Kiss My Knits!

Picked these up at another trade show recently.

Claudia Hand Painted fingering weight in colorway Sharks

…in colorway Eat Your Veggies…

…and in colorway Plumilicious.

These are going to make some amazing socks.

Just one more. With a little purple left over from the previous skein, I thought I’d do one final dye job. Same Universal Superwash Merino Sock colored with Jacquard acid dyes. This is primarily aqua with some purple poured into one section of the dye pot after the aqua had taken up. I’m a big fan of blue.

Used some of the russet that hadn’t completely exhausted to make this coral/brown with purple. The purple uptook faster than I meant for it to, which was the result of overcompensating with the vinegar. Still, no mistakes, just happy accidents, right?

I finally tried out some of Universal Yarn’s Ready To Dye Yarn.

I like it. It came out with a nice russet color. It reminds me of Jane Russell. So that’s what I’m calling it. Jane Russell.

Em asked me to make something for one of her summer tutors who is going to have a baby.

Em requested baby socks and picked the pattern, XO for hugs and kisses. The baby is going to be a girl, but I dyed this yarn for Em when she said she wanted the socks to be light blue. The reason? “Ms. X has green eyes, and if the baby has green eyes too then the blue will look good.”

This kid’s got better fashion sense than I do.

For a break from orange hats, I thought I’d see how some of my handdyed yarn knit up. Not bad!

I was a little reluctant to go outside and photograph this, as I was stung by a wasp earlier today. That sting is one effective countermeasure – it definitely discouraged me from going anywhere near the wasp’s nest. Unfortunately, the nest in one of the clothesline poles, so once the weather turns sunny again, we’ll have to work out a solution. And in the war of wasps versus humans, I have the advantage of being a tool-using animal.

I shook up the turquoise to be sure it was mixed before adding. The result was a good head of foam. It dissipated some before I got the camera.

I decided not to re-dye the alpaca/silk blend that I dyed a couple of weeks ago. However, it was still bugging me too much to actually knit with myself (which means I’ll still have to either overdye it, sell it, or give it away) so I dyed up some more alpaca/silk yesterday. This is a nice silver with lavender notes. Or a lavender with silver notes. Whatever floats your boat. It’s destined to become a lace scarf so I didn’t want it variegated to the point that it would obscure the pattern. So I think we have a winner. I can work with this.

This is the “mocha rage” I dyed yesterday. 100% sportweight wool, dye with Jacquard acid dyes in brown, chestnut, cherry red, red-orange, and black. It turned out all right. By the time I started it up I wasn’t rage-filled anymore, so it did its job. I hadn’t done a brown before, so it was good to branch out. Literally branch, actually, since I suspended part of it out of the dyepot using a large stick from the back yard in order to get two different shades.

This is the second set I dyed yesterday, chestnut and cherry red. It’s Blue Sky alpaca/silk. I want to make a scarf and couldn’t find a color I liked, so I dyed my own. However, this yarn is freaking me out.

I can’t tell what color it is. It’s a little bit darker than it appears in this picture. People who I’ve shown it to seem evenly divided among brown and red and purple. I’m not sure myself. My eye can’t quite resolve it. It’s like one of those rabbit/duck pictures where you see one thing and then you see the other. I don’t think I can make a scarf with it because it’s going to make me nuts to look at it constantly while knitting.

I think I need to overdye it, but I can’t decide whether to go toward brown, purple, red, or some other direction. Thoughts?

Purty handdyes