Husband's Berry Socks

A few pictures of the pair of woolen socks I made for my husband. They are a perfect match to the pair of socks I knitted for myself earlier this year, based on the cable pattern of the Nalu Mitts. 

Unlike the yarn for my socks, which I dyed with instant drink powder, for my husband's socks I experimented with acid dyes and I think the color saturation and variation came out even better. Alas, the phone camera does not reflect completely the true colors of the socks - it makes them more pink and in real life they are much closer to wine red.

For our photosession we took advantage of the beautiful scenery we had at our feet during our hike on Lulin last Sunday. We actually had our picnic here, on Dobrinina skala peak, overlooking Vitosha across and the vast Sofia valley down and out.

For the socks I used again my usual sock recipe for toe up socks for husband, with 64 sts, Judie's magic cast on, fish lips kiss heels and stretchy cast off. The twisted stitch cables are mirror symmetrical, placed on the outer side of each sock and at the end flow into the twisted stitch rib of the socks.

Pattern: Nalu Socks (personal pattern, using Nalu Mitts cable)

Yarn: Alize Superwash, hand dyed, 70 g

Needle: 2.5 mm

Time to knit: several weeks with breaks

Ombre Socks

Those couple of weeks I spent in my reclining chair, watching TV shows (I finally succumbed to Netflix produced Korean shows :) and nurturing my back, I found nothing better to do than study German and knit socks. More about German later, now the socks.

I finished two pairs of socks, one for my husband (still not photographed) and one women's size, probably a gift for a good friend of mine, who has been asking for a new pair of woolen socks.

In order to dye the yarn for the socks, I initially wound it in a double thread cake and knitted a sock blank. Then I dyed the blank in a sort of ombre effect, from bordeaux to dark purple, using my red, bordeaux, brown, purple and grey dyes.

I fixed the dye in the microwave, washed and dried it and then wound it into two identical cakes.

 

The socks are knitted toe up, using my simplest sock recipe, with magic double cast on, fish lips kiss heels and stretchy cast off.

Pattern: Ombre Socks (personal pattern, 58 sts)

Yarn: Alize Superwash, 52 g, hand-dyed 

Needle: 2.5 Addi circular needles

Time to knit: 5 days

I enjoyed the process so much, this mindless knitting in the round, while watching some mindless TV dramas (Crash Landing on You and the one I especially liked - Memories of Alhambra), that I am thinking of repeating the experience with another ombre dyed sock yarn, this time in some yellow, green and blue shades.

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 :)

Autumn Colors

As the Indian summer is over and it's cold and gloomy and rainy outside, I am taking out my wool dyes and getting my knitting mojo back.This weekend I got to play with two new to me Bulgarian sock yarns. Until now I've only used the Turkish Alize Superwash 75% wool 25% nylon, 420 m / 100 g and I am quite pleased with it. But I'm always curious for something new.

The Performance yarns have the same technical description as Alize Superwash, but so far I'm happier with them than with the Turkish yarn, as far as dyeing goes. The yarn took the dye beautifully, preserving its shine and smoothness better that Alize Superwash. Of course, the major test - knitting, is still ahead, I'll be counting on my mother for reviews, as these skeins are a present from me for her.

I used one and the same method for both skeins - layering of colors on twisted hanks, using four colors for each hank, three of which were the same and done simultaneously - butter yellow, bright yellow and orange. For the fourth color I chose green for the first skein,

trying to imitate this tree in front of our building.

And for the second hank the fourth color was sort of chocolate brown - a mixture I made myself from yellow, red, blue and black. On these pictures the skeins are still a bit messed from the dyeing

and here they are reskeined, smoothed and ready to be sent. I love reskeined yarn, as it gives better idea of the distribution of the colors and how they would knit up in the future socks.

Murder, She Wrote

This is a dyeing experiment I've been planning to try for a long time, as it produces very interesting two-color results. And because my two colors are blood red and black, the end result strongly suggests too much reading and watching of crime mysteries :)

The process - the yarn is loosely wound into a ball, not a cake and is submerged into the first color. The dye penetrates unevenly from the outside to the inside of the ball. After the first color is exhausted, the ball is taken out of the dye bath and let to dry a bit. I intentionally collapsed part of my ball, as the dye wasn't penetrating into the ball and I didn't want to be left with a couple of red layers and all white yarn.

After some significant time of struggle with the mess the collapsed ball had created I rewound the yarn, starting from the outer red layer and exposing the white yarn to the outside of the ball.

Then I dropped the ball into the black dye bath. I used the same water, as it already had the citric acid in it, I only added the black dye to the bath.This time I did not collapse the ball, as I didn't want to turn everything black. I like the light greyish - pink transition section, but for fuller coverage one could dye the entire skein red and then cover only part of it with black.

As I wanted to be certain that the dye was well fixed to the yarn, I steamed the yarn for 20 min, placing it in a strainer above the dyeing pot, filled with clear water.

As the yarn is intended for socks for my husband, I had initially double stranded it, so the final step was to divide it back into two one strand cakes - a very time consuming effort, as the yarn was like a 300 m string of twisted threads. I'm not quite sure why this happens, but dyeing two identical cakes with a two-stranded skein always ends into such a twisted string and it is a big nuisance and very unfriendly to the yarn. If my yarn wasn't superwash, it would probably have ended somewhat felted.
Now on to knitting these murderous socks :)

Tropical

My latest dyeing was inspired by the YouTube channels of two lovely ladies I've been following for several months - Rebeca's Chemknit's Tutorials and Jessica L'Heureux.

: After soaking the yarn for an hour, I placed it in my dyeing pot, where the water with citric acid was at the point of boiling. I had prepared three solutions of yellow, orange and red (which turned to be more magenta than red really, it came from an egg dyeing tablet, not my usual acid dye). I poured 2/3 of each cup of dye along the sides of the pot, trying to assign one third of the pot for each dye.

: After the dye had been exhausted I added the remaining 1/3 of each cup to fill in the gaps, trying to cover most of the yarn with dye.

: After all of the dye had been absorbed by the yarn, I took the yarn out of the pot and let it cool off for a while. In the meantime I added more citric acid to the pot and 1/4 cup of black dye.

: I made two knots in the dyed skein to provide some resist, took a deep breath and dipped the yarn into the black dye

: The result is this colorful skein, with some of the yellow, orange and magenta of the initial dyeing preserved due to the resist knots, plus the new colors from the black glazing - purple, green and brown.

: To me this speaks tropical and I love it! I'm eager to explore further the possibilities of this dyeing method.

: I've already cast on a pair of socks - Hermione's everyday socks, a free and very popular pattern on Ravelry: