Urchin, Part 1

I would like to show you this:



Do you KNOW what that means??!! The knitting on the urchin shawl is DONE!!!



I finished the knitting at 11:30 last night (The number of stitches worked out even! Not too few, not too many!), and grafted it this afternoon. Grafting lace, in pattern, requires concentration. There was no way I was going to tackle that last night at 11:30. I'm pleased with the way the graft turned out, though. I knit a little tab of waste yarn for the provisional cast on, and that made it easier to graft in pattern, since all I had to do was follow the path of the waste yarn. Still not something to do while watching TV, though.



I grafted the whole seam before taking out the waste yarn, and it was really cool to take it out and see that the stitches were all joined together. The finished graft is nearly invisible.



So then I had a finished lace blob!



It measured 60" across, unblocked. But I wasn't quite done yet. I still wanted to dye it. That, however, required some samples and practice.

When we were on our way back from Friday Harbor last week, I stopped at Weaving Works in Seattle to get some Jacquard acid dyes. With great trepidation, I filled up my big dye kettle (obtained yesterday at Safeway, since the thrift store here in town didn't have any large kettles) with water and some vinegar, and started dyeing. Shaun asked me "Do you know what you're doing?" and I replied "Sort of..."



Clockwise from the top, these are Vermillion, Purple/Vermillion, Sapphire, and the exhaust from the shawl bath. I didn't want to use up a lot of the shawl yarn for samples, so I used some of the Rambouillet x Cormo fleece I was working on ages ago. I still have a pillowcase full of scoured but not carded wool, so I mainly dyed that, with a mini-skein of the shawl yarn in the dyebath with it to see how the blue shawl yarn took up the color. I'll have great fun spinning wool I dyed myself, so multitasking seemed like a good idea. It also made the math easier.

I knew I wanted the shawl to be a light warm purple with a hint of red, so I tried the Vermillion dye first. I figured since the yarn was already blue, overdying it with red would make purple. The red was so strong, though, that it overpowered the light blue. Even if I had used a lower depth of shade, it would have been too red. So next I tried the Purple dye, with just a smidge of Vermillion. That gave me the color I wanted, but it was way too dark (I was working with about a 1% depth of shade). I figured that if I took the depth of shade down to 0.3%, it would be just right. (Then I dyed a pot of Sapphire wool, just to practice once more. Also to see what the Sapphire dye looks like. It is glorious.)

Next step, the shawl. Eek!



A swim in an Orvus bath to get out a year's worth of grimies and thoroughly wet the fibers while the dyepot heats, then......



I ended up pulling the shawl out of the bath before it was totally exhausted because it looked like it was getting too dark, so I threw in some more Ramb x Cormo to soak up the last bit of dye. I'm glad I did this, because the shawl turned out just the right color.

Stay tuned! More in "Urchin, Part 2".