Thanks to everybody for following along with (and participating
in) our sock blank dyealong!  We’ll be posting our finished projects
over the next several weeks, and you’ll be able to see how our sock
blank dye jobs translate to actual stitches.  Just a reminder, you
can still enter to win a $50 gift card by emailing a photo of your own
dyed sock blank – here are the
details.

I’m a big fan of the Jacquard
acid dyes, and I use them all the time at home.  Instead of dyeing sock
blanks or Bare
yarn, though, I usually tend to dye a lot of roving and loose fiber
for spinning my own yarn.  For one of my first attempts, I tried dyeing
the roving by handpainting it with foam brushes, wrapping it in plastic
wrap, then steaming on the stovetop.  I chose a basic rainbow color
palette (since I was just starting the whole dyeing thing) and this is
what I got:

(That’s my cat Eddie, mashing up my nice
fluffy roving.)

I spun the roving in color order, and once I had
two bobbins full I plyed them together in roughly the same order so that
the colors would blend and kind of “smash” into each other.  I knit the
yarn up into a basic linen-stitch scarf, and this is what I got:

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I am one of the photographers here at KnitPicks and
since I
have started working here I have been verrrry slowly learning how to
knit. When
I heard about the dye along I thought great! an excuse to not only pick
up my
needles again but I can try out a new craft, dyeing. I have only
tie-dyed so I really
had no idea what I was doing. After a couple of talks with the girls
around
here and reading through the very helpful book Natural Dyeing I decided
to try
my hand at some plant dyeing. My goal was to use only plants/flowers
that I
gathered from around my house but the loooong rainy May we have been
having
nixed that idea.

I have been toting a project, either lace or socks, constantly – daily – in a GoKnit Pouch since September. I kept having trouble with my small sock needles poking through my other little knitting bags, but not with the GoKnit Pouch. This thing is sturdy! And it keeps my knitting clean and protected, and is just the right size for stuffing into my purse if I need to. The Pouch sits neatly and unobtrusively on the floor beside me too; I pull the drawstring tight so the balls of yarn stay trapped inside the Pouch instead of rolling around while I’m knitting.

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I knit this sheep hat for Katie’s baby (due February 22!). I was inspired by Jennifer Little’s adorable Sheep Yoke Cardigan that I saw on Ravelry, but I figured a newborn would be more likely to wear a hat, and by the time the baby would be big enough for a cardigan it would be summer. I used Jennifer’s sheet chart and applied it to a basic newborn hat size (the free pattern is in the sidebar of my Indigomouse blog).
As for the yarn, I decided that rather than buy multiple balls of Swish DK and only use a small amount, I would use some Bare Superwash DK I had on hand and dye my colors. (I did use Swish DK in white for the sheep–don’t ask me why I thought bleached white wool was more “sheepy” than the actual sheep color of the …