Posts tagged Yarn
Swifts and Winders
Oct 25th
If you work with yarn a lot, you understand that a yarn swift and a ball winder are two incredibly useful and important tools to have. If you don’t have either, you want them. If you have them, you wouldn’t give them up for NO ONE. If you have one that doesn’t work very well.. that’s frustration right there.
I have a winder that isn’t working as well as it should. Which frustrates me because lately it has been winding some UGLY center-pull balls. Lopsided, loose… bleh. Frustrating! My swift was made for me by my husband. It’s not the fanciest, but it does the trick and sure beats wrapping it around my knee or the back of a chair like I used to.
Now if I had my druthers (I’ve never had the opportunity to use that word in a blog post before. I’m so excited!), I would get a “squirrel cage” swift. Have you ever seen one of those? Google it. And then drool. It’s a vertical swift and you can attach your winder to the top so it’s one, contained unit. Stick it in the corner out of the way and super easy to pull out when you need it. I’ve read countless accounts of people who have these swifts that say they wind all the skeins in their house when they get them, they’re so easy (and fun!) to use.
So yeah. One of those would be nice.
I saw an electric ball winder at Joanns from Boye and that was mighty tempting. Electric! No cranking! AWESOME. But then, I don’t trust Boye so much (needle snob) and what if something got tangled? You’d have a heck of a mess to sort out. Believe me, I’ve had to sort out some mighty scary yarn messes and that is NOT FUN. So maybe just a quality winder, like the ones that Royal makes. Or some of the custom ones I’ve seen on Etsy and around the web that allow you to wind BIG skeins. My winder is from KnitPicks and while the price was VERY right and it sure beats nothing at all, it makes those darned ugly yarn cakes. And makes me want to chuck it across the room on many an occasion. But I will admit it has gotten some VERY heavy use.
But yeah. Need a new one. OH yeah.
So if you knit, dye yarn, spin yarn, etc and so forth: what do you use? Do you like your swift? Hate your winder? I don’t want to hear from the people who don’t have either and see nothing wrong with not having either because I can’t relate to you people. No offense. But I question your judgment.
A Time to Dye
Mar 12th
It’s pretty much true of any knitter. We have a serious vice. A yarn vice. I just love gorgeous yarn. Unfortunately, gorgeous yarn is rather spendy and I can’t quite afford any for myself yet. Luckily, I get to work with a lot of gorgeous yarn via my YYMN clients. Still, it would be nice to have some beautiful yarns of my own.
This leads a knitter to think about dying. No, not DYING, but dying yarn. Lion’s Brand sells some wonderfully cheap wool yarn in a natural/undyed color called, “Fisherman’s Wool” and it’s universally known as a great yarn to practice dying on. I’ve acquired two skeins of the stuff myself and have had a great time playing with it.
First, I used strawberry lemonade kool aid, black cherry kool aid and really strong coffee. I tried my hand at handpainting but that was a big ol FAIL. I didn’t take proper precautions to ensure the colors did not run together so… they ran together. Oh well. I knit a soaker out of it that I finally finished last night (why is it that I can knit all these fabulous things but never find time to knit for my own children?).
Next, I just did a regular kettle-dye with grape and cherry kool aid mixed together. What came out was a beautiful, variagated (and slightly gradient) plum color. I would like to do a skirty for Evie with this. I can’t wait to see how it knits up. I must make time! At any rate, this method was a LOT simpler (and cleaner too!).
Next, I branched out into using Wilton’s cake dyes. It’s basically gel-based food colorant and is pretty potent stuff. You can buy a box of 8 colors, each in 1/2 oz. jars. You have to add vinegar to the dye, unlike the kool aid, but it works. I wanted to try high concentrations of all the colors. This was a variation on handpainting but again, I didn’t take very good precautions against running together and the black, red and orange ran together something awful (it’s hard to even make the red out in this one!). Still, it’s very colorful and I’ll be interested to see how it knits up.
And, most recently, I did a dip-dye using Wiltons again. This time I used leaf green, royal blue and violet. I overlapped the blue and green a little in order to produce a deep teel color and it worked beautifully. The colors came out wonderfully vibrant and again, I’m very interested in seeing how this knits up.
I’m tempted to put this (as well as the rainbow yarn and perhaps even the plum) up in my available yarn gallery for prospective clients with a strong caveat that it IS just Fisherman’s wool (nothing fancy) and that I have no idea how the colors will knit up. The last skein, for instance, I have a feeling will pool something awful since the color repeats are so long.
Experimenting with yarn dying is a lot of fun and very addictive. You have to be prepared to embrace what happens though, as sometimes (most times?) what results isn’t what you expected. I’ve got a skein of white Cascade 220 soaking in a lanolizing bath right now that I’ve just kettle dyed with pink, orange, red and yellow. I’m also toying with the idea of dying my own trim skeins in the future as well (for instance, I need to find some sky blue for a future custom and it’d be kind of fun to just dye that myself).
Who knows, I may even branch out to real acid dyes like the “big time” dyers! I doubt I’ll ever be very good at it, but as long as I enjoy it, that’s what matters, right?
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