sock yarn

Trade Winds — Help Me Choose the One

By Stephanie

I dye because I love playing with colour.  And when I free myself from the (usually self-imposed) requirement to create a specific hue or shade, and instead just let myself be drawn into pure experimentation, I find real joy in the process.

Last week, I did just that.  I created a basic colour recipe, and then tweeked it, and tweeked it again, and then once more…  and dyed one skein in each, just to see how they’d come out.

The Trade Winds Clockwise from top left: Westerly, Northeasterly, Southeasterly, and The Sea Below

Trade winds blow great ships across the sea, their sails billowing, their hulks lying heavy in the blue and green waters, laden down with trunk upon trunk of brightly coloured silk fabrics, and barrels filled with the warm shades of precious spices.

Because the recipes (and the resulting colourways) are so close, I’m going to choose only one colourway to dye for the shop in future.  But… I’m not sure which one to pick.   And so I’d like to ask you, dear readers, for your help.  Which one would you pick?  Please tell me!

And, just to add a bit of fun, I’ll give a $4 credit on your next order from SpaceCadet Creations to everyone who leaves an answer in the comments here before midnight on Friday.  Howzat then?  Sound good?

So, go on then!  Tell me which colourway you’d pick!

Small print:  Comments must be left on this blog post before midnight on Fri Oct 1 2010.  Limited to one $4 credit per household.  Comments must name a colourway chosen from the four listed to be valid.  Multiple comments will not count for multiple credits. Commenter must list a valid email address when leaving the comment and then use that same email address when placing the order with SpaceCadet Creations, in order to be properly credited. The $4 credit must be claimed via the message section when placing the order on Etsy, in order to be properly credited.

The Most Important Piece of Equipment for Dyeing

By Stephanie

When I tell people that I dye yarn, I get a variety of responses — from surprised to confused to intrigued.  Occasionally, I find the person I’m talking to is a knitter, and that’s always a nice surprise for both of us.  I love it when that happens.

.

Sometimes the person asks if I can teach them to dye, or if they can come and watch the process.  And I always struggle with that, because I’m not sure what I’d show them.  The mechanics of dyeing are no secret — they’re well documented in books and websites — and it’s easy to learn how to do it.

.

But the Process happens in my head — it’s when I think of the colours and the combinations I want to create, and I work backward to figure out how to mix the dyes to get exactly what I’m visualising.  The Process is me experimenting with colours, making mistakes, learning from them, saving them at the last minute, and learning some more.  And I honestly don’t know how I could show that to anyone without them actually getting inside my head.

.

But there is something I can show you.  It’s the most important part of dyeing.

It took me a while to figure it out, but it’s the one piece of equipment you really cannot be without.

.

It’s not the wool.  It’s not the dyes.  It’s not the dyepots, nor a special magical stirrer that makes the colours come out just right…

.

The most important piece of equipment a dyer possesses is…

.

…her Sharpie pen, so she can write NO FOOD on every piece of dyeing equipment.

.

Because poisoning your family by accidentally serving dinner out of the bowl you’ve been dyeing in really takes the shine off of achieving even the perfect colour!

She Likes Winter, Snow, and Ice: Shop Update

By Stephanie

Megan was thinking of a cardigan, something simple, with a crew neck… maybe with snowflakes.  The kind of go-to cardigan that could keep her warm and cosy all winter long.  She was excited to get it on her needles, and asked me to dye the colours of Frost.

It would have white, of course, and a soft silver grey, and…  and… ah yes, that lovely cool blue of winter shadows.  I couldn’t wait to get started!

The key was getting the balance right: the amount of white to blue to grey, and the intensity of the colours.  Frost can be soft and light, or it can hard and crisp; sparkling bright in the sun, or shadowy and blue.   I wanted to make sure that Megan got the Frost that she had in her mind, so I dyed it twice and let her choose.

This is Megan’s Frost:

I loved pulling the yarns out of the dyepot, seeing how the colours came together.  But, better than that, Megan loved the colours — she said her yarn was exactly what she was hoping for.  And I can tell you that nothing is so nice for a dyer to hear!

The silver-grey Frost and more skeins of the shadowy-blue Megan’s Frost are in the SpaceCadet’s shop.

The Trouble with Cameras: Shop Update

By Stephanie

One thing I’ve discovered since opening SpaceCadet Creations is that I really love photographing yarn.  I really love it.  When I get the camera in there, in close, and the light is just right and colours are popping and I can almost feel the texture coming right through the picture, I get so excited.  Mmmmm… yarn porn — is there anything better?

And I suspect that paragraph is completely incomprehensible to anyone who is not yarn-crazy…  But you understand, don’t you?  Yeah, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

But sometimes, it goes wrong.  I’ve got my camera there, the light is right, the macro is doing its thing…  but the colours just aren’t coming out right.  It should be working, but it’s just not.  And I can’t tell you how crazy-making it is when that happens — because I’ve put a lot of effort into the colours I put in my yarns, and it’s incredibly frustrating when I just cannot get the camera to capture those colours.

This week, I’ve put a bunch of gorgeous yarns in the shop.  I love them!  Some are sublimely coloured, some are subtle, and some are quirky, but they’re all  beautiful to look at…

Clockwise from left: Celeste yarn in Plumberry, Stella yarn in Megan’s Frost, Astrid yarn in Sailor’s Warning, Celeste yarn in Sweetpeas, Celeste yarn in Night Sky, and Celeste yarn in Sweet Decay.

But see that one in the middle, down at the bottom?  The one with a lot of blue and what looks like maybe black?  That was one of those yarns that simply refused to be photographed.  Flat out refused.  Oh, it looks nice enough in the picture but, in real life, it’s just so much more — deep, vibrant purples, dark greens and browns, amazing blues.  It’s so dark and rich and moody…  truly stunning.  But could I capture that on film? Could I heck!  And it was driving me crazy!

So, if you can’t fight it, join it.  So, here’s how I’m going to look at it:  see that picture there in the middle, and the bottom of the page?  That one is there to make all the other pictures look even better.  Seriously — look at them.  Doesn’t that one picture make the colours in the one above it look so subtle and soft?  And doesn’t it just make the pinks in the one to the right look vibrant?  See what I mean?

And so that bad picture serves a good purpose now.  But what’s even better is what will happen when someone buys that yarn…  Because when they pull it out of the box and see its true colours…  they’re going to understand just how frustrating that camera can be!

Spotted in the Wild: Socks Knit with SpaceCadet Creations Yarns

By Stephanie

The thing that never fails to take me by surprise me is the way that the colour of a yarn can change as it is knitted up.  As beautiful as it looks in the skein, when the colour repeats are all long and stretched out, is nothing compared how to it looks as you start knitting and the stitches join the colours together in unexpected ways.  It’s so exciting to watch each row unfold!

So exciting, in fact, that it’s sometimes a bit hard for me to send my yarns off to customers…  because I want to knit them up myself and see how they come out.  And so the thing that never fails to absolutely delight me is when customers share pictures of their finished objects and I get to see my yarns all knitted up.   Let me show you two that I think worked out beautifully.

Cindy won this skein of Garden In Spring in the SpaceCadet Creations May Giveaway…

.

And she used it to make these fabulous Dancing Diamond Socks by Wendy D. Johnson.  I love how knitting subdues the wild variegation of the colours but still allows the yellow to pop.  The result is just gorgeous!

.

When I lifted my first skein of Plumberry out of the dye pot, I loved it — loved it — but I knew that it was the kind of wild variegation that needed a carefully chosen pattern to really bring out the best in the colours.

.

And when Sarah chose to knit Pomatomus by Cookie A. with it, I don’t think she could have picked a better pattern for the yarn or a better yarn for the pattern.  These socks are absolutely stunning!

.

Thank you so much, Cindy and Sarah, for sharing your beautiful socks with us!

And everyone else, when you finish a project with one of my yarns, please do share it — I just can’t get enough of seeing how those colours turn out!

Softness Radiates from the Screen

By Stephanie

New yarns in the shop are always exciting.  But not nearly as exciting as those yarns are in person — holding them in my hands, they are simply sooo much better than in the pictures.  How I wish you could just reach into this blog post and feel the softness, squeeze the smooshiness.  They are gorgeous!

But since you can’t, pictures will just have to do!  Have a look:

Clockwise from top left: Luna Laceweight in Calm Words, Stella Fingering Weight in City Park, Celeste Fingering Weight in Precise, Celeste Fingering Weight in Spluttermuck, Luna Laceweight in Old Money, Luna Laceweight in True Love’s Aura.

Now, I know it’s tempting but…  no, wait! No, don’t stroke the screen!  You’ll leave fingerprints!!!