It sounds so eco and easy and fun…but when I tried it with t-shirts, not so much.
My daughter and granddaughter are here for the summer, and we decided to try tie dyeing t-shirts and some yarn with koolaid sprinkles. First off, I had trouble finding a good variety of colors. I bought what they had and needed much more than I thought. So, a trip to the store to search out alternatives like other powdered drink mixes and even jello flavors was our Hail Mary. Please, don’t follow my instructions because I’m not instructing! I read a caveat somewhere that you have to use koolaid that is unsweetened, specifically the kind to which you add sugar. Makes sense. And most of our alternative products did not fit this description.
In the end, my skein of yarn using only koolaid turned out …and the t-shirts faded out in the first wash, except for the jello bits. That turned into permanent crusty blobs.
Here’s photos from the second attempt, using Rit Dyes. Fingers crossed the colors stay!
First, flats to paint!
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Can’t rotate this
T-shirts are dyed a second time (after the koolaid fiasco). Looking good!
Blanks: It keeps me up at night thinking about blanks… Here is a palette which is knitted up double. It's intended for socks, for sure, because once you paint it you have 2 balls of 50 grams each, one for each sock to be identical.
I have to chuckle, because when I started to knit my two socks, I THOUGHT I would knit two-at-a-time on one circular needle. Knit them without rolling the yarn into a ball! But my real intention was to figure out if my pattern on the blank would convert to the same pattern on a sock. So, a better use of my time would be to do 1 sock, and see if that's what I wanted.
I knew it wasn't going to be simple, and a bit disappointed that it wasn't MADE simple by KnitPicks. First of all, what you see on the blank is knitted double with a gauge of 4.5 stitches per inch. On the label it says the yarn is to be knitted with needles #1-3 for a gauge of 7-8 stitches per inch. And second, and maybe even MORE confounding is the fact that the blank is knitted in stockinette back and forth (flat) and socks, well, are circular.
big foot sock – notice purple is pooling as I had hoped
After much deliberation (instead of a good night's sleep), I figured that a symmetrical pattern located at the vertical mid-point could line up with using each row of blank as one row of circular knitting. I knew I wanted 64 stitches around in fingering weight with small-ish needles, but if that didn't "eat up" a full row of blank, the pattern wouldn't line up. And… it didn't. Not until I loosely tensioned the yarn with US 4/3.5 mm needles. Even then, it wasn't totally reliable, and the fabric was very loose, and you could see right through it. That, my friends, makes for very poor socks…socks that will wear out fast, and your "big-foot" recipient will hate it. Even as a hanging Christmas stocking, there would be no surprise as to what's inside!
I found knitting at the 7-8 sts=1 inch gauge makes a great sock, and the colors swirl around, and I'm very happy. (See email for photos.)
OK…I'm done with wordpress for now. I'm going to continue my ramblings directly to you on email. Let me know if you want to be removed from my mailing list. (WordPress isn't "talking" to my photos, and I can't be bothered to figure out the problem.)
I recently was commiserating with my fellow knitter as she was finishing up a (gorgeous/ingenious) blanket project that used up hundreds of bits of fingering yarn. The original stash buster! But, as the end neared, the dreaded "weave in the ends" process made it painful. So painful that she confided that she had COUNTED the remaining ends just to give herself some solace that she was gaining ground. I suppose counting 60 plus ends was a respite.
Now it's my turn...two mittens...
Any guesses how many ends? No contest; I'm not counting!
The finished mittens sure are…”original”. Used countless patterns to create them.
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