Gryffindor Sock Yarn

The first of my latest sock yarn dyeing experiments. When Gaby saw the gold and burgundy stripes her immediate reaction was that these were the Gryffindor colors, so I'm calling these socks Gryffindor. The color scheme is dark red brown for the toes, heels and cuffs and equal gold, dark amber and burgundy stripes for the foot and leg.

A few words about the process, as it was not the usual and is an example that not every failure is irreversible. The semi solid brown yarn started as an experiment in speckling. I had watched a video for using salt-shakers for speckling yarn and I bought a new salt-shaker, mixed salt, citric acid and red, blue, yellow and orange acid dyes, sprinkled the wet yarn and then microwaved it. The result was most unsatisfactory, probably because the salt shaker had very wide openings and instead of speckles I got splotches of color, the yarn looked ugly. I washed it and let it dry, had a hard look at it and decided to overdye it. I had some leftover dye solutions from another dyeing job, so I mixed some of them, I think some dark red, caramel and brown and overdyed the yarn. Initially I was bummed that it turned out so dark, but now I love it.

After I had decided that this yarn would become toes and heels, I needed to dye yarn for the body of the socks. My plan was to make three 4-round stripes in yellow, orange and red. I measured how much length of yarn I needed for one round of vanilla socks my size, then I wound the skein double and then into a very wide circle, so that every round contained approx. 12 rows when knitted into socks. Then I dyed one-third in yellow, waited for the dye to be exhausted by the yarn, then added the orange color and then the red. The yarn looked OK, but kind of childish with three primary colors and it didn't match the dark brown.

So, I made a solution of caramel color I had left from a mixture for a previous sock yarn and soaked the whole skein in it. The colors darkened and were definitely better looking, but the yellow and the orange became very similar. So I made one more solution with pure brown and dipped the orange and red sections in it, leaving the yellow outside the pot. Thus I got the dark amber from the initial orange and the burgundy from the initial pinkish red. Now I am very, very pleased with the colors. The orange family of colors is very much my thing!

And just a couple of pictures of yesterday's cake - this is the long weekend of the Liberation Day, our national holiday, so I made a fruit cake in the colors of the flag. We love cakes, so any excuse occasion for celebration is welcome :)