Turquoise toes

I've had several really good days with my dye pot lately. I try to save energy by heating it in the morning and rotating batches of roving in and out all day. It makes more sense than hauling everything out to dye one or two braids. During this last big day, I tried my first kettle-dyed yarn. I love how it all turned out and I am itching to re-skein it and see the final project. It takes forever to dry, so I'm having a hard time being patient.

This is my first batch of dyed roving. Several of these have sold already and I had a lot of fun experimenting with color.



I chained all of the roving into nice little "braids" and used the ragged and excess bits from the ends to spin samples. I wanted to test the Merino and Falkland fiber and see how my dye-jobs behave in action. The singles marl and self stripe a little, but the really interesting part came when I plied the yarns. They come out more heathered and the shockingly bright colors are tamed by the darker patches, even if there aren't many. It's really wild and I love the finished yarn. I'm not a huge fan of barber pole striping in yarn, and this kettle-dyeing technique seems to help prevent it.









This is my latest batch. The first four on the left, hanging on clothes hangers, are my first hanks of yarn. I love all of them and I'm going to have a hard time letting them go. The brown is based on the same colorway as the brown roving above. It's really interesting to see how the colors behave differently on yarn versus roving. The yarn I spun from the fiber is a really complex mix of browns and came out a sort of warm toasted sugar color overall. I'm going to knit swatches of those four yarns to see how much they actually stripe or if they come out dyed more to the stitch.



The reason for the name of this post is that I managed to spill a little turquoise dye on my kitchen floor. I didn't notice until I stepped in it and smeared it across the floor. It wiped up easily and will likely wash out of my (blush) acrylic sock, but it dyed my "protein-fiber" middle toe a nice shade of turquoise blue. I feel fancy.