiful fabric once spun.