Sock Yarn for My Mother

I hadn't played with wool dyes for quite a while and I hadn't realized that I actually missed it.
My mother loves knitting socks and when I was preparing my parcel with the Rhapsody blouse, I decided to add two skeins of sock yarn, dyed by me. For both skeins I used low immersion techniques and I wound the yarn into very long skeins, using the "walk between two chairs" method :) The yarn is Alize Superwash, 75% wool, 25% polyamide.

I dyed the first skein in the pot, adding a range of warm colors - yellow, orange, red, pink, scarlet and brown. I tried to distribute them randomly, hoping that there will be minimal pooling when knit into socks.

I am very happy with the final warm combination of colors and can't wait to see what will become of these.

For the second skein I used again low immersion, but in a tray - yellow and green in both ends and variations of chartreuse between. And i also added orange speckles to this skein. I love the color combination, but I worry that the color distribution will definitely result in pooling.

Inspired by these skeins, I made another one for myself, but more about it next time :)

Speckled Space Socks

I'm having trouble with my Wisteria Sweater (more about this in another blog post) and in order to cleanse my palate, so to speak, I knitted a pair of socks. Socks are those small mindless knits that can totally recover one's passion for knitting and are such an instant gratification. Even in  this case, when I utilized a yarn I had dyed about two months ago not very successfully.

The yarn was my second attempt at rainbow speckled yarn - I soaked the yarn in warm water and citric acid, then placed it on wrap foil and sprinkled it with dry dye powder - red, yellow and blue. The theory is that the speckles of dry dye would stick to the yarn and where they combine all the colors of the rainbow would appear. However first I did not manage to sprinkle the dye evenly and then I made a very bad mistake - I was too impatient and I after I had microwaved it I brought the yarn to the sink to wash it before it had cooled down. As a result the dye residue, which is usually substantial when using dry dye, stuck to the still warm and acid yarn and made it look dirty instead of white with colorful speckles.

For more than a month the yarn just sat in my project bag, rejected and unloved. I knit a small sample, hoping that when knitted it would look better - but nope, it was still grey dirty. So eventually I overdyed it with yellow and then with orange. I thought I had played enough with it, so I finally cast on the socks I had planned for it - the Speckled Space Socks, a free pattern on Ravelry.

But I still didn't like the color of the socks, they looked like unappetizing mish-mash. Half-way through my first sock I had a mini crisis, wondering whether this wretched yarn was worth all that trouble. In the end I decided to finish the socks (which turned out a bit short because of the limited quantity of yarn) and then to glaze them or eventually overdye them. I dipped the finished soaked socks into hot and very acid red dye bath and let them absorb the dye. Now I finally love them - the darker speckles were preserved and the color turned layered and interesting. My husband liked them so much that he wants a pair of the same color for him too :)

Pattern: Speckled Space Socks by Amanda Stephens
Yarn: Alize Superwash 50 g, 210 m
Needle: 2.5 mm
Time to knit: 6 days