Mustard Seed Yarn Lab

Rain rain go away!

The above pictures were a few weeks ago when the sun was shining and we barely needed sweatshirts. It feels like a long time since I’ve been warm, and this rain is not helping….and there’s two more days of it coming. Sigh….I can feel my motivation melting away with the rain.

BUT…I have been getting some dyeing done in between the craziness that has become my current life. Craziness, you ask? Well, I apparently have a shoulder injury of some sort, most likely brought on by Extreme Knitting….(when I hear those two words in my head, they’re spoken by the guy who advertises monster truck shows with a really deep, booming voice.) I’ve been getting physical therapy twice a week and now I need an MRI soon because nothing seems to be helping so far.

I also got myself a new full time job! Yaayyyy!! I love the work from home proofreading job, and trust me, I’m sorely going to miss working from home and making my own hours, but the money was not enough to get us by anymore and the hours were becoming too unstable. So starting next week, I’ll be in a new job, working regular hours and commuting again. I’m also keeping my proofreading job part-time AND I will have my Yarn Lab to attend to as well. So life is about to get much more complicated, but hopefully more fruitful, too. Each weekend is filled with birthday parties, starting last weekend and going all the way through to mid June.

Despite the dreary weather, which seriously reeks havoc with my motivation, I have been dyeing some yarn and roving. Denise, an old friend who I’ve known since middle school, asked if I could make her some blue and green yarn. She wanted a darker blue and green, because although it’s for a baby blanket, she’s hoping the little boy will be able to keep it long past his baby years. She even sent me a picture of the type of blue and green she wanted:

So I accepted the challenge and came up with this:

I call it Planet Earth. It’s so hard to get an accurate picture of color. As you can see, it looks a little different in each picture, but I think it’s closest to the top picture.

After sending her the pictures and getting her OK, I sent them on out to her, and they’re becoming a very special blanket for a lucky little man.  She promised to send a picture when she’s done, and when she does, I’ll be sure to post it here.

I realized how much I enjoyed that; dyeing something specially requested. What a fun challenge!  I would be glad to do that for anyone else wanting something specific.

I liked the blue and green together so much, I decided I wanted something like that for my shop and made a more vibrant version:

I call it Peacock….for obvious reasons. It’s in my Etsy shop, if you’d like some.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m reading the Game of Thrones series, and I’m enthralled. They are the most fun books I’ve read in a looooong time, and each book seems to get better and better! Well, I just finally received my shipment of sparkly yarn and roving. What does this have to do with A Game of Thrones? Well, I’d had a special idea in my head ever since I first ordered it… that I wanted to dye a skein of yarn that was sparkly like snow, and I wanted it to be in the colors of Winterfell,  home to the Starks. Their sigil is a grey direwolf on a white background. I pictured this yarn in my head and exactly what it would look like for about a month before I finally received the yarn I needed to make it happen. And Voila! I am proud to present Winterfell:

It is so hard to see the sparkly silver thread woven into it in pictures, but trust me, it has a subtle glitter  that really does look like fresh fallen snow.

It’s a Superwash Merino/ Silk/ Nylon/ Silver Poly mix. I am in love with it.

I only dyed three in this batch, but this one should be easy enough to recreate. I loved it so much I even dyed some sparkly roving in the same colorway for A Loom With a View in Newburyport, MA. No pictures yet- it’s still drying.

So that’s all for now folks. I’m going to go into hibernation and hide under my covers if I don’t start to see some sunshine soon.

So, I had last Friday off, and I promised some pictures of what I did all day. I started off by unwrapping a pound of Alpaca/Merino wool.

Then I weighed it……

….separating it into 4oz balls:

Then I soaked it in a water/citric acid mix for 30 minutes:

And layed it out over Saran Wrap over a tupperware top:

The above picture is both of those balls you saw. So it’s 8oz layed out evenly, waiting for dye.

I squirt the dye onto the roving with squirt bottles or a syringe. Here it is half done…..

This Aplaca roving is about a quarter of the thickness of the usual roving I dye, and it was sooo much easier to get the dye spread evenly throughout the fiber.

After I apply about 2 colors, I have to drain the excess water into the sink, hence putting everything on top of a movable tupperware cover. For the one above, I wanted a mixture of earthy colors. It easily takes me an hour or more just applying dye….this thin roving went quickly as I didn’t have to struggle so badly to get the dye soaked through.   When complete, I pull up the Saran Wrap from the edges and just wrap it into a tube-like shape, place in a colander and steam it for 30 minutes in a large pot. Below you can see it cooling off outside:

The roving is wrapped in the colander at the bottom of the picture. The pot at the top contains different roving I dyed that same day in a different way.

I have a sad story about the roving at the top. But first, would you like to see how the Alpaca turned out?

The two on the left are the ones you have been looking at pictures of. You may be thinking it looks quite different than you expected…..me too! I am always surprised to see how different roving looks when it dries. It’s so much darker when wet, and misleading. But this time, I’m happy with the final product. I dyed the blueish-gray one the next day and I love them both. The Alpaca is super soft and fluffy, and I’m itching to spin them into yarn myself.

So, remember how I said I had a sad story about the other roving? Well, it started out a beautiful mix of Merino and silk…like melted butter. So soft and slippery and wonderful I think it was more fun to rub against your face than to actually spin. I’ve dyed it many times before, always in the way I showed you….laying it out, squirting the dye onto it, steaming it…but this time I had a better idea. This time I decided I might get more even distribution of color if I kettle dyed it, like I do the yarn.

I soaked it:

And then I dyed it in the pot, making mostly 2 different colors for this one:

Then I took the pot outside to completely cool down before rinsing:

Same thing with the other, which I decided to dye 3 different colorways, first starting with red and yellow/beige:

Then adding green and letting cool down:

And when they were done, I was extremely happy with the results. Squeaky, jump up and down happy with the results. I must embarrassingly admit, there was some patting myself on the back when I saw how beautiful these came out. Strong color, evenly spread throughout the thick roving….I really thought I had this down.

Lovely, no?

Well, I’m not completely sure, and I’ll be sure to bring them to my knitting group tonight to have the spinning experts check them out, but I’m pretty sure I felted them. MAYBE not the blue/green one, but I’m fairly sure the red/green one is useless. How? I don’t know!! I was so careful. I handle them gently. I don’t let them touch water colder than they are. I wait for them to completely cool down in their dyebath before I even think about rinsing. What went wrong??  I’ve never had this happen when I steam the roving. My bright idea didn’t turn out to be such a good idea after all. For now, I will go back to painting the roving and steaming it. I might try kettle dyeing it again sometime, but maybe not with such expensive roving.

I have more yarn to show you, including a couple specially requested skeins I dyed for an old friend, but this post is pretty long, so I’ll save that for another time.

This is what I looked at all day. I sat at my dining room table, hands poised over my keyboard, staring out this window at my very favorite pink blossomed tree. Sun streamed through my house and the temperature was perfect outside and I DID NOT WANT TO WORK.

My mind was jumping back and forth to everything else I wanted to be doing and my heart was lounging in a big box in the corner of the room. A big box filled with 50 skeins of white yarn and 1 lb of roving. All I want to do is touch it. Spread it out all over the table and lay my head on it. And it scares me a little…all that WHITE. So many pounds of fiber just waiting for me to change it, hopefully into something beautiful, something other people will love. And more is coming. I’m expecting 10 more skeins with sparkle and 2 more lbs of roving, also with sparkle. The sparkly fiber was on back order, but should be with me next week and when I think of it, I squeak a little with excitement.

I have more exciting news. My favorite local yarn shop in Newburyport, A Loom with a View, has agreed to sell my roving! Betsy is the store owner, and she said she wants at least two of each colorway I make for her. So I’ll be dyeing in double batches. I started one colorway on Sunday. Here are the 2 rovings laid out and ready to be dyed, below.

And here is the finished product:

They should be almost exactly the same, as I painted them together as one. I haven’t named this colorway yet. Any ideas anyone want to throw out there? Opinions? Feel free to leave me a comment! I have to be honest, I’m not in love with this colorway. I just don’t like blue and pink together, and there’s more blue and pink than I had originally intended. None of the colors came out as dark as I had hoped either. I will do better with the next ones. I’m sure there is someone out there who these will appeal to.

I have not gotten too much knitting done. Here is where I’m at with the Juneberry Shawl:

And here is where I’m at with the Glynis socks (which is a torturous pattern, btw):

The other red socks have been put on hold until I can finish either one of these.

I’m done with A Clash of Kings and onto A Storm of Swords. My GOD those books are horribly addictive. Sometimes there are nights where I don’t even want to knit, I just want to go in bed and read. I know! Blasphemy, right?? I can’t help it. George R.R. Martin is brilliant!

It’s late now, and I just ate a chocolate chip cookie that I was craving all day (I just baked them at 10pm) and I think it’s time to go to bed and read. Today was my Friday. Tomorrow I have off completely, and I will spend the day dyeing fiber. I’ll take as many pictures as possible and try to give you all an idea of how it comes out. I’m a very slow, meticulous dyer, so don’t get too excited. A day of dyeing may only bring forth a few skeins or a few rovings, but I’m sure going to try and be quicker. I’m a girl on a mission. Not only do I have my Etsy shop to stock, but I have two shops willing to sell my roving, and I don’t want to disappoint. I better get my butt moving! Fiber, here I come!

YAWN…after I get some sleep.  🙂