Infinite variety

So, as I think I mentioned the other day, I am now the proud owner of a galvanised bucket; and once you have one of those, the world of dyes is your oyster. And, while dyeing fabric is always a fun thing to do, I realised that I now also had the wherewithal to dye yarn; and that got me really excited. I absolutely love all the colour mixes that Adelle at Vegan Yarns does (the feature photo is one of hers), and so I thought... I'm sure I could do that. But how?

If you want fairly long stretches of colour, it's fairly obvious. You base-dye the yarn in the lightest shade you're using, then, once it's fully dry, you set up the other dyes in separate dye baths (it's easiest to do it with two, but if you're careful you could probably arrange the skein in a triangle and use three) and then dip each end, or corner, of the skein in its own dye bath. This is probably how the yarn above was done, although Adelle tells me she doesn't normally use two dye baths at once; she uses one, waits for the yarn to dry, then dyes the other end of the skein. That makes sense, as it's then easier to hang up while it's drying. But what I'm most interested in is something a bit more like this:

The variation here is a lot more subtle, and also - as you can see from the loose yarn - the individual lengths of colour in it tend to be shorter, on average. This is clearly not a dip-dye job. So I asked her how she did this kind of thing, and got a surprising answer: she paints the dye onto the yarn. Even with the yarn folded repeatedly across a suitable surface (she has a metal work surface which is easy to clean, but she says that if I haven't, a seed tray works admirably), I can't imagine that being very quick.

So I wondered about speeding it up. First of all, it occurred to me that I could perhaps wind the yarn round something narrow (like one of my mesh sticks) and carefully dip each edge into a different dye bath; but the problem with that is you can't wind an entire skein of yarn onto a mesh stick in a single thickness, so either you're going to have to do repeated winding - probably slower than painting - or put up with uneven dyeing. And if I did find anything long enough to take the yarn in one thickness, it wouldn't fit in the bucket edge on. That one, then, isn't ideal.

This was when Adelle introduced me to the concept of "sock blanks". I think these are new, as I haven't seen them on the site before. A sock blank is a knitted rectangle that is dyed, generally with a gradient of some sort, and then you unravel it to knit your socks from it. Adelle's are knitted using a double thickness of yarn, so that both the finished balls of yarn are dyed identically. I realised that that is exactly what I'm looking for; Adelle knits hers to about the proportions of a playing card (naturally they're bigger), but I realised that if I made mine long and thin, I could then roll them into a loose spiral, and it would be a doddle to dye the edges separately. That way, you can get quite short lengths of colour, and you could even combine techniques by painting a stripe up the middle. I might have to feed lengths of wire or DPNs through the loops at the top of the spiral in several places, so that the middle doesn't droop and cause uneven colouring; but it's all do-able.

So I've bought some of the undyed sock yarn, and also... wait for it... seaweed. (It's pretty much the case that if it's vegan and it can be spun into a fibre, Adelle stocks it.) I hadn't been specifically planning on seaweed, but I wanted some DK as well as the sock yarn, and the seaweed was half price. It's spun in a place where they make saris, so it tends to pick up little bits of glitter and other random fibres, and apparently this batch is "particularly bad" so she's selling it off cheap. That really depends how you define "bad". I like a tweedy effect, and as for glitter... bring it! I think the colours will come out rather muted, as the undyed seaweed yarn is greyish, but that's fine. I'm thinking of doing it in greens, and the lightest green is called "Neon Green", so it'll probably benefit from being toned down a bit.

And in completely unrelated news, the play is finished, barring any tweaks that the cast want. The organiser is raving about it (and especially the fact that I completed it in so short a time); but, even though it's just under an hour long, which is within the limits we originally agreed, she's now getting cold feet about the group's ability to do it. Personally I think she's underestimating both herself and them. After all, at the first rehearsal I thought "this is terrible - hardly any of us can even act!", but by the time the play was performed we all could, and it was brilliant. So they are, in fact, great learners, which makes me think they can do even better next time. Anyway, what I've done is to suggest she shows it to the rest of the group, and if anyone would like their lines cutting they need to say that (and give me an idea of about how much they want cut). I don't think many people will, because I was careful to give the bigger parts to the people who were already confident; the one exception is someone who e-mailed me at almost the last minute to say she now had some new commitments that she hadn't been expecting earlier, so she wasn't sure she was going to be able to get to many rehearsals, and could I maybe give her a smaller part? So we had a chat about it, and we agreed that what I'd do would be to cut her existing part down and try to keep her in as few scenes as possible, so that she need only attend the rehearsals for those scenes.

The songs, incidentally, went down a storm. Including the love theme from Titanic, which I dutifully started listening to on YouTube and then had to stop because it was annoying me so much. (It's the tune. The words aren't too bad, in fact. You'd have thought they could have managed to write a better tune for them.) And because it annoyed me I ended up parodying it quite savagely... and they thought that was hilarious. I'll take that. 😄 Other than that, we've got a rather fine sea shanty called Wellerman (from context, that's someone who runs a provisions vessel out to other ships), which just got more piratical words put to it, and a suitably themed but quite repetitive song by Enya called Orinoco Flow. I didn't need to alter that one very much, but I did hack it down to only one verse and a chorus, because after that you've definitely got the idea.

So, with a bit of luck, by the end of next week any final tweaks will have been done and they can all boing off and start rehearsing it. (It's traditional to take August off, but since the group has effectively taken July off I think they probably will start rehearsing as soon as possible.) And, since I don't have a part, I won't need to attend those rehearsals; I'll just need to get on with making the nets for the production, but I can do that at any time. It's much easier when you can fit things in around your other activities, rather than having a thing that is scheduled.

Plus I don't have to listen to our organiser singing the Titanic parody... no shade on her, she's got a good singing voice, but I think I'd go bonkers if I had to hear that every Thursday from now to Christmas!