Cheryl asked how I got the yarn to be self-striping. As she guessed, there was some math involved, but it was easy math. Eunny has an excellent guide to dying self-striping yarn here. But here's my technique, in a nutshell: First, figure out what you want your striping pattern to be (i.e., 2 orange, 2 purple, 4 orange, 6 purple). Then you figure out how much yarn it takes to knit a round; this involves actually knitting. You make a giant hank whose circumference is the total number of rows in your striping pattern times the length of yarn it takes to knit a round. Divide the hank up appropriately - for me this involved making it look like a lopsided, four-tentacled octopus (I pulled all of the transitions to the center so each tentacle would be one color, corresponding to a stripe) - and dye away.
Lorraine asked if the socks smell like the Koolaid used to dye them. They don't so much smell like the flavors as they do like a non-descript Koolaid smell. What I mean is that they don't smell like orange or grape, but they do smell like Koolaid. Fortunately, the smell is not strong (smelling it practically requires sticking my nose against the sock), and I suspect it will fade with washing.
In other knitting, the Horcrux sock is coming along swimmingly.
(It doesn't look nearly as retarded on the foot as it does laying flat.) This is easily the fastest any of my knitting has gone for quite a while. Can you tell I like it?
2 comments:
For me, it's all about the colors. Fantastic blues and purples.
But smell is a big part too. I'm a confirmed wool sniffer.
The Elzano socks have arrived. The yarn is impressively soft despite the dying. I don't discern any lingering odor. And at 9 - 9 1/2 stitches per inch, that's some fine knitting!
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