Wednesday, February 23, 2011

The Fix Is In

I still can't figure out how I thought this ball of yarn was anything vaguely resembling attractive, and as such, could be made into anything I'd place on my body for public viewing.

The socks feel rather nice though, as the yarn is part bamboo (and superwash and nylon).
Fortunately I'm a big fan of the dyepot.

At first I thought I'd throw some purple over it, but it turned out that I had none left and didn't feel like mixing, so I threw in a glug of black which frightened me a bit, as it was, well, rather black and a bit cold-looking. I poured in some magenta to liven things up, but all that happened was that the dye liquor became utterly opaque.

Slightly anxious, I rummaged through the main handspun box and found a skein of scratchy not-very-well-dehaired cashmere yarn in ugly beige, which joined the socks. There still seemed to be an awful lot of dye.
The main handspun tub is quite large, yielding a skein of something containing angora and a couple of sparkles (those white spots are sparkles) in an insipid greyish lavender that's just this side of dirty white. In it went too.
The yarns turned out rather well, but didn't really suck up any of the black from the socks, which is what I was hoping for.

I think salt would have helped with the leveling, and also probably getting it a whole lot hotter: I put it in the crock-pot on medium because I needed to go to bed. If I'd been more engaged and hands-on, I'd have chosen high for as long as necessary, but when you're multitasking, something's gotta give.

I'm not entirely unhappy though; even though the photo doesn't quite capture it, the socks are a very nice, very deep, barely this side of green, charcoal. With a greener and a slightly more purple stripe. Absolutely more wearable than before.

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