Sunday, February 12, 2006

Dye Success

I’ve been knitting away (in between rug hooking sessions) on T-Man’s latest pair of socks. I’m using Sandnesgarn’s Sisu (80% superwash wool/20% polyamide nylon) and I forgot that it has less yardage than my usual Confetti sock yarn. It’s only 160 m in a 50 g ball so 2 balls is not enough for a large pair of socks. Ok for me maybe, but not for T-Man. So I bought another ball (well 4 balls actually) of this:

It has 3 plies of very dark grey and one of natural white. I call that a ragg wool especially when it’s in natural sheepy colours. I wound one ball into a skein and popped it into a little dyepot to come out looking like this:

To match this perfectly:

Luckily, since I couldn’t remember exactly how much Lanaset/Telana dye I’d used for the first two balls, I just went with my instincts and it worked! I have to admit that I cheated slightly by having the red and black dyes already mixed up due to a long-ago error in volume. (Those evil decimal points just want to trick you sometimes!) So I didn’t have to measure minute amounts of different dye powders, just a single quarter teaspoon. Oh, and the other 3 balls? They will stay undyed and become the tabi socks for the Ninja.

Our Spectrum dye study group had a lovely day yesterday eating and chatting. We didn’t get a lot of monoprinting and stamping done but what was accomplished was really nice. I just worked on my rug though. I didn’t bring any fabrics to stamp on, naughty me. It’s not like I can’t do that at home. I have all the stuff and the workspace if I suddenly get the urge. It's the eating and socializing that counts!

It’s not so sunny today. T-Man has a cold so we cancelled our outing for today. We were going to take his mom out for a walk on the river seawall and to late lunch/early dinner at the Westminster Quay, but it’s been postponed until he feels better. Didn’t want to pass germs onto his mom. Hopefully my immune system is up to the task of escaping this one. But you never know. Meanwhile I don’t get my fish and chips! Darn, I had my heart set on all that greasy goodness and now I have to cook something healthy instead.

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