Kiss My Knits!

Holly Jolly!
246 yards DK weight superwash merino wool

When I hold it up to my ear, I swear I can hear sleigh bells. Now come with me back to Sunday, when the most festive yarn in all of Christmastown was born.

Dye day at Jetsyknits’! The perfect time to try out my box o’ PVC pipe, which I have dubbed the Yarnomatic. Previous to dye day, I wound a skein of Bare DK weight from Knitpicks into a ball. I had an idea, and I needed a nice little packet of yarn for it.

On dye day, I laid the Yarnomatic out in one long line with posts sticking up, then laboriously walked around it, hunched over like Igor from Young Frankentstein, wrapping yarn from my pre-wound ball around it as I went.

Turtlegirl76 came to my rescue, taking one half of the Yarnomatic while I took the other. She also offered great suggestions for future configurations, like rotating the joints in the middle and adding shorter lengths of pipe (which I have) to create legs, so I wouldn’t have to kill my back leaning down as I go. I’m also considering making it into a big triangle and standing in the middle to wrap, although that might just make me dizzy.

The yarn was loosely tied at regular intervals. It really should have been tied more often, I think, because we got a little tangling on one end. Once dyed and dried it set itself to right pretty quickly, though. Also, I should have used a different colored tie to mark the halfway point on each side. As it was, I had to eyeball it and I was off just a hair. The red side is 3 yards long and the green is 3 yards, 18 inches long. Eh, close enough. Live and learn.

One side was handpainted with Jacquard emerald, and one side with fire red. The fire red side got a bit of concentrated suspension in a few spots, so it’s not as even as I might like. It’s my own fault for jamming the yarn into a jar of dye in a moment of gleeful abandon. However, it’s not that noticeable. I’m still happy. I’ve since done some research on how to prevent Dye Goo from suspending out in yellow and red, so it led to some learning, which is always good.

Check out the color join! Not a lot of bleeding from one side to the other there! I laid out extra plastic wrap and wrapped the two sides separately, then encased them as one yarn sausage for steaming. It did a good job of preventing contamination from one side to the other.

Unwinding the skein was laborious, since you can’t exactly put a skein that large on the swift. My idea was to put it back on the Yarnomatic and ball it, but it was cold outside and I didn’t feel like reassembling all those pipes anyway, so I strung it over a few bits of furniture in the house and balled it into a conventional ball, then used a swift to reskein it to standard dimensions.

I’m thrilled with how this turned out, and no amount of groaning from the holiday weary souls around me can change that. This would make some cute socks, maybe with an afterthought heel to preserve the striping. I’m excited to knit it up and see how it does.

I’ve got some extra Bare DK weight – I’m wondering what other stripe combos I should do. Or heck, maybe someone else needs some Holly Jolly yarn. It’s only 246 yards per skein, but 246 yards of holiday cheer goes a long way.

Happy holidays, one and all!