What a Hat!

An Adventure in Multicolored Yarn

 

Article by Veryl Ann Grace

 

I wanted a very special Christmas gift for a friend and, for once, I was actually planning ahead. It was July when I came up with an idea that not only produced that special gift but also stretched me in the process. She would receive a hat knitted from my own hand dyed, hand blended, hand spun yarn. This is the process that created that hat.

I went stash diving for the fiber and came up with enough Blue Faced Leicester from Ashland Bay. It was a soft roving but without the problems that come with an extra fine wool like merino when one is a novice dyer. The last thing I wanted was pretty colored felt. The second fiber was dog hair from my friend's dogs. My stash included good supply of it collected from her dogs over a number of years. Judy has Great Pyrenees, a Caucsian Ovcharka, and Samoyeds, all premium dog breeds when it comes to fiber.

I knew I wanted to use a bright blue as my base color for the yarn. Beyond that, everything was up for grabs. So I pulled out the book that would be my guide throughout this whole process: Color In Spinning by Deb Menz. If you have any desire to create multicolored yarns and no real knowledge, I highly recommend that you find a copy of her book either at your local bookseller, at the library, or on line. She is very clear in her directions and has plenty of illustrations to help. After reading her section on color theory, I decided to have most of my colors be adjacent to the blue in the color wheel. The only color that I used on the other side of the wheel was a bright yellow. I ended up with a dark teal color, a light aqua, a purple, and a fuchsia along with the blue and yellow. The dog hair added various shades of white with a small amount of beige.

I used Ashford acid dyes for most of my dye stock and two different methods for dying my wool. The blue was five grams of blue powder and a pinch of yellow. Five grams of purple and one gram of hot pink gave me my fuchsia. My second purple is probably not repeatable. I started with about six ounces of leftover dye stock from the fuchsia. I added water to bring this up to 12 ounces of liquid. I used approximately two ounces of this liquid on a skein of yarn. I then added an ounce of blue dye stock from Jacquard dyes that I had on hand and filled the bottle to the twelve ounces again. My lighter aqua was made with four grams of teal and approximately ½ gram of yellow. The darker turquoise was four grams of blue and two grams of green. All dyes were dissolved in twelve ounces of hot water before I used them.

To dye my blue, I used an immersion method heating six quarts of water, a quarter cup of vinegar and my dye stock in a large dye pot. The wool was simmered for twenty minutes and then left in the pot over night. I did this because I was dying about 8 oz. of the fiber. For the other colors, I used the method featured in The Twisted Sister's Sock Book by Lynn Vogel. After soaking the fiber in water and gently squeezing the liquid out, I placed it on a sheet of plastic wrap and poured the cold dye on the roving. The fiber was then sprayed with vinegar, wrapped in the plastic wrap and steamed for twenty minutes to set the dye. It also sat in the plastic wrap over night. All fiber was then rinsed thoroughly and laid out to dry. I dyed about 2 oz. of each of the secondary colors. Although I kept records of my process, I'm not sure that they were good enough for me to duplicate the colors. I have a tendency to cook in a serendipitous way and I'm afraid that my fiber dying follows the same methods. When all was said and done though, I was happy with my colors.

Ok, I have all this roving in very pretty colors; but that's a long way from multicolored yarn. So what's next…back to the Deb Menz book. Deb discusses a number of methods for blending fiber with each one giving a slightly different effect. No matter which method you use, I highly recommend that you make use of your scale as you choose the different amounts of your colors. It will allow you to duplicate your efforts for multiple batches.

My next step was to create a number of thin batts of the fiber. My first batt contained a thin layer (0.2 oz.) of the purple plus a thin layer ( 0.2 oz.) of the yellow. The second batt was 0.2 oz. of teal and 0.2 oz. of the aqua. Next came a batt of blue and dog hair again each layer contained 0.2 oz of the color. The fourth batt was a layer of blue and a layer of fuchsia in the same amounts. The next batt contained a 0.3oz. layer of blue and a similar layer of dog hair. The last batt was a 0.4 oz. layer of blue. Each batt was piled on top of the previous batt to give me a pile that weighed 2.6 oz.

So now I had a nice pile of fiber that really looked very pretty but wasn't a good choice for spinning. To turn the batt into roving, I had to go through two steps. First, I started at one end of the batt and placed my hand over a section that was about two inches in from one long edge and carefully pulled it away from the batt. I moved along the long edge and continued to pull my piece of the batt away from the main pile. I did this until I got almost to the end of the long edge. Then I moved along that short edge about four inches from my long edge that I had pulled away from batt, and I started down the length of the batt again pulling the strip away from the main batt. I continued to do this until I had my batt pulled into a zig zag strip that made one continuous piece.

However, this still wasn't something that I could use for spinning; so on to the last step. I started at one end of the zig zag strip and I began to carefully draft the fibers out keeping as many of the colors as possible in the drafted areas. It took me about three passes through the fiber to get it drafted to the size that I wanted it. I then rolled this roving into large balls. I now had something I could use to spin. I repeated creation of the batts and the zig zag and drafting process two more times to get the quanitity I would need. The final weight of the roving was 7.8 ounces.

The yarn was spun on a Lendrum folding wheel using the highest speed on their standard flyer. It was then plyed using the slowest speed on the same flyer. My yarn came out to about eleven wraps per inch. I had approximately 7.6 ounces of yarn when I was finished.

The pattern for the hat was a simple watch cap pattern that I found in Knitting With Dog Hair by Kendall Crolius and Anne Montgomery. It was knit on U.S. size three circular needles and finished using U.S. size three double points. The pattern says that the hat takes approximately 200 yards of yarn. I didn't keep track of my yardage but I had 5.3 ounces of yarn left when I was done so it took 2.3 ounces of my yarn. I was very pleased with the hat when it was finished and my friend was delighted when she got it. As things happen, her weather has been unusually cold this winter so it has already gotten lots of use.

The whole project took me about four months. But the work on it was sandwiched in between many other projects and a busy life that had nothing to do with fiber. With more concentration, the project could probably be finished in less than a month. Would I do it again? You betcha! It was lots of fun and there are all kinds of possibilities when you start blending your own yarn. It could challenge one for years.