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by Kelley on May 25, 2010
I’ve finished the Pumpkin Gloss socks! I will be dropping them off to my friend this afternoon. They don’t look too good on the sock blockers because I didn’t actually wash them. Cindy is really going through a hard time and I don’t want her to have to wait even one more day for her socks. I just remembered that I promised myself the microwave popcorn popper from Sur La Table as an incentive to finish the socks. It turns out that Cindy’s troubles worked much more effectively. < |
Category Archives: Inspiration
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by Knit Picks Staff on May 25, 2010
I don’t normally announce new books in a blog post, but this one is special. We’ve been anticipating Cookie A.’s new sock book for several months now, and once we knew it had shipped to us from Interweave’s warehouse, we were watching the truck’s progress every day. And, there were wings on that truck! The books just arrived! Cookie is well-known for her fascinatingly constructed socks – they’re works of art, architecture and a marvel of knitting engineering. Please let me know if you’d like a knitalong for this book; we could definitely get that set up if there is interest. < |
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by Knit Picks Staff on May 22, 2010
I’ve never dyed yarn before. I love to experiment, but I don’t really like following instructions. This makes for an interesting combo when it comes to hand dyeing. I cook a lot and like to mix different recipes for the same dish into a funny hybrid that by nature I can never remember how I made. Must be a good method for dyeing yarn, right? Definitely! Well, perhaps . . . |
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by Knit Picks Staff on May 20, 2010
Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 I’ve always been curious about dyeing yarn, but I was intimidated by the safety precautions you need to take with dyes that aren’t food safe (although now that Kelley and Kerin have given us some pointers, I am feeling more confident). Then Nina pointed me towards the What a Kool Way to Dye group on Ravelry, and I couldn’t wait to give Kool Aid dyeing a try. My local grocery store didn’t have a huge variety of flavors, so I picked up two of everything they had. |
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by Knit Picks Staff on May 20, 2010
I was actually going for more of a gradated-sunset-kind-of-look with my second sock blank, but since my cherry blank completely exhausted all the dye in the red Kool-Aid (to my surprise!), I only had lemonade and orange left. I decided to wing it and try mixing 1 pack of orange with some red food dye and a splash of vinegar and see what I'd get. First I dumped the whole blank in the pot of boiling lemonade until it exhausted the dye. |
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by Knit Picks Staff on May 18, 2010
I've recently been exploring natural dyeing methods, and I was really excited when we started carrying a Indigo Dye kit. What makes indigo dyeing a little tricky is that indigo is not naturally water soluble, and you need water to help the fabric absorb the dye. So the indigo in this kit is reduced into powder, and when you add it to a bucket of water, it is a yellow green color because the oxygen was removed. You add wet yarn or fabric to the indigo and hold it in the dye bath for only a couple of minutes. When you remove the dyed yarn, it is a bright green color and you can watch it turn blue as it comes into contact with oxygen. I have a more in depth tutorial for dyeing with this Indigo Dye kit here. |
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by Knit Picks Staff on May 17, 2010
I have never dyed yarn before, and honestly I was intimidated. What I have dyed a lot though is frosting and white chocolate. I love the "gel" food coloring that you can buy at Michael's or any store that has a "cake decorating" section. This isn't the liquid food coloring drops, this is food coloring in a gel form so the color is super concentrated--you don't need much to get a really vibrant color. Try it in melted white chocolate, then spoon your white chocolate into a zip loc bag, cut off the corner and drizzle over thick pretzels that you've dunked in melted caramel--so yummy and they make a great personalized gift for sports team lovers, or...oh wait, what was I talking about? |
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by Knit Picks Staff on May 13, 2010
I got to join in the dye-along, even though I'm in the computer geek department rather than the creative department. But that also means that I managed to do pretty much everything wrong. It turned out well, anyway. At least, I like how it is going so far. So for anyone who has never dyed before, I think it will probably turn out ok, even if you do everything wrong, like me! I used 3 different flavors of Kool-Aid to dye my sock blanks - Watermelon Cherry, Cherry, and Black Cherry. My husband and I are adopting 3 teenagers, so I wanted to make pink socks for Liza (12), as that is her favorite color, and red socks for Dasha (14), as that is her favorite color. And in the interest of fairness, though I'm not sure he will wear them, I wanted to make dark red socks for Max (16), since red is also his favorite color, and dark red seemed a bit more macho than the bright red. |
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by Kelley on May 11, 2010
At this point I have two lovely sock blanks. I am going to be knitting with two strands held together for each of my Shape It Scarves from The Knit Stitch by Sally Melville. |
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by Knit Picks Staff on May 10, 2010
I am SO excited to be participating in our Dye-Along! Dyeing fiber is one of my recent hobbies, and I'm looking forward to sharing lots of my experiments with all you talented people! First on the slate is my sock blank. I mentioned last week that I typically don't knit socks two-at-a-time, but a few months ago, I had an inspiration which was too thrilling to ignore. I wanted a pair of socks that looked good enough to eat: |
