Sunday, March 10, 2013

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Beginning Blue and green striped socks

I have about 400 yards of lace-weight hand spun singles from one of my EC X Texel fleece.
I plan to make some more wooly socks from this as the first ones I made (red striped ones) are so good as bed socks.
So. spent ages trying to find out where I got the space-dying instruction I had used before, with my homemade warping board. Stupidly, didn't include that in the previous post and searching the net didin't bring me any luck.
Then I found it in a folder with all my patterns - sitting there, minding it's own business.
I've based this procedure on Paula Egberts "Dying for Socks", Creating space-dyed mock Fair Isle design which whas published by Spin Off  magazine - it includes several sock preparations and patterns.
I"ve roughly followed the warping method (made the white center hank a little smaller) and then dyed the first, main hand with Eurolana blue dye and the last hand with a mix of Eurolana blue and yellow dyes to get a green.
The hardest part is getting it back on the warping board as the wool yarn shortens during the process - so that's why I have additional nails in the board to accomidate  the shorter hanks when they arrive out of the dye and sit there drying.


The next step will be to wind it off onto the swift so the sections follow as blue-white-green-blue....
After that, the hank will be wound into a center-pull ball.
The blue hank (hank 1) was started and finished with 18 wraps/rows, and in-between, it had 9 wraps/rows, the white was 2 wraps then the green was 5 wraps then the white got 2 more wraps on the way back. This follows Paula Egert's system as she found that the rib on the top of the socks tool 18 rows and she bagan knitting plain once the color changed. The second sock needs to be knitted starting from the center of the ball as there are 18 wraps/rows there too. Thereafter, the blue color covers 9 rows, the white, 2 rows followed byt the green for 5 rows and then a second 2 rows of white. The white spaces the two colors and borders the green in this case. 
I din't try for multicolors on hank 3 unlike Paula who used several short runs of color to mimic the Fair Isle patterns when knitting.  I might have a go at that sometime though as it must look lovley when knitted up.