When Kerin and I were faced with the challenge of designing fun,
playful kits for a kid-and cotton-themed catalogue, we decided to
imagine ourselves as kids again and figure out what kinds of things we
would have wanted knit for us. It wasn’t much of a challenge, really.
Sweaters??? Bo-ring! Scarves? Suh-NORE!!! The kids in us wanted
something that would be really, truly FUN to play with, especially in
the warming days of springtime:
When we released the Backyard Garden kit, I created lots of tutorials for fun projects to embellish with your knitted flowers, leaves, and bugs. But we wanted to hear your ideas too! We had a contest to see what other knitters plan to embellish with their Backyard Garden kit, and I picked 5 winners who had fun and creative ideas! Each winner will receive a $25 Knit Picks Gift Certificate, and I will send a message in this community to let them know that they have won!
And now for the winners!
Cheryl is going to knit a flower for each person who attends her World Wide Knit in Public event!
Kyle is going to turn the embellishments into ornaments for his Christmas in July party.
Susan suggested using the flowers as luggage tags, so she could easily spot her suitcase at the airport.
Evelyn would use the flowers …
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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I wasn’t exaggerating when I said that in the last year, I have been
bit by the dyeing bug HARD! Today I want to share two more of my
food-dyed yarn experiments with you, and discuss how different put-ups
of yarn can make the colors appear different.
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This has been a rough few weeks, trying to hide this giant sweater
from hubby! But after putting the sleeves on holders and deciding to
steek the chest, it went much faster.
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.
When I finished dyeing up my Rainbow sock yarn that I last blogged
about, I was really really excited to start knitting with it RIGHT
AWAY! But you know how it goes with socks..I had to get one of my
billion sock projects finsished before I could think about casting on
another one. So while I waited for a free set of needles, I wound up
the hank, to better admire the color combinations:
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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.
Read more »There’s one kind of food-grade dye that I really like to use, but it
can be a little hard to find. Usuallly it’s only available in stores in
the spring.
Easter Egg Dyes!
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The appeal of dying sock blanks is the never-ending possibilities. You can choose to be creative in a linear fashion or be abstract. I sound like an art museum docent. I chose to give linear a try for the blanks I was dyeing for my Shape-It Scarves.
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