Blue Hands

What a wonderful, busy, exhausting weekend, full of colour, laughing, experimenting and friends, both old and new.  On Saturday, I went to a hand-dye your own wool, at my favouritest wool shop, Get Knitted in Bristol.  And what wonderous fun it was.  It was run by Jeni, from Fyberspates (check her stuff out, absolutely stunning!) and she was so patient, generous and knowledgable.  She took us through the basics of hand-painting wool, and just allowed us all to experiment with different yarns and colours and effects.  I have to admit, I'm slightly jealous of some of the amazing things that some of the other ladies came up with, but only slightly, because I am just soooo proud of my own little collection.  The course covered three yarns (a lace, a sock and a double/chunky) but I managed to come away with eight, and only paying £5 extra for one skein, as Jeni was kind enough to give us some freebies.  So here's a little run down of the dying process:

 

Pre-soak yarn and lay out on suitable surface

 

Wear gloves (!) and mix up dye and fixer in steamy hot water

 

Start painting!

 

And a little more (this being my neighbour who was doing the same colours as me)

 

Ensure wool all covered (assuming that's what you want!) and a good bit of table coverage for good measure!

 

Have a nosy around at everyone else!  Oh and get a bag ready, and carefully shove yarn in

Place in steamer until water in bag becomes colourless

 

Allow to cool sufficiently to handle

Rinse thoroughly

 

Allow to dry (a process that will prob only be finished at the end of the week)

Select next yarn to play with!

And repeat

 

and again

And so forth... until:

 

Your clothes horse ends up looking like this, and despite your fairly best efforts with wearing gloves your hands end up like this:

 

Oh dear, what would the patient's say?

They all seem to be taking ages to dry, which is annoying when all you want to do is play!  The dye is fading on my hands, but my cuticles still seem fairly worse for wear!  Ooops! 

I love the colour of my lace skein (the middle row, middle skein).  I spent ages mixing the colours (suggested by Jeni) to get the right colour that I was after.  And I'm very happy with it.  It's only one colour, but with varying pentrance of the dye to get a semi-solid colour effect.  A lovely grapey/mullberry colour.  The green was the less successful colour experiment, I wasn't really wanting such bright limey greens, but I love it all the same!  I was aiming for more natural shades.  

Here are some of the other yarns I liked the looks of:

(some of these are mine)

 

 

I could go on, but I won't!  It is after all beyond my bedtime.  Sweet colourful dreams everyone!