A Dyer's Work is Never Done.

Another kit, another color.  How hard can it be?  As it turns out, it can be a little… difficult.  Not every pattern designer out there has the chance to ask for a custom color for their every idea and project.  Working to match yarn with imagination can be… tricky.  The kind of tricky that knows the limitations of a pantone book, but the limitless sight of the inner eye.  Yes Virginia, we can dye a color between 2 pantone shades.   Sometimes, it’s a conversation about those pantone shades and interpreting that conversation into the dye pot – which occasionally takes a few skeins or versions to reach the ‘ah-ha!’ moment.  Sometimes, it’s more serendipitous – like our first meeting of the minds when the yarn color now called Thalassa inspired the sock kit ‘Poseidon’.  This can be good and bad.  These colors can sometimes be… um… difficult to recreate.  As in ‘I have no idea how I did that – it was 3 different exhaust pots’.  We have a standing joke here about skeins we label as ‘Don’t Show This To Lisa’ colors.  She sees most of them anyways, but with strict instructions not to get any ideas

So… on to the current Sock.  This color has a long and cherished history with us, even though it was never actually a reality until October.  It all started… with a Polar Bear.  Once upon a time, (well actually, several times a year), I joke that the next sock needs to be a ‘Polar Bear in a Snow Storm’ (i.e. a white skein, unsullied by dye and therefore wickedly easy for the dyer to um, ‘dye’).  This idea for some reason, has never quite come about.  Options on the Polar Bear concept, have been a white skein with a scattering of yellow… called ‘Polar Bear was Here’, or a white skein with a big black dot on it- ‘Nose of a Polar Bear’… well, you get the idea. 

In September or there abouts, somehow the Polar Bear poked his nose back into the conversation and I took him seriously this time.  Except, everytime I thought about him… he wasn’t white.  Or rather, there wasn’t very much white at all on the skein.  When you picture a Polar Bear, what do you think of?  I began seeing him in my mind’s eye in his environment.  He’s not just a bear – you don’t picture him hanging out in the Cascades hiding in the lush green of the coastal rain forests pretending to be a brown bear or a grizzly bear… just as you don’t picture either of those bears floating comfortably on hunk of ice.  Nope, I see him, I see his environment, and I see blues and aqua and a little navy and a smidge of black… and a little white (he is a white bear after all).  I see him swimming in the water colored by the ice and the temperatures and the sky and the weather.  A Polar Bear spends hours in the water – he’s been seen swimming more than a 60 mile distance, and is so well insulated he swims in the icy waters to keep from overheating.  When my bear began invading my vision, he looked more like this:

Definately not just a plain, white skein.  So… I dyed a few skeins in my ‘Polar Bear’ colorway, and showed it to Lisa.  Here’s where the term ‘eye of the beholder’ gets bandied about.  Lisa does not have a Polar Bear hanging out with her.  She has something a little more… well, ‘Lisa’ in mind.  Something more like one of these, perhaps:

 So, after a little tweaking of colors, my ‘supposed to be easy’ Polar Bear skein, came to life.  Slightly different than I originally dyed it in October, which is fine with me – that one is dear to my heart, and will be available for sale in a couple of days.  (I have a club kit to mail out first.)

Regardless… the current Sock 5 main color is on of my  top 3 favorite colors of any kit so far in all the club years… I think it’s also taking the longest to dye. ( Am I the only one who sees the irony here?)  I’m not entirely positive but it could be because I’m doing it (basically) one skein at a time… Why, you ask?  2 Reasons; Because I’m the Dyer and I Said So, and it just doesn’t look ‘right’ any other way.  Actually, most kits/colors do get dyed several at a time, sometimes as many as 9 at a time, spread out on the table, or multiple pots on the stove.  This one wouldn’t quite work out that way.  The pot had too much water and too small of a space and very little control, and the yarn on the table meant the yarn wouldn’t have enough moisture to ‘wet’ the dye.  Someday, Santa will bring me a dye table like the ones we had in art class in grade school – with a 4 inch lip coming up all the way around so the whole gosh darn table is one giant ‘pan’, and with a drain plug at one end – tip table, empty water out.  Briliant.  But I digress.  Basically, without the dream table, I would have been ankle deep in run-off if I’d tried this on a flat surface.

My time-consumer, let me show you it:

Step 3:  (Steps 1 & 2 are pretty boring and standard for any kit – skein the yarn, get the yarn wet.  We’ve skipped ahead to step 3 in favor of getting to the fun(er) stuff sooner.) ahem.  Sorry… where were we?  Oh yes. 

 Step 3: Lay out the yarn in an unorganized but organized manner in appropriately sized tin-pan.  It’s unorganized enough to dye more varigated than just laying it out flat, but organized enough to keep in a nice, manag-able skein.  The pan?  Ubber cheap from the grocery store, lined with plastic.  The plastic is critical.  Durn acid eats right through the pan without it.  Nothing like filling it up with water and finding it’s leaking through several small, pin-prick sized, acid-eaten holes.  For this project, the size of the pan was pretty important as well.  I wanted it smaller than the skein was so the skein stayed unorganized rather than being able to lay flat and smooth.

Step 4:  Sprinkle on powder dye.  This step actually has a ‘prep’ step – mix custom recipe of dye powder for appropriate colorway.  Anyhow, once you’ve got your ‘new’ color, and your hazmat mask or other appropriate lung protection… we sprinkle on the powder.

Step 5:  Smoosh.  There’s enough water in with the yarn to be able to dissolve the powder and smoosh the color around.  Not so much that the yarn is submersed, but enough.  And I can’t tell you how much that is – trade secret (and plus I never measure, I just ‘know’ - ya know?).

Step 6:  repeat steps 4 & 5 until it looks ‘right’.

Step 7:  Using a syringe, add liquid dye of a different hue/shade etc in random places.

Step 8:  While that skein is setting/soaking up the dye, start a 2nd skein in a neighboring pan.

Step 9:  Reaching completion of step 7 on the 2nd skein, flip the first skein over carefully.  This is an art, do not try this at home.  The goal is to flip it over while keeping it intact, front side and back side distinct (and really, is there any other way?).  No splashing, no slopping of water.  It all stays in the pan, not on the floor, the table, or your clothes.  (Anyone who’s dyed with me can tell you this is no easy task – I don’t seem to have a problem with it…)  Once it’s flipped over, scrunch to fit it into the pan and create some nice varigation without loosing site of the ‘white’ bits that need color.

Step 9:  Repeat step 6 & 7 on skein 1, then repeat steps 8 & 9 on skein 2.

Step 10:  Pick up skein 1, squeeze out excess water, and set aside. 

Step 11: Repeat steps 3-7.

Step 12:  Skip to step 10 on skein 2, and continue until you run out of custom blend of dye powder, or wet yarn.  Get more yarn wet, make more custom dye powder blend… repeat.  When you’ve got enough skeins to fill the pan you steam to set the color, steam them, then rinse them, then spin out the excess water, then hang them to dry, then wind them up neatly and stuff them and anything else needed for the kit into the package… and send them out the door.  (**If at this point, you feel like the guy in those donut commercials from YEARS ago – where he wakes up at dawn and says ‘Time to make the donuts’… then your doing it right.)

Easy-Peasy, no?  Now… what are we going to do for sock 6?