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.
This is the bombyx silk I was going to spun for the second half of the Tour de Fleece, but… life intervened and I didn’t manage to get that far. So, running just a wee bit late, I’ve finally got it on my wheel now, and it is a dream to spin.
Not that silk is always a dream to spin… Bombyx silk generally has a very long staple length, and that can make drafting a challenge. The distance that you’re used to holding your hands for drafting wool simply isn’t far enough apart when you’re spinning silk, and it can easily become a struggle as you start tugging at both ends of the same fibers.
A few months ago, I spun pure bombyx silk for the first time in many years and, even though I’ve spun a lot of silk in the past, I realised that my hands had forgotten what to do. It seemed to take forever to retrain my hands (…or more likely, my brain) and until that moment when it finally clicked, I was pulling and tugging on that silk as if I’d never spun in my life. As a result, the yarn came out much thicker than I’d wanted and lumpier too. There’s no doubting it’s beautiful to look at, and the colours ethereal, but because I spun so much thicker than I intended, I just didn’t get the yardage I was hoping for. It’s come out to a measly 143 yards and I’m really not sure what I could make with it.
So now, as I begin spinning this second braid of silk, I am really focusing on spinning as thinly as I possibly can. And, it turns out, I can spin pretty darned thin! Now that my hands (and brain) are back in the groove with spinning silk, this is how it’s coming out…
That is, as long as I don’t get too involved in a scary movie on telly and forget to spin super thin (see the occasional thick bits in the photo below? Yeah… that was when the film hit a tense spot…). But overall, this is coming out exactly the way I want it. And now that I’ve got the hang of it, it is just sooo much fun to spin.
And this time, I hope to come out at the end with a really good length of some truly beautiful, smooth, pure silk yarn.
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.
Sometimes when the undyed yarns arrive, they are already in skeins and sometimes they are on cones. When it’s the latter, they have to be “skeined off” before they can be dyed.
Each skein is wound off individually onto an antique skein winder, and weighed as it goes along. Then it’s twisted up into that familiar shape, dropped into the basket, and the next skein begins.
The skein winder goes incredibly fast for being such an old girl, and creates a nice breeze, but there’s no doubting that skeining off is hard work, and tiring if there is a lot of yarn to be wound. But it certainly is lovely to look at.
But then, when isn’t fiber-stuff lovely to look at?
This post is in honour of the fact that a huge delivery of undyed yarn arrived on my doorstep today, beautiful and smooshy and ripe with colour possibilities. Look for it to start appearing in the SpaceCadet Creations shop very soon!
Wednesdays are hard, I know. You’re still two long days away from the weekend, and too far from last weekend to go back. You’re stuck right there in the middle of the work week. There’s no where to go.
This week, I’ve been attempting to create some new graphics — an ad for Ravelry, and a new banner for the blog and my shop. It’s all part and parcel of running a small fiber arts business and, while it’s something I’m having to figure out entirely from scratch, I have to say I am really enjoying the learning. It feels good to stretch …most of the time. Sometimes it seems to morph from a learning experience to an exercise in pure frustration, and I am reminded that I am a dyer, a spinner, a knitter — not a graphic artist.
And so it was this week. I took the pictures, loaded them onto the computer, opened up the software and… nothing. Nothing worked the way I wanted it to, nothing would cooperate. I couldn’t get the graphics to come out the way I’d envisioned them for love nor money …and so I stopped, and set it all to one side and decided to tackle afresh on another day.
So today is Wednesday, and Wednesdays are hard. And at some point today, you will come across something that isn’t working for you either, and is just driving you crazy no matter which way you go at it. When that happens, stop. Set it aside. You can tackle it tomorrow, when you are feeling a little fresher. …When it’s Thursday and you’re that bit closer to the weekend.
And in the meantime, treat yourself to a momentary mid-week pick-me-up, and have a little peek at the one thing that did go right in my little foray into self-taught graphic design: the pictures — just a wee bit fiber eye-candy, to lift your Wednesday.
I dyed some fiber in the Sailor’s Warning colourway, but I wasn’t happy with the way it came out. Don’t get me wrong — it was beautiful — but it just wasn’t quite Sailor’s Warning to me. It wasn’t different enough to be its own new colourway, but I wasn’t happy putting it in the shop when it didn’t look exactly as I’d intended.
…But how can I waste 4oz of beautiful, soft-as-clouds merino fiber?!? I can’t! And besides, I know that, even though it wasn’t exactly perfect as fiber, the colours will blend and soften when it’s spun and it will look gorgeous.
So I am spinning it up, and it will go in the shop as hand-spun. Keep your eyes open for it!
