Sanity and peace regained with the aid of espresso.
A new topic today: Overdyeing (or is it overdying?) yarn. My mom's Briggs and Little sweater reminded me that I used to overdye everything. Mostly because I was (and still am) a bargain shopper when it comes to yarn and fabric. Did you have a Woolworths? We did, and it had a $2 a meter fabric section. So did Fabricland. A big bargain wall. You could take something quite hideous, and overdye it into something unique and quite beautiful. (Overdye in this case means dyeing on top of another colour, not over doing it.) And the same is true of yarn. Bargain bins with weird cantelope hues or pinky beiges could be transformed.
The tiny kitchen in my apartment usually smelled of vinegar and Synthrapol and dye. Young and ignorant, I used to use Procion dyes with abandon, 10% mindful of safety. Procion used to be the only one I could find (this is before online shopping) and the colours were great.
My favourite results were with brown heathers. You would think adding dye to a light brown heather would give you something muddy, but actually it takes a jewel-toned dye that might be a little too bright and mutes it into a more sophisticated shade.
Back in the present, I was sorting my stash into Keep and Don't Keep, and I came across some bags of 100% silk Louisa Harding Mulberry. There's something about silk yarn that makes me feel that I'm not allowed to get rid of it, even if (or maybe especially) it wasn't expensive. I used a grey Mulberry for Thornfield, and love it. The yarn is soft and wears really well. But the colours of these other ones... The dark teal is quite nice, but just a little flat. The light teal is just too blue for me. And what was I thinking with the pink? What was that? I don't, can't, won't, wear bright pink. And why only four balls of it?
Anyways, 28 balls of silk that I'm not allowed to get rid of but don't want to knit.
Then I found these jars of dye I bought a long time ago, can't remember for what. And thought, why not crack out the rubber gloves and try a little overdyeing? I want to add lime to the teals to kill the blue-ness, and more deep teal to get variegation. I also was gambling that teal blue added to pink would get me a purple.
Here's a little sneak peek at the results, which finally dried yesterday, but I'll post more about the process tomorrow.
