hand dyed yarn | Mustard Seed Yarn Lab

Tag: hand dyed yarn (page 4 of 5)

From scratch!

11.10.11 / Danielle / 4 Comments

Ok, well, not really. But I’m getting closer. My friend asked me to make her a hat like the one I made for Evan, (remember the hat knitted on toothpicks?), but she wanted it to be charcoal gray with a lime green stripe and a white stripe. Now, this hat is made with sock yarn, and 3 different colored skeins of sock yarn would be pretty expensive, so I offered to dye the yarn myself from one bare skein. So I guess starting from scratch would be actually shearing the sheep, carding the wool, spinning and then dyeing it. I’m not quite there yet. But I can dye, and I’m learning how to spin too!

So here we are, looking like a tangled mess, right after coming out of the pots.

Above we have all 3 colors waiting to turn into balls, and below we have 3 beautiful balls waiting to be made into something special. They stare at me while I work on other things….I can see their patience wearing thin.

It’ll be a great project to work on during the long ride we’re going to take this Thanksgiving. They’ll just have to wait a little longer…or maybe I’ll start earlier. After all, I did finish THE SUPER SECRET PROJECT and it’s blocking right now as I type! It’s quite lovely and I don’t know how I’m going to restrain myself from posting the pictures before I give it to its recipient. Must. Hold. Back!

Misc.

10.22.11 / Danielle / 6 Comments

I think it’s been awhile since I last posted, but I have been VERY busy. Busy dyeing all the yarn I ordered, mostly.

I still have 5 more skeins to go, and today I dyed a skein that’s part silk and drying in the other room. And check this out:

This is the last part of my Christmas present from my sister who just went to Rhinebeck! Wow! That’s 4 skeins of Sanguine Gryphon yarn, 3 bags of roving for my new drop spindle and a niddy noddy. I squeal every time I look at it all! Thank you Shelly! So now I’m going to re-skein all my skeins on my new niddy noddy and make them look even better, and I already started working on spinning yarn on my new spindle:

How amazing is that? You can’t tell from my picture but this roving has some sparkly thread in it and it’s gorgeous. It’s not that hard to do but it hurts my back, so I’m going to have to limit myself. With all this fun going on, my Christmas knitting is suffering, and I’m going to have to really put in some knitting hours this weekend.

In non-knitting news, my son banged his face against the coffee table table last night and split open the section above his lips. It was small, but deep and after it had stopped bleeding and he calmed down, we dragged the poor kid to the hospital and ended up getting a stitch in it. He did soooo good. He didn’t make a peep during the whole procedure. When I told him how proud of him we were for being so brave, he said, “I’m not brave, it just didn’t hurt.” Haha! Thank God for Lidocaine. As if that wasn’t a bad enough night, when he finally got to go to bed, he started coughing. It got worse and worse as the night went on and I immediately recognized it as croup. He sounded just like a barking seal. And when I went to check on him at 3am, he was so hot with fever and uncomfortable from the coughing. Sigh…it was a looong night. But today, when I was trying to take a picture of his wound, he posed for me and asked that I take his picture like that, because he looked so cool:

This is Emmet looking cool. (See his cut?) And that is the stupid hat he insists on wearing everyday. He got it from his daycare and he loves it.

Well, enough typing. I’m exhausted from a long night with almost no sleep at all. Goodnight everyone! I promise I will post more pictures of the newly dyed yarn as soon as I figure out how to get an accurate photo of each skein.

My weekend so far

10.16.11 / Danielle / 1 Comment

And I’m including Friday, because even though I was working, I was dyeing yarn at the same time. Here’s some sneak peeks of the making of Autumn Leaves and Midnight Sky :

The first picture is the more accurate one. Tomorrow I hope to take some better pictures, when they’re dry. It takes days to dry. It’s very hard for someone as impatient as myself.

I finished these:

They’re called Easy Handspun Mitts. Just click on that if you’d like the free pattern on Ravelry. They weren’t lying…they were definitely easy and fast, and the Noro yarn makes them sooooo addictive to knit…I’ve already started another pair for me! (These are for my niece.)

And the boys were productive as well:

Mike did all the work and Emmet supervised.

Well, it’s almost 11pm and I still have 2 more skeins of yarn cooling down in the pot. I think they’re going to be stunning. I will post their picture soon. I’m going to throw them on the drying rack and go to bed!