This yarn was a dyeing disaster. I was aiming for Garden In Spring, one of my favourite colourways, and the colour just went all wrong on me. I pulled it out of the dyepot and… Oh no! The pinks were crazy-bright, the greens were just plain ugly, and the purples totally non-existent. I have a picture of it… I can’t even show it to you, it was that awful. It was embarrassing.
I set it aside and decided not to think about it for a few days.
When I finally went back to it and turned it over in my hands (cringing, cringing the whole time), I realised what I wanted to do with it. I thought I knew the shade that would salvage it. I mixed my colours and in went the yarn. And a little while later, this is what I lifted out…
I had hoped to salvage it — instead, it has been saved. It came out so much better than I could have hoped!
There’s one skein in Astrid DK and one in Celeste Fingering weight. And now I just have to decide if they go in the shop or… if I keep them for myself!!! I may have to think about this for a spell.
SpaceCadet yarns have been featured in an Etsy Treasury several times now, and each time I have been absolutely delighted to get the news. There is nothing quite like having your work choosen by your fellow Etsians and highlighted right there on the screen to make you feel all warm, right down to you toes.
But the interesting thing is that, so far, every time my yarns have been included in a Treasury, it’s been the Freshly Cut Grass colourway that’s been picked — every single time! And that’s great, because it tells me that the green I created for that colourway is as eye-catching to others as it is to me. But at the same time, I couldn’t help wondering why none of my other colours were ever chosen — or if they ever would be.
So you can imagine my surprise when I clicked on the link in an email today and found that it was not Freshly Cut Grass but instead Cold Waters that had been chosen for the “I Feel Like a Blue…” Etsy Treasury. I believe I actually let out a whoooop, I was that excited!
Ladies and Gentlemen, I proudly present you Cold Waters, the newest Etsy Treasury star in the SpaceCadet lineup…
Tucked away in the description of my yarns, right down there in the last paragraph, are these words: “Each item is individually hand-dyed by the SpaceCadet, using professional grade acid dyes which are mixed by hand from primaries”. That last bit is really important to me — mixed by hand from primaries. Every colour you see in my yarns and fiber has been created by hand, conjured up from only the primaries and black. It’s both the entire reason that making hand-dyed yarns excites me so much and the source of more than a little pride for me.
I see a colour in my mind (or, more usually, several colours together) that I know I want to dye and I start dissecting them. If it’s a purple, is it a red purple or a blue purple? If it’s a darker shade, I gauge how much black is needed to darken it. If it’s lighter, I work out the dye-to-water ratio it requires. And then I calculate in the personality of the fiber — every fiber takes dye in its own unique way, so the same colours can come out wildly different. And taking all that together, I mix up the dyes in the way that I think is going to create the colour I see in my mind, submerge the yarn, and… wait.
And the moment that I pull the yarn out again, and see whether my calculations — and my instinct — were correct, that is the most exciting moment in the whole dyeing process. When I get it right, I go a little wild, grabbing friends, family, any passers-by and saying, “Look! Look! this is the colour I was going for and this is what I got!”
Thinking abou this the other day, I wondered if all this excitement wasn’t really a bit ridiculous…? I mean, really, it’s just colour. Painters do it all the time, don’t they? And they not only mix their own colours but then go on to create something with them. They don’t just sit there crowing over all the little puddles of colours they’ve created on their palettes!
But then I realised that, unlike painters, when I mix my dyes, I’m doing it blind. The colours in the water are sometimes a good indication, but often not. And besides, the insides of the dyepots aren’t white so what I see in them is always distorted anyway. No, there’s no way to know if the colour is right until the yarn goes into the water. Dyeing is a one-shot deal.
So when I pull the yarn or fiber out of the dyepot and it’s exactly the colour I had envisioned, it’s pretty darned exciting. For this yarn, I imagined cornflowers, that lovely soft violet-blue that seems to be everywhere this time of year.
Merino and Silk Laceweight Yarn in Cornflowers
When I lifted the yarn out of the dyebath, I knew I’d nailed the colour. And, yeah, I am really proud to be able to say I mixed these colours by hand from primaries.
The runners-up, who each get 2oz of beautiful hand-dyed BFL fiber:
Victoria Fassano
GalesKnits
And the skein of my hand-dyed sock yarn goes to:
Cindy Petty
Congratulations! Please email your street address to spacecadetcreations (at) gmail (dot) com, using the email address you subscribed with, and I’ll get those sent off to you right away.
And thank you to everyone who participated and helped make this giveaway such a roaring success!
The May Giveaway has come to a close and I am just overjoyed at the response — so many people subscribing, tweeting, friending, and commenting about my yarn and fiber. It’s such a help to me to hear everyone’s thoughts and feedback. Thank you all so much! I now have to tie up all the extra entries with the subscriptions and I am presently fighting off a very nasty cold and fever, so it will take me a few days. You can expect the winners to be announced near the end of the week.
In the meantime, let me share with you what I pulled out of the dyepot yesterday. The colours are so rich and delicious that I just want to fall into it headfirst. I simply could not get the camera to really capture the tones of this yarn but, here, have a look…
When the grapes have been harvested and gathered into great piles at the end of each row, and the piles have been collected and taken to the winery, what is left in their place is a ruby-red mark where the sheer weight of the bounty crushed the succulent grapes and the dark juice escaped and ran down, leaving that beautiful, telltale stain — deep as burgundy in some places, soft as a rose in others — against the yellow-brown of the dry, sun-baked earth.
Each skein is over 100g of Superwash Merino in a wonderfully soft 3-ply, fingering weight yarn. Two skeins available, sold separately.
Fiber Content: 100% Superwash Merino
Weight: Approximately 3.7oz / 105g (approximately 490 yards per 100g)
Colourway: Vineyard Stain, 100530-001
Care Instructions for the final item: Hand or Machine wash, Lay flat to dry.
Each item is individually hand-dyed by the SpaceCadet, using professional grade acid dyes, using professional grade acid dyes which are mixed by hand from primaries. Please be sure to buy enough for your project as the colours may not be able to be reproduced exactly.
SpaceCadet Creations is a smoke-free, pet-free environment.
Please remember that the colours in pictures may vary depending on your computer monitor. The colours in the photos are as accurate as possible.
After the skeins are dyed, we reskein them into smaller, more manageable skeins to go in the shop. And we do it outside, if it’s a nice day… in the dappled sunlight with a glass of chilled mimosa. This was my Sunday.
Freshly Cut Grass on the swift
From the swift onto the skein winderThe swift moving at high speed
