hand dyed yarn | Mustard Seed Yarn Lab

Tag: hand dyed yarn (page 3 of 5)

Yarn Lab

12.2.11 / Danielle / 2 Comments

I don’t even know where to start. It has been a while since I’ve posted, I know. And every time I look at my StatCounter and see that people are looking at the blog, I feel guilty. But since a few weeks ago, life has gotten CRAZY busy.

I work from home, proofreading, and sometimes it’s really slow and I have extra time and that is when I dye yarn, clean the house, knit Christmas presents, type up blog posts….catch up on life. But since before Thanksgiving, work suddenly got busy. And I let my fulltimers have Thanksgiving weekend off. And the work came in fast and furious, but not many proofers were around to deal with it. Including me. Well, we’re dealing with it now. I’ll have worked almost 50 hours this week by the time today is done. My brain is tired.

I haven’t started Christmas shopping….I have a 4 year old who has asked for everything in every commercial he’s seen. (No, he will not be receiving very much of it but I think I should get him a few things 😉 I have 3 knitted Christmas gifts to finish, and only 24 days to do it. I have about 10 more skeins of yarn to dye before I can take pictures of it all, and upload it to my new Etsy store, which has nothing in it at the moment.
I need to make my tags, of which I have to show you. Here’s one of the 4 I’ve finished so far:

I’m madly in love with it. My husband designed my logo and I’m making the tags with the rubber stamp he had made of it. Mustard Seed Yarn Lab is being birthed! It’s not here yet, not completely, but I figure it will be by the time December is over…I hope.

And can I just say, Yarn Lab is such an appropriate title. You should see what I’ve got cooking today. It’s very complicated…I don’t even know if I can explain it completely, but what I’ve got going right now, as we speak, is probably best described as a debacle. And the whole experiment, well, I would call that a fiasco.

It started with a grand idea I had to make self striping yarn. I had an idea, a picture of a contraption in my head, and I was determined to try it. But how? Well, let’s start with 5 heavy pint glasses on the floor, now how about a wet skein of undyed yarn…now imagine the wrapping of the yarn around the glasses…carefully…caaaaarefully….and now we’re tangled. Tangled, wet yarn. Now imagine me taking the rest of the day to untangle a skein of yarn that is half hooked up to a contraption on the floor. Picture backache and tears, and a 4 year old accidentally knocking over one of the glasses, inciting a temper tantrun from his mother. At 8:30 at night, said mother was done untangling and wrapping, and decided to tie off the different loops of yarn…only to realize this was never going to work.

That mess of yarn sat on my dining room table for a couple of weeks. Sections tied off, stinking of vinegar, waiting for me to do something with it, even if it meant undoing the whole thing and just plain dyeing it. Now here’s the kicker. After I realized this was obviously NOT the way people make self striping yarn, I thought I’d be sneaky and google “How to dye self striping yarn.” I feel like such an idiot. Why I didn’t think of this in the first place, I have no idea. Oh,…there is a MUCH easier way to do it, and rather than explain it, you can google it for yourself. Sigh…

So. The yarn. I decided for my lunch hour today I would show this crazy looking sectioned off yarn who was boss. After all, miracles happen right? Well,…let’s just say I feel like a mad scientist in my yarn lab. Rather than trying to describe the scene that just took place, just go ahead and picture yards and yards of tangled plastic wrap, drips of acid dye, paper plates, plastic cups, rubber gloves, plastic medicine syringes and a mad dye scientist running back and forth 40 times from the dining room table to the kitchen sink. It was not an ideal situation. But now, now my friends, I have a large pot of steaming yarn hanging out in a colander precariously placed on top of the pot.

I can’t wait to see what becomes of my creation. If it were green, I’d call it Frankenstein.

The pink yarn

11.21.11 / Danielle / 3 Comments

Remember this yarn from my last post? The one I said I fixed?

Well, this was waaaay too much pink for me. So I tied off 4 equal portions and re-dipped it in black….and got the yarn on the right, below.

I like it! And the black ended up being a dark purple. It will make a stunning shawl. I think knitted up it may actually have a tweed effect, but we’ll see. And I actually love the yarn to the left of it as well…on my computer screen it is looking a bit washed out, but the color is like chartreuse. It’s a lovely wool/silk blend that will go into my store, as soon as I get it started. I couldn’t wait to see what the dark one would look like wound into a cake, so here it is!

I’m going to have to start researching what shawl pattern might look best with this.

Dye class and spinning

11.17.11 / Danielle / 2 Comments

Last weekend I had plans to go to NY on Saturday to hang out with my sister (Shelly) and come home that night. We were going to take a dye class together. But on Friday, my little sister (Liana) got into a bad car accident and was in the hospital with lots of stitches in her face and a broken orbital bone and broken nose…among other expected discomforts. So I didn’t come home Saturday night, I stayed with her to see if I could be of any help or comfort. As sad as I was for her, I was just so happy and thankful to God that I still have my little sister. Last weekend could have been a LOT worse.

Dye class was fun though. I don’t really feel like I learned anything new, but I DID learn that I don’t really like dying yarn in a microwave, which was a method I hadn’t had a chance to try yet. Here’s a picture I stole from my sister’s blog showing all us ladies in the process of pouring the dyes over our yarn. We were in a super cool room above a bar in Chatham NY. That’s me in the back right corner, and my sister is in the front right.

All the women there were so friendly and fun to hang out with. But I was not happy with the results I got for my yarn. (If you’d like to see Shelly’s yarn results, click here.) First I had this:

It was bulky yarn dyejob gone horribly wrong. My colors turned to mush as we were told to squeeze out all the liquid before putting the yarn in the microwave, so in an attempt to save my skein, I threw on some red and purple, hoping for the best. When I saw it hanging here I thought…hmmmm…maybe it’s not going to be so bad…almost cool? I was wrong.

I don’t like it. It looks like a color blind monkey dyed this. I call it Muck.

Next, I thought I’d go for a purple and red skein. I love purple and red together. But again, when we squeezed out the excess water and dye, I ended up with this:

That’s a whole lot of raspberry and purple, and when I spun it into a skein, the pinkness of it was overwhelming…just too…raspberry. So today, I could not bear it anymore and I took that skein of raspberry vomit and tightly tied off 4 even sections and threw it in a pot of black and boiled 90% of the raspberry right out of it. The result is hanging in the other room right now, drip drying on the rack, and I got exactly what I wanted. I will post a picture of it here tomorrow or Saturday, as soon as it’s fully dry and wound into a skein or a cake. I think you’ll like it. Yes, you.

My third skein also made me unhappy.

Now, I’ll admit, it doesn’t look all that bad in this particular picture. But it was actually blue, teal and white. Is there a worse color than teal??? It’s just offensive really. I was not having this in my house, so a couple days ago I made a pot of what I thought was brown…a yellowish brown, I guess….and look at what happened to this blue/teal skein!

Good Lord! It’s fabulous! Now the above picture isn’t showing just how rich the mix of colors appeared, and it’s actually much more green than this. Try this one:

That’s a little closer to the actual color but still not as rich, and it’s hard to make out just how many hints of different colors show through. It’s a mix of different greens and hints of brown. I’m finding the hardest part of this whole yarn dyeing endeavor is trying to get a picture that’s accurate. I don’t think I’ve been successful once yet, and that’s frustrating, since I want to sell my yarn online and this is the only way people will be able to see each skein. But anyways, I’m seriously happy with it. What do YOU think?

Next, I have some of my hand spun yarn to show off. Can you even believe that fluff turned into the skein you see in front of it??

Now that is one ply of Blue Faced Leicester wool and right now I’m working on spinning the rest of it into a second cake. When done, I will ply them together to end up with a real skein of (hopefully) finger weight yarn. I will be sure to show you when it’s done. It’s a slow process, as I spin on a drop spindle, but I love it. My sister is learning to spin on a spinning wheel and she let me try it out this past weekend and it was sooooo HARD! It always looked so easy when you see other people do it. Nope. Not easy. She tried my drop spindle and felt the same way about it! Ha!

So I’ll do my best to post a picture of how the raspberry skein turned out as soon as it is dry. Make sure to check back in a couple days!