The Knitting Fiend

Yesterday was a such a bright sunny day; I felt like dyeing! So I did. Now I’ve done dyed (. . . a mess of yarn!)

The first and only time I dyed yarn, tutors were present: I hand painted. This time, my tutors weren’t here, so I did something easier: solid colored yarn. Still, I did do one adverturous thing. I’d heard you can create sophisticated colors by starting with buff colored or greyish yarn, so I decided to search for some undyed yarn in buff or grey tones.

Natural undyed yarns haven’t been “in” recently, so I had a little trouble. Luckily, since I love the Taiga Goat Down, so I checked Taiga out. It turns out they have expanded their choices, I found and purchased a yarn called “Unusual” in shade 1507. (It’s 100% goat down, and costs $5.75 a 470 m a 100 gram skein. )

Shade 1507 turned out to be a taupe color which is a beautiful sophisticated color I could knit up for a nice shawl. But let’s not get side tracked — my intention was to dye the stuff and I was going to dye the stuff.

Still, what color?

I examined the goat down color: taupe. Then I thought “Brownish red is good– like wine or maroon. Brownish blue? Sounds muddy. Brownish purple? Ick! “

Since i had absolutely no experience dying these buff color yarns, I had no idea if I was right; it was just a guess. Still, I thought it best to dye the yarn some “fire red” color.

To dye the yarn, I needed to turn the skein into a hank. Lucky for me, I had this cool thing called a “niddy noddy” around. (Handy, huh? I’d shown Jim one and asked him to make me a 3 yd niddy noddy, and “Voila!”)

Last night, I unwound the yarn onto my niddy noddy. The activity involved a) drinking wine b) watching tv and c) chanting “niddy noddy, niddy noddy” as I unwound and wrapped yarn in a weird double V pattern. Then, using small bits of yarn, I tied the hanks very loosely in at least 8 places, removed the yarn from the niddy noddy, then twisted and folded the hanks. (I tied loosely because I don’t want to tie to prevent the dye from penetrating in spots. )

This morning, no longer under the influence of wine and chanting “niddy noddy”, I was ready to dye. I got buckets filled with liquie Ivory and warm water and soaked the yarn for 10 minutes; I drained the bucket and rinsed in fresh warmish water.¹ Then, I let the yarn soak in warmish water another 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, I prepared a concoction of KnitPicks “fire red” Jacquard acid dye and, following the directions, dyed the trying to get a more or less uniform color. This involved simmering the yarn until the dye was absorbed which took about 30 minutes.

I then removed the yarn from the heat, placed it back in the bucket and let it sit in the garage to cool. Once the yarn was cool, I dunked it in cool water. I noticed no dye dripped off (which is a good thing.) I hung my yarn outside to dry.

Sunday night, I cast on to create a faroese style shawl!

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1. Note: This natural colored yarn contains a lot of lanolin and/or some sort of natural goat oil. Oils are sometimes though not always retained on undyed yarns. US hand knitting manufacturers often remove this oil because the yarn feels softer after the lanolin is removed, and that soft feeling helps move yarn off the shelves.

Because of the lanolin, when the yarn arrived, I knit up a swatch, then washed it the yarn in Ivory liquid clothes soap. The lanolin comes off and the yarn fulls very, very nicely, so if you knit something from this yarn, you’ll find the garment softens dramatically after you wash and block it. When you wash the yarn before dying, the lanolin will come out.