Dyeing Workshop

At the weekend, I went to a workshop at A Good Yarn, Cleethorpes. It was a "Dye your own yarn" workshop with Jonathan from Chroma Yarns. It was great fun and everyone made gorgeous coloured yarn.

The dyes

The aftermath

Everyone's gorgeous yarns

My finished yarn

Yarn wound into a cake

Hopefully, it'll find itself made into a pair of gloves (for a friend) at some point.

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More Yardage

I've spent a few days recently on my spinning wheel. Here are my latest yarn-like creations:

Remember this? It was some of the Wensleydale/Silk roving I dyed recently - blogged here

It's changed into a 2 ply, 15 w.p.i., 157m/100g - sport weight.

I finished the Faux Cashmere I mentioned last week.

It's 18 w.p.i., 268m/100g.

I've finished the mate to the Teal Shetland - so it's all ready for some fair isle mittens.

It's a very pale green, BFL, 161m, 17 w.p.i. Not identical to it's mate but close enough for the mittens.

I've also made a couple of mini skeins. The sparkle will hopefully become a Christmas tree decoration; 

and the other two are the start of a larger lot of yarns for another fair isle project. The original idea was for some Bandelier socks, so the colours I have are similar but think I might use the same pattern and improvise something else. Don't think I really want make a pair of socks I have to handwash at the moment!

Weekend dyeing

I had a wonderful day at the weekend. I spent the entire day in the back garden with my dyeing gear and my burco. The weather was gorgeous and it was really good to be out in the garden which I haven't done much this year.

It's my first go at handpainting yarns and I made a complete and thorough mess even though I had my gloves and apron I seemed to have more dye on me than the yarn did!

I dyed 3 lots of merino sock yarn (or at least I think it is as it wasn't labelled and from a bargain bin on the bluefaced.com stall)

The yarn turned out like I wanted but I had a few problems with the fleece. I did something wrong somewhere because the pale greeny one was meant to be bright blue so it either needed an extra wash before hand or I didn't put enough citric acid in.

The purple is wensleydale and silk and turned out as intended though.

Dyeing Find

At Woolfest, I bought a dyeing kit from D & T Crafts and I've been amassing all the equipment I'll need (such as gloves, dye pots etc.) when a lucky find turned up. I'd been planning to do most of it on the stove but a Burco Water Boiler appeared! It's from my parents-in-law, they used to keep turkeys commercially and used the boiler for cleaning up; they've moved on to arable farming so it was looking a little lost and forlorn in one of the barns. 

It's been re-appropriated for dyeing. It's quite big so think I could do a fair amount at once. Not sure which technique to try with it but looking forward to some dyeing. I'd bought some lovely undyed rovings from Wingham's when I was there at the beginning of the week - (a very happy coincidence!).