As well as my first experience with professional dyes, I now have my first experience with laceweight yarn:

Satsuma Lace yarn, dyed by Eskimimi

This solid-dyed 100g of fine lace-weight yarn was actually completed five days ago, but it has taken me that long to hand-wind it into a ball.  Ok, I haven’t been winding constantly all that time of course, but it seems like I have been winding it forever, and I breathed a sigh of long relief when I wound the last 200 yards or so this afternoon.  If it takes that long to wind into a ball, how long will it take to knit? I will cross that bridge when I come to it.

The other yarn I dyed was a fingering weight sock yarn of 75% wool and 25% nylon – my favourite hard-wearing fibre combination for soft yet strong socks.  This is a super-saturated, rich semi-solid range of greens.  It’s a vibrant, rich green and I absolutely love it.

Broccoli Sockoli, dyed by Eskimimi

I’m going to be dyeing a few more skeins for friends over the next few days, but I am also thinking of listing a few yarns on Etsy if I am able to part with them. Every time I look at the rich colours I think of all that I could knit with them, and my mind is alive with all of the colours and combinations, variations and techniques I want to try out on the next skein of yarn.

Of course, it is time-consuming, requires patience, time and concentration, but I realise now why people love hand-dyed yarn – there is just an extra liveliness in a hand-dyed skein that is hard to explain but easy to appreciate.

Hand-dyed

mystery yarn from my early days of knitting

The yarn itself is not unlovely – it should be perfect for the season with its rich autumnal hues, but I am just so useless at working with it.  I have tried many times – I cannot count the occasions on which this has been frustratingly unravelled and put back into the cupboard for ‘another time’.  It was bought when I was but a brand new seedling with my single pair of needles, and I could see all of the possibilities of the forest of knitting laid out in front of me for the first time.

The fibres, the weights, the colours. A yarn shop was like walking into a grotto of jewels, as colours danced from the walls and treasure troves of tone and hue sat in baskets on tables.  The choice was almost endless, and choosing a single colour all but an impossibility.  

the Painted Lady

This was too much… Of course I wanted a ball of yarn that was more than one colour, who wouldn’t? I saw this yarn and thought of Jaffa Cakes and the Red Admiral butterfly dancing around a summer meadow with his Painted Lady.

I didn’t understand what ‘pooling’ was, and this single skein and it’s many attempted blotchy outpourings scared me off of hand-painted yarns as I slowly and painfully learned that lesson many times over. Now – I know that many knitters love pooling – there is a long and on-going thread on the Ravelry Knitting and Crochet forums that will serve as proof of this fact, but it’s just not for me. I like to make the decisions with my knitting, not let the yarn decide what is going to happen, but I’m trying to find a compromise with this skein. It’s been my companion for long enough now for us to have reached a compromise, I feel.

I have asked if it would mind applying itself attractively to the Marialis End-to-End scarf from 101 One-Skein Wonders essentially a very simple feather and fan scarf with a moss stitch border. It’s not too pretty at the moment, but I’m hoping this is just the misshapen and lumpen caterpillar that it will unfurl its regal wings like a Painted Lady when the time comes for it to be blocked. Either that or turn into some Jaffa cakes – ether one would suffice.

Designed to help friends and family take care of your hand knits

Here are some handy gift tags to help ensure that your hand-knits have a happy future when you give them as gifts. These small gift tags can be printed onto normal A4 white card and folded down the centre line. The front features a short message and a bright ball of yarn and knitting needles (each sheet has four different colours, so there’s on to suit any recipient) and the reverse has a number of fields for you to fill in that will help the recipient of your gift to care for it for years to come. The inside can be left blank for your own message or additional information, and there’s room for you to stitch a spare button to the inside of the card if you have used any on your knitted item, so that spare button and care instructions can always be found together.

You can view and download the file here to save to your desktop and print any time you want to give the gift of a hand-knit. I plan to make a set for crocheted items and also some more Christmassy-themed ones, soon.

The brevity of this post is due to me having caught the ‘flu.  Please send virtual Lemsips.

^{PS: my apologies to anyone who has had trouble getting the download to work in past months – the download location seemed to be temperamental and intermittent, but it should be working fine, now.}