Tuesday, July 7, 2009

The Yarnarian Keeps Her Promise.



I promised I would show you more yarn, so here we go. Liebe and Belleza, both in Bambi, the heathery one.




Raritan in Penny, original skein and reskeined.





Tranquil and Melody, Bambi:




Graceful, Judith yarn!



Brand New Yarns: Superwash BFL/nylon: 80/20 and gorgeous and silky and with long fibers and utterly lovely. I'm going to keep one of them for me, because I've never knit on BFL, and I want to try it out. After all, how can I tell you about the yarn if I've never knit on it!

Sock weight, superwash, 115 grams, approx. 380 yards, which is the industry standard.

Gor-gee-ous!

Spice Road and Souk. If you want one, let me know and I'll keep the other one. I only have 8 more of these skeins. Before I buy a lot, I need to see how it dyes and knits up, but I can already tell you before knitting, that this will be a keeper. Same wholesaler as Bambi and Alexa, and you know how they feel and look. So, whoever picks first, she gets that yarn, and the other is mine, Wicked Yarnarian!




AND, because I love you all, I'm offering one skein of Penny dyed in those loooong 6.3 yard skeins. Not 6 feet, 6 yards! This is what I dyed yesterday. I did 2 of them simultaneously and have kept one for me to play with, and one for you. This is my usual Penny yarn (75/25 superwash wool/nylon), but wound up in this long circumference and then dyed. I'm playing with possible stripes. "Possible" because I like to dye in my loosey goosey fashion, and not with rigid lengths and such. But when you have yarn this long, the urge to play with striping is there. So this yarn has a dark brown strip of approx 2 yards, a lighter brown stripe somewhere else, and those candy colors along the way. In my gauge and 56 stitches, my dark brown stripe is approx 4 rounds. Your knitting would have different results. I'll show you a pic of a sock for me, and now I'll rip it out and try a mitered something or other just to see how it works knitting back and forth in garter stitch.

So here's the good news about this new technique, which needs a name: Winding up into a long skein and dyeing goes pretty quickly. Here's the bad news: Reskeining it into a workable skein for you takes forever! So it becomes a very labor-intensive activity. And therefore, I have to charge more. I know, it hurts. I'd rather not, but I have to reskein manually, there's no swift that will hold this baby, so it goes back onto the warping board. My usual price for Penny is $20; the price for a long skein will be in the $25 range.

BUT, here's more good news: while I'm playing around with length of skeins and dyeing striping sections, I'll charge my usual $20. After all, why should you pay extra for my experiments? And folks, I can make skeins up to 14.5 yards. Imagine what I can do with those. And more good news: Say you want to make a shawl and need 1200 yards of sock yarn. Easy peasy. OK, a lot of manual labor in the winding up end of it, but the dyeing goes very quickly, so it is very possible. Ah, I'm getting grandiose here, but you know what I mean.

Here it is: Chocolate Bonbons (chocolate candy with delicious centers)





Interested in any of the yarns? The usual: fritzL234 AT yahoo DOT com

Tranquil and Melody are spoken for.


Chocolate Bon Bon has been grabbed!

Raritan is gone!


Henya - I don't know if I can repeat it, but I'm going to try. I'm knitting with it and it is one really great colorway.

Lol - I couldn't do that to an innocent customer. You'd hear the swearing and cursing all over the world for that nastiness. Nope, I have to figure this out so that it doesn't take me 45 minutes to reskein one skein of yarn. Yup, 45 minutes. Crazy, no?

Hunter - What I've been doing is just placing the dyed skein back on the warping board so that it's easy to take the threads off. The problem is how to reskein it to a much smaller size. I'm dyeing up a few 6 yarders tomorrow, and when they dry, I'm going to play around with my large wooden swift and see if that isn't easier. I know I can solve this without buying or making anything new; it just takes a little time to figure out what's easiest. So far, I've only dyed 4 of these skeins, and 3 were wound into balls, and one was in a skein, so I have a lot of other ideas.

3 comments:

Henya said...

I love that chocolate! Any chance for those who have missed this boat?

Lol said...

If its a pain to wind could you offer the option to send it in its long skein for buyers to wind? The bon bon looks stunning.

hunter said...

Ya know...you could build a swift that would handle this pretty easily. I'm thinking several long spokes (4 of them crossed to give you an 8 armed shape) with pegs at gradated points along the spokes. I bet I could make something with a drill and 20 bucks worth of stuff from the hardware store. This is very doable...

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