Monday, April 16, 2007

Lookit What I Can Do Now!

I recently ordered the Spindolyn from Cathrine Goodwin.

It was totally worth it! I have now discovered the joy of hand-spinning. I even took up that drop spinde I bought a while back. Turns out that it works great! Thanks to the Spindolyn, my drafting has improved and that made spinning on the drop spindle that much easier. I ordered a couple more spindles from a different Ebay vendor, Ma & Pa spindles. Very cheap but work well enough. I got them in a pack that included 2 bottom whorl spindles, one large 1.9-ish oz. an a smaller just over one oz., a small niddy-noddy, which is perfect for my little practice skiens, but not so good for winding larger balls of "blanks" for dyeing. It also came with a small nosetpinne, but honestly I'm not to thrilled with it; it wasn't well sanded before it was lacquered and it too is a bit too small for larger skeins. But overall a good deal, the spindles are good for beginning to spin and very cheap.

I really enjoy spining on hand spindles, but if I want to get into production I'll need a wheel. Any reccomendations?

Saturday, April 7, 2007

I Dyed

Sorry, sorry, I've been terrible blogger! After I came back from Mexico, I had a week to make up all the school work that I missed & then off to Washington state for spring break! And since then, I've been trying to bring up my crap grades. However, while I was in Washington, I looked up the yarn shops of Seattle, Bellingham and the vicinity. I'll post the reviews later.
The purpose of this post is to share my very first dying experience! After reading the Knitty Spring 2007 article on safely dyeing your yarn with food quality dyes I was instantly inspired! I ran out and bought up some McCormick's food coloring as well as some other dyes that I found in the soap and candle making section of A.C. Moore's and a skein of Paton's Merino in white and went to town... in my kitchen.
The purpley- green combo uses the hot-pour method described in the Knitty article using the turquoise, lilac, and rose dyes from the soap dying kit supplemented with the McCormick's red, blue and green dyes. I don't think that I'll use the soap dyes again because I needed to use the entire little squeeze bottle and these dyes didn't seem to penetrate the yarn as well as the food dyes did, hence the small white patches.




The orange was also achieved via the hot-pour method using both McCormick's red and yellow and some of the Wilton's icing dyes, buttercup and Burgundy. I wanted to do a combo of reds, yellows, and oranges, but since I was dying on a natural color (more Paton's merino from my stash) rather than white the yellow didn't look too good.
A note on the Wilton's: at first I didn't have faith. I read the ingredients which included sugar (HFCS) and hydrogenated oils to make it pastey and I thought "eww, won't that make my yarn all gummy?" I figured that the sugar would rinse out, but thickened oils, wouldn't it prevent some of the sugar from washing out? Well, no, it doesn't. The tiny bit of paste added in realtion to all the water in the dye pot isn't much. I believe that the sugars and oils also help the dye penetrate the yarn and helps the dye stay where you poor it, rather than spreading as soon as it hits the water like the soap dyes did. This makes sense considering the loading dyes we use in gel electrophoresis. These dyes are loaded with sucrose the weigh down the dye so that it sinks in the buffer with the DNA. Anyway, I think that I'm hooked on home dying. Etsy, here I come!