Warping Bored

Now that my pal Debbie has finally received her Dye-O-Rama yarn, I will post a few more details on how I colored it.

Last week I listed my starting materials. Per Ysolda's instructions, I made my own warping board with a spare piece of plywood and some small nails. Like her, I crossed the board 14 times. Each row was 2" apart and the two columns were separated by 2' (24"). I wrapped it in her style ten full (down and back) times.



I tied every crossover loosely with some spare cotton yarn and removed the long, tied-up yarn. I dyed it in sections so it would become self-striping.

The 1/2 pound of supersock ended up making two ~360-yard skeins and one ~270-yard skein after all the wrapping.

I only had one non-food pot that met the requirements (enamel or stainless steel), so I did the colors in batches.



The big stainless steel pot is for food but I used it to rest the inactive yarn so it wouldn't catch on fire. I'm crazy like that.

The Country Classic Dyes are so easy to use. Per the instructions I presoaked the yarn in hot water with a little dish detergent for 30 minutes prior to dyeing. The water clears up during the 20-30 minutes that the boiling yarn takes to soak up the dye. These were relatively small dyelots so I used ~1 tsp dye per ~6 cups of water per color. I dyed all the superwash merino at once and I wanted the colors to be fairly subtle, so I didn't worry too much about measuring.



I orginally designed a complicated stripe pattern for my pal but accidentally dropped the white into the green, making a bit of a mess on the white. I kept this skein for myself and made a sock out of Wendy's Toe-Up Sock Pattern.



Debbie's yarn should have wider stripes of more uniform thickness. For perspective, I knit this sock on bamboo US1s (the 0s were making the fabric too tight) out of half of the 360 yards I kept for myself. The other sock might be finished in time for fall. I'm just not sure, because I have lots and lots of other fun sock yarn to knit up.

If you're interested in more dye-your-own links (Catherine!), check out the sidebar information at Scout's Dye-O-Rama page.