Lots of dyeing pics

I had adelivery of BFL sock yarn and laceweight yarn yesterday. It was only a small order, aobut 10 skeins of each just to try it out.

So I decided to dye the sock yarn tonight and to try to dye a 100gr each of the fibres (shetland, merino and bfl).

Here's how the day went:

As it was lovely and sunny outside I decided to use our picnic table in the garden. So I carried all my supplies outside. Made up all hte dye solutions in the kitchen.

Doens't it all look neat and colourful:

I'd planned to write down teh colours I was using and dye all skeins individually and photgraph them as I'm starting to work on some regular dye recipes.

Here's skein 1:

and skein 2, using a bit of a random technique, which consisted of squrting turqoise and yellow dye randomly until whole skei nwas covered.

Skein 3

I had decided to dye each skein separately, using proper hadn painting techniques. I'm not too keen on ths method of dyeing and I can't do it in teh kitchen due to the mess it makes ubt it's fine for the picnic table. Then I realised what hte time was and that I had to be at afriends house in less than an hour. So away went the squrtie bottles and out came the bowls.

The reaminding skeins

Then the fibre, it all looks different here before microwaving:

Not quite sure what happened to the colour after rinsing

I think I need to do some research into how to dye fibre properly. I'm happy with hte result but what happened to hte blue bits. And the colours are a lot paler than I'd expected. I did it the same way as Idye yarn. More practice needed.

And here's the dye area once I'd finished:

Not quite as neat as it was when Istarted. Empty bottles and bowls scattered everywhere. Water everywhere. And most of that wet stuff on the floor is water rather than dye, apart from the red bit on the left.

Rushed clearing up and getting all hte yarns microwaved, rinsed and hung out.

Then a quick lunch, change of t-shirt, toilet and a spritz of perfume and ran out the door to visit my friend, Clare. Two of my other friends were there too and we had a Cornish Cream Tea - Yummy and sat in the sunshine in the garden and had a lovely chat.

Oh and this came in the post this morning

Hipknits aran and dk silk which I won in a charity auction run by Piglottie. Wasn't I lucky. The yarns are stunning, especially the dk (light blue/grey - it's like silver). I may do a Clapotis with hte aran and I'm thinking of doing a lace shawl with hte dk.

No spinning news today as I basically havne't done any since yesterday. But I'm curling up on the sofa with my knitting and a tub of Ben & Jerry's and a Julia Roberts film so may do some spinning then.

Watch out for an Etsy update tomorrow or Thursday - most of the BFL (keeping a couple of skeins for myself) and some more merino which I found in a cupboard earlier. Just needs re-skeining.