Yarn dying

I have finally managed some yarn dying this week. The above skein is 150gm of Naturally Sensation merino 8ply. I'm quite pleased with it, now that I have wound it up into skeins, but when I had originally finished I was discouraged.
I used food colours as I have done in the past, but I tried a new and quite interesting technique for setting the colour.
Solar heat, I did this by hand painting the yarn as you would for the steam setting technique and wrapping in clingfilm. But instead of steam setting I lay the skeins in a polystyrene box lined with reflective building paper (aluminum foil would work too) and put it outside in a sunny position and covered with a piece of glass and left it for a couple of days. This works even faster if you have hot sunny days like we have had lately.


The above (out of focus but was closest to colour) pic shows the largest batch I have experimented with 800gm of 10ply Bendigo Woollen Mills Luxury yarn. I love this yarn, and it's really affordable, soft and quite hard wearing. I'm not the only one if you have a look at the many projects on Ravelry.
Now to decide which cardi to knit for winter. A few on my long list are Rosamund's cardi (not sure as this colour is so dark and the the cable details will be lost), Tea leaves, Juliette (8ply pattern) and Kerrera (I'm not sure there enough). Have a look at the links and tell me what you think?


This is the wonderful swift I bought off Julia last month with some xmas money my lovely Mum gave me. It's brilliant you can change the size of the skein and wind it up with ease, it's so much faster than put the skein on the back of a change and hand winding. If you check out her blog you can win one along with a whole lot of other lovely knitty goodies to help support a little girl called Hope who has cancer.
Hope Osborne is a little Wellington girl turning 4 in almost a week who was diagnosed with cancer 2 years ago. Since then she's gone through countless painful and difficult procedures and earned 900 beads as a badge of her journey with child cancer. Please support her and her family in their time of need and head over to Juila's blog and donate.

Summer Yarn Swap

This was the yarn I dyed up for the summer yarn swap, that was organized by the lovely Hannah of Rainbow Child and Red Riding Hood Yarns.

My lucky swap recipient is Kate from Chevgirl. I used berry colour tones for a summer berries theme, added some yummy berry chocolate logs and wildberry tea. I also gifted Kate a pattern on ravelry that I had been looking at for awhile. The sweet Spring Garden Tee by Alana Dakos of the wonderful blog Nevernotknitting.

I dyed 200gms of pure wool with Queens food colouring in the crockpot, wow was it fun and amazing to think what you can do with something as simple as food colouring and vinegar. It was my first attempt at semisolid colours but it didn't work very well as I didn't use enough dye. So I overdyed using the steam method, on the stove.

Creative Space - A fresh batch of Bibs

Today I have been experimenting with a little bit of dying. Well trying to dye opp-shop woolies, the first attempt was in the washing machine with a nice dark green machine dylon dye. Umm maybe it would be a very good idea to read the fine print, at the bottom "does not dye wool". Second try I hope will be more successful, will have to wait and see. I used a denim blue hand dye dylon which does dye wool.

Above is a pic of the custom order for one of my little reversible merino bomber hats. The sweet little model/recipient is in our Kindermusik class which is every Tuesday morning. Tessa loves music and gets very excited each tuesday when I tell her its music today. She has really thrived on it and has great rhythm unlike her parents, hehe.


Another order of Bandana Bibs completed for the website I supply. I have two sizes, 0-12mth and 12mth+. I started making them after we had so much trouble with Tessa's teething rash, they were great as they sit just under the chin catching all that dribble.
I have been trying out my new toy a SNAP PRESS, yay no more bashed thumbs as I hammer on snaps. And much faster too.

Check out more creative spaces at Kirsty's