The Knitting Revolutionary

Dyeing days

The dyeing continues. It's funny - compared to the total of what I've dyed and sold over the past few years, this isn't that much... but it sure looks like a lot piled up on the spare bed! I'm loving the long weekend - the only thing I have planned is to go to a hen's night tonight, and the rest of the time is for dyeing, and spinning, and hanging out with my birdy and my boy. Mmm.

Meanwhile, I got myself a very exciting book in the mail this morning (yes, it *is* the morning of anzac day long weekend, I was very surprised). So I've tipped out a pile of spinningy fibrey stash and I'm going to play a bit with felted yarns and maybe coils and that sort of exciting stuff. Eeeeeeeeeeeee!

Advice please! What sockyarn holds dyes well?

I'm hoping that clever people out there can give me a bit of advice.

I still occasionally dye wool, I don't sell a whole lot these days and so I tend to dye for myself mostly. I use Bendigo Woollen Mills yarn for my 8, 10 and 12 ply stuff, and it seems to hold the dye well.

However, their machine wash yarn (sockweight, or 3-4 ply) doesn't hold the colour, and the baby wool (again, 3-4 ply) is too soft for sockyarn. I made a great colourway with blue, green and hot pink, but the pink faded to pale pink on the first wash, AND after 2 washes they looked so badly fuzzed and pilled that they looked worse off than my old hotsocks sockies - which I knitted almost 5 years ago and have worn constantly ever since.

What I'm looking for is something like the regia yarn, but plain white or cream - a proper sockyarn (not babywool or soft merino) that is hard wearing and machine washable, and holds the dye properly! Can anyone in the know help me out here? I'd be quite willing to order the yarn from overseas. I know it's out there but I don't know where.

Bah. Dyeing issues.

Ye gods. It's been a whole week since I updated.

Time's a weird thing, and I suppose everyone knows that. But it still freaks me out a bit when I look at the blog and think it's only been a couple of days, and the last entry was dated 8 days ago. Mmm. And I think that was a forward-dated entry, too. LOL. Now you know my evil tricks that make you think I'm updating regularly! Well, I don't! When I've got a big energy spurt, I type several blog entries all at once, and forward date them to periodically pop up on the blog. So it's probably been more like two weeks. Hehe. All the same in the end, really.

Anyway... I'm posting today because I've got a few issues, darlinks, and I'm hoping that my vast readership of about 30 peeps (hehe actually I have no idea any more, but I'm happy) can tap into their vast amount of experience and knowledge (and I'm not being sarcastic any more, you guys are awesome) and give me a little bit of a tip with a couple of things.

First thing is I have a slight issue with my dyeing. I do plenty of rainbow handpainty type dyeing, and this isn't so much of an issue, because this type of dyeing is unpredictable at best, and any inconsistencies are hidden in the colour changes and the sheer variety of shades and colours within and between skeins. And hand-painted skeins should always be alternated between rows anyway, to allow the differences in skeins to be spread throughout the final completed piece of work.

My issue with dyeing is with my flat shades, which I've only really done for myself. The purple stuff that I dyed for my cardigan (which I'm still occasionally attempting to finish with the final 11 beads) had the usual patchy bits within skeins which I rather like, as it gives depth to the colour and an interesting texture to flat bits on the cardi. I mean, some bits within the skeins are darker or lighter. But overall, it comes to a fairly flat colour, with random darker bits throughout. I do hope that makes sense.

But my last lot of dyeing (here pictured being made into a sweet little cabled jumper for moi) was 9 skeins of green, which I did in the same big pot. Some bits were darker and lighter, and I got the same nifty striation effect as I knitted, and all was going swimmingly until I attached the 2nd skein, and discovered that it was lighter. Not lighter in bits, but the whole skein was just lighter overall than the first skein. I've knitted little swatches from most of the skeins, and it appears that I the colour remains consistent throughout the skein, but some skeins are lighter than others. And this doesn't make sense to me, since they were all dyed in the same pot! And if there were darker bits and lighter bits, it would make more sense if half a skein was darker or lighter, but not the whole skeins. Weird.

So I'm hoping someone may have some tips. My theories are that even though I tried to put the skeins into the dyebath as quickly as possible, the first ones were darker because the water was hotter, and the temperature of the dyebath would have dropped as each skein was place into the bath. Second idea is that since I left it simmering on the stove, the skeins at the bottom of the pot got much hotter and took up more dye that the ones at the top of the pot. I did move them and stir them gently, but of course was quite worried that I'd felt them, so didn't do a whole lot of this.

Any ideas, my brilliant and talented friends???

Colourful stuff from your resident golden-oldy

So I'm sitting at work yesterday, and someone's put the radio station on to the oldy type station, playing cute old songs like Mr Sandman. And it was sort of nice and I'm thinking hey, they're old songs but they're still fun to listen to, and after all half the patients here are seniors anyhow.

And then they played Age of Reason. Um... I had that album in highschool... *aaargh!*

Anyway, I've been playing with overdyeing. I had all this old Cleckheaton Tapestry stuff that I got for $1 a ball from Spotlite ages ago, and while I liked the colours then, they sort of un-grew on me. So out came the paints and buckets, and I played a bit with overdyeing. I like the pink, but the green is nothing short of amazing. Niiiiice!

The original colour is the one on the left. And, hating skeining and winding as I do, I just chucked the balls of wool into the dyepot and squished them enthusiastically to get the dye all the way through. Heh! Et voila... they took hardly any time to dry in the hot Canberra sun while still wound into their balls. *grin* Laziness must actually be the mother of invention. Necessity didn't even get a look in.

Ooh... blokes, men, dudes and boiz

...I just listed a heap of wool on ebay.

And it sold. So quickly, that it's freaky.

Yay!

Anyway, I was just about to type something about my latest colourway, and before I could even post they were gone. Woot!

So my latest colourway is called Gwabegar, and it's bush inspired. I'm starting to do a few more earthy colours, more "blokey" colours, inspired by David Reidy's little blurb on What Men Want and Why The Hell Can't Yarn Designers Make Nicer Blokey Colours. I made Blue Steel (woot Zoolander) and it looks really yummy knitted up, and then I decided to go with some mossy green, bush greens and greys, and came up with Gwabegar. So these are the two new blokey colourways, both of which have already (sorry guys) been sold.

I made my dad's Christmas scarf out of Blue Steel and he loves it. He's been wearing the same old dirty red scarf on his motorbike since I lived at home as a child, so I thought with a sexy red Ninja he really ought to be wearing something a little more stylish. *grin*

So, men, and knitters for men, and anyone else out there with an opinion on the hot topic of men's colours... whaddya think?

New blog for me...

I've finally set up a sales blog, so that I can take direct orders as well as selling via ebay.

Go over to http://monnsqueak.typepad.com/colour_revolution/ and have a look. I've made the colour of the blog itself very plain so that it doesn't interfere with looking at the coloured skeins. Any suggestions for promotion of the site? :-)

sock!

Mmm. Sockage.

I'm loving this new colourway, but haven't thought of a name for it. It's more intense than in this photo, but the colours don't come out true with this camera unless in direct sunlight. So what I'm doing here is testing out how machine washable wool holds dyes. Weird how it's ended up striping. Usually my dyeing is much less regular.

So David gets a pair of socks, and wears them in his vile blokey sneakers on the hottest day imaginable. If his toes turn purple, the wool doesn't hold the dyes.

Diabolically CLEFFER!

The Fair Isle is ready!

Mmm.

It makes me want to actually make something fair isle, even though it's not usually my thing. I have made four sets of wool, and you can buy one if you like from http://tinyurl.com/7hts9 which is the page showing my current ebay listings.

I really struggled with the pricing of it, so I've only listed one for now. I've set it at $120 starting bid, for 23 x 50g balls of wool. (I'm putting a couple of white balls in just in case someone wants to break up the colour a bit). Now, selling hand made stuff, be it dyed wool, knitwear, artwork, is always a difficult thing when it comes to the decision of "how much do I charge for this?"

There are things that I've made which cannot be priced. For instance, a very fine cross stitch which took me about a year to sew. I estimate about 300 hours of work in it - about an hour a day on average, where some days I worked for 3 hours solid, some days I worked an hour and a half on public transport and some days I didn't do any. So if I charged, say, what a kid at Macca's might get paid to offer you fries with everything, like $10 an hour or so, I'd be charging $3,000 for it. Or, if I charged what I get paid at the medical centre, that'd be $6,600. Plus a couple of hundred for the very lovely frame. And whatever the materials cost.

A knitted jumper? Well, let's say you get cheap wool, you can get away with materials for a nice jumper for under $100, the pattern a few dollars depending on whether you've flogged it from the net or actually bought it. That's easy. Once again, the difficult thing is labour. I think (and here I'm just guessing) that if I sat down and went like a crazy thing, I could rustle up a jumper in about 40 hours or so. A full working week. So again, basing a price tag on my current hourly rate as a medical receptionist, $880. Plus the wool and pattern cost.

Know anyone willing to pay these prices? Send 'em in my direction.

This is where my rule of knitting requests came from. People ask you to knit for them. "Oh, that's so nice, if I bought the wool could ya knit me one o' those?" Sure, honey, I'll work for you for free for a week if you'll do the same in return. You're an accountant? Cool, that'll cover my tax returns for the next 5 years. Of course life doesn't work like that, so yeah. Unless you're putting out, you get no knitty knitty from me. Lessons are free, but I don't generally knit on request. Which doesn't mean I don't knit for other people - I sometimes do, but it will be the pattern and the yarn I have chosen for myself as my current project, and I won't tell them about it until it's finished. No deadline, no knitting stuff I don't wanna knit. Which is.... probably why I don't finish anything.Hehe!

But the balancing act is charging something reasonable for something that is hand made with skill and love and thoughtfulness. I always feel torn when I think "what will I charge for this?" For most of my stuff I tend to charge about twice what it costs me in materials, and from this profit pool is taken my ebay fees and my labour. In the end, I probably get "paid" about $5-$8 an hour, depending on what I've been dyeing. The fair isle set was a struggle to price, because it sounds like SO MUCH! But I think it's good value considering the amount of labour that went into it (works out at just over $5 per ball). I'm not sure I'll do it again, I literally spent HOURS winding balls, about 100 balls in total when it was all finished. But... I think it's gonna be worth it. This is delicious quality stuff, and I'm trying to work out whether I'm going to keep a set for myself or not. Hm! Decisions, decisions. In the meantime, it's back to my dreadfully demanding life of going to the gym, dyeing wool, playing warcraft and smooching to my bird. Yay!

Strawberries!

Mmm. I now have strawwwwwwwwberries. This is the first one! They are destined for champagne, I just know it. I've been gardening quite a bit, I'm trying to get some coriander going, and have some rocket seedlings in the kitchen *droooool*

The other thing I've been doing is dyeing lots. My first batch is now up on ebay, so have a look at http://tinyurl.com/7hts9 and see if there's something there that tickles your fancy. Mmm.

I have a fantastic new dyeing project underway, and as soon as the wool dries (tomorrow arvo) I'll be winding it up and getting it into batches. What I'm making is a fair isle colour set, with three shades of seven different colours, so you can have awesome fair isle patterns with matching colours. Mmm. No more trying to match reds with pinks or oranges with peaches or browns with beige. I'm using the same colour dye for each three-shade set, with more dye used for the darker shades and a smidgen of dye for the paler ones. Yummmmm!

The initial batch of olive, logwood and citrus orange looks awesome, and the rest of it (sitting in the bathtub doing the long cool-down) is looking pretty good too.  This first set is of seven earthy sort of colours, and the second set will be pure lurid rainbow colours. Yummmm!

Finally, I got an email today and thought I'd share this to see if the total can't get boosted. Yeah, it's free advertising for this real estate bunch, but if you click on this link and it gets to 100,000 within 4 weeks they're going to sponsor DOCS to have Sydney's biggest billboard for the rest of it. Good cause, huh? Hopefully they'll get it for more than 2 days.

http://www.realestate.com.au/do_something_big_for_kids - click and forward! :D