With a baby, white is not exactly practical... and then I saw that Libby managed to hand dye her yarn for Outfit 4 - FINALLY someone told me how I could do it and where to get the dye in the UK! I was ready to go.
* Don't forget to enter my knitting pattern giveaway here*
First I had to make the ball into a skein and tie it so it would not knot. I think I could have made the skein larger to be honest, it would have been a bit easier. However as you will see later I made the ties too tight - don't!
Then the dying process... I bought the dye from Tall Yarns 'n Tales. On the basis of Libby's colour, I wanted something a bit darker, so I bought two dye kits: Autumn Sky and Charcoal. I did test it on a very small portion of yarn - the proportions were around 3/4 blue and 1/4 charcoal and it was too light. As I have only one skein, I decided that was enough of a test (I thought I was very good to test it in the first place), and went for it: 2/3 blue and 1/3 charcoal - and hoped for the best... There was blue, there was charcoal, it could not go wrong!
I had 140g of yarn left, I put 4.5l of water (you will see some guidelines in Libby's post) and quite a bit of dye - it is a bit like my cooking style, a bit of this, a bit of that... As you can imagine I don't have any notes on how much dye I actually used... Sorry. I used a stainless steel pot - that I don't use for cooking. And off we went. I kept the temperature under 80 °C. I bought a cooking thermometer to make sure of it.
Et voila! I present my first (only) skein of Steel in merino silk! And I love the colour, so I am slightly annoyed I was not more precise, but to be honest I needed a more precise scale for small amounts and I did not have one handy. It is worth having!
The white skein has been in my stash for a couple of years, Steel is already being used! You can see the white speck showing - that is where I tied the yarn too tightly - it is going to look handmade.. Well that is the look I am going for, isn't it!
