dyEd in the pot...

On Saturday I went over to Darcy's to dye yarn.  The initial motivation for this escapade was this stuff: 

a really nice wool/silk tweedy yarn that I love, except for the colour.  The goal was to make this into something a little more wearable, so I could finally take it of my stash (after about 5 years of it sitting there waiting to be used up!).  I also brought along the DK and laceweight jaeggerspun yarn that I used for Max's christening set last summer - the yarn is fabulous, but it just didn't want to be white any longer.

Henri and Frobisher gathered up all the dyes, and then we started soaking the spaghetti yarn in vinegar and water.

We used acid dyes for this yarn, which requires a little bit of extra care - 

the dye is carcinogenic, and comes as a very fine powder, so you have to use gloves and wear masks while scooping it out of the jar and mixing it together.

Mmm... green yarn soup!

I dyed three batches of yarn altogether.  This one is the JaeggerSpun DK:

This is the laceweight:

And this is the Rowanspun Summer Tweed:

We had so much of this yarn that it had to be dyed in two batches - when it first came out it looked much darker, and it was harder to tell the batches apart.  Now that its dry, I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to alternate dyelots to make sure that I don't get odd colour patches in the finished product...  which might be interesting if I knit this in the round as I was planning.  Hmmm...

(Darcy died her yarn a lovely silvery grey/black colour, but you'll have to go check out her blog to see it).

While Darcy and I were mucking about in her kitchen, Mike was out getting a little exercise...

(for reference, you can see Vancouver way off in the distance there on the left side - most of us only ever get to look at the front of these lions!)

Nice view from up there, eh?  :)