The dreaded "S" word

Last week at WHMU(WHSKAL), I swatched. Which is something that happens pretty rarely around here, so I thought I'd babble about it a little bit.


Usually I don't swatch. My gauge is usually pretty close to the recommended gauge on ball bands, so for things like socks I don't swatch. I don't swatch lace. I don't swatch for scarves or mittens or hats. In fact the only thing I do swatch for occasionally is a sweater.


Typically I'll start with a sleeve if I'm worried about the gauge and check that after a few inches. But if it's something that for which gauge is really important, I'll do a swatch. Or a yarn that I have no information on for appropriate gauge. Or if I'm not sure how the yarn and the pattern will work together, I'll do a swatch.

I've been wanting to do Manon for a while now (Rav link). And since it's another Norah Gaughan funky construction type of thing, I figured swatching would be in my best interests. So I threw the newly dyed Italian yarn into a bag along with three needle sizes and headed for Whole Foods.


Three needles sizes you ask? Yup, three sizes. Because nothing pisses me off more then knitting a gauge swatch with a particular size and then finding out that it's wrong. So I use multiple sizes on the same swatch and then pick the one that works best after washing/drying.

For this sweater the pattern calls for US size 9 needles. Usually I would try to bookmark the needle size (i.e. use one size smaller and one size larger), but I couldn't imagine that I would need a US 10 for this, so I took US 7/8/9 as my needle range.
Recommended gauge for this project is 18 st/24 rows for 4 inches. I cast on 26 stitches with the 7s, knit about 4 rows in garter stitch and then started working in stockinette stitch, keeping 3 stitches on each edge in garter. After a while, on a wrong side row, I knit 7 stitches. After a while more, I figured I had enough to be able to check the gauge, so I knit one entire wrong side row, and then switched to the 8s.

click for notes

The process proceeded as above except that instead of knitting 7 stitches in the middle of that stretch, I knit 8, and so on (9 stitches with the size 9s). This makes it very easy later on to figure out what needle size I used for which section of the swatch, without having to rely on an easily lost piece of paper. The swatch is finished with several more rows of garter stitch. I finished this one easily that night, and tossed it into a cold bath when I got home (although I did start the sweater before measuring the blocked swatch - thankfully the gauge didn't change!).

click for more notes

I'm happy to say that, not only was my gauge spot on with the US 9s, but the swatch didn't bleed at all, proving that my improvised solar dyeing/steam setting of the dye worked pretty well. It is slightly variegated, which looks just gorgeous when knitted up. And I've got a gauge swatch that tells me how the yarn works on 7s and 8s too, just for future reference.

Large turkeys

In my ongoing quest to attain dye-goddess-hood, I've been scouring local thrift stores and eBay for a crock pot. Actually, what I really wanted was this, but there was no way I was going to pay close to $100 for something to play with (my Yankee-Puritan heart shrivels up a little bit just thinking about it).

Last week I stuck a gold mine. There, on Craigslist, was an 18-qt roaster oven, brand new, never used, for $25. Several emails and a few hours later, I was the proud owner of an important dyeing tool. But the fun really started when I took it home.

Devil helped me unpack the box, and then decided to test out the capacity.

Boo was more interested in chocolate chip cookies, but decided to try it out herself to see what all the fuss was about.

I'm not sure it was her thing. Suffice to say, an 18-qt roaster oven will hold either an average size 3.5 year old, a largish 1.5 year old, or as much undyed fiber as you can shake a stick at. Like that merino hiding in the back there,

and all that stuff around the speaker on the left there,

not to mention the two pounds of Targhee I have sitting around. Whee!

Fun with dye

Last summer I bought a bunch of acid dyes thinking that I would start doing some dyeing. And then I bought an bunch of undyed top and had great plans for doing my own colorways to spin.

And then, predictably enough, life got in the way and I never got around to it. About a month ago, I came across a thread in the Norah Gaughan fan group on Ravelry about a celebratory sweater - she is designing a sweater for the group to knit as a free pattern. She posted a schematic and I decided to paw through the stash and see if I had anything appropriate.

I found this yarn I got in Italy a couple of years ago and thought “Wow, that might be perfect if only it were a slightly different color.” One thing led to another and I found myself some time later hovering over the stove with lots of little jars with 1 oz samples of yarn/top bubbling away. Now I’ve got a notebook filled with dyed samples, and I decided to give the yarn a try.

Click on this picture to see which color I was aiming for

I pulled out the Italian yarn and got to work.

Now, that there one of two skeins of this stuff, resulting in 815 g of worsted weight yarn. I do not have a pot the appropriate size that I can donate to the non-foodsafe dyeing cause, nor did I want to drop umpteen bucks on something just for this one experiment. Instead I went to the local Target and got myself a large plastic box. Since I live in the South, and it is 90 degrees until November, maybe I could do this outside.

I soaked the yarn with the appropriate amount of vinegar (according to Deb Menz, Dyeing Goddess Extraordinaire) and a whole whack of water. Technically it was supposed to be 31.87 liters, but I didn’t have that much distilled stuff on hand so I just filled up the tub about halfway with the hose and threw the yarn in to soak.

Then I pulled the yarn out and added the dye directly to the soaking bath. Deb Menz has very specific formulas for the amount of water needed per dry weigh of yarn/fiber, but I’ve seen more then one other person say that the amount of water isn’t the critical factor, so I decided to wing it.

Devil wanted to help

I put a big piece of plywood and a Crepe Myrtle log on top to keep out inquisitive squirrels and children and left it overnight.

Much to my surprise, I came out the next morning and found this:

I knew from my 1 oz experiments that with this particular formula, the turquoise didn’t exhaust completely, but I was shocked to see how much of the dye had exhausted!

But...I rinsed the yarn multiple times, and found that it was still loosing a lot of the blue/purple dye. So I put it back into the dye bath/rinse water and added more vinegar and left it for a couple of days.

Then I pulled out each skein individually and wrapped them in plastic bags and steamed them in my very large lobstah pot (which gets lots of use down here, let me tell you). I figured that the dye had gotten into the yarn in the outside step, but still needed to be heated to complete the process.

It seemed to work. So now I’ve got 815 g of dark blue yarn with purple undertones. It turns out that the NG pattern calls for DK weight yarn (perfect for the bag of purple Silky Wool I have hanging around), so this will get to be something else. But I'm definitely more excited about it now!

Yarn School

Where to begin? Oh, ok, maybe with this...

Or this,

Or this.

Suffice to say, I had a good time. Friday was dyeing and fiber prep. I've got more photos here if you need more details on what I dyed, but Friday morning was a whirlwind. I did 3 lbs of fiber in 3 hours. Of course, it makes a huge difference when you have a Dye Fairy around to mix up the dye and do all the rinsing for you. Clearly I'll have to train my kids to work a salad spinner and put them to work.

Then we headed to Alpacas in Wildcat Hollow for lunch. I almost took this guy home with me,

but settled for some unwashed locks and processed roving instead.

Friday afternoon, I was introduced to hand carding and drum carding, and got to try real woolen spinning. Whee! I made some mini-skeins from hand carded rolags, and then spun up a batt that I made on the drum carder.

Definitely fuzzier and loftier then my usual spin.

I spent most of my time spinning up the 4 oz that Adrian stuck in our goodie bags into this:

Some incredible Corriedale, dyed with brown, burgundy, chartreuse and orange. Sounds horrible in print, but the top was incredibly beautiful. Unfortunately I threw it on the wheel too quickly to get a picture of it, but there may be some over at the Yarn School Flickr group.

Saturday was the big spinning day. We had demonstrations on different drafting techniques, plying, spinning novelty yarns. Nikol and Jennifer also talked about raw fleece and how to pick a good one, and got one corner of the gym very sheepy smelling with piles of fiber all over the floor. I was intrigued enough to get some hand cards to play with, but I figure I can hold off on a drum carder for a while yet. Between the goodie bag, the alpacas and the dye lab, I have enough fiber to last me for quite a while!

Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of the goats or bunnies (some pictures here) who came to visit on Saturday, but they were very cute and very soft, and thankfully I didn't have too much cash left by that time. Sunday morning I was up at 6:00 am to head back to the airport in Kansas City. I got back here, Ironman picked me up with the girls, and we dropped him off at the international terminal to go to Peru. It was a great trip, if exhausting, and I'm so glad I got a chance to hang out with some other spinners and try some new techniques. If we're still in country next year, I might have to think about going back.