fishie’s aquarium

Ta-da! Countless hours were spent unraveling, skeining, weighing, removing the elastic strands, reskeining, dyeing, reweighing, reskeining again, and designing labels. Dyeing recycled yarn is officially a success! The colorways, from left to right: Salmon, Sea Anemone, Phyllidia, and Algae. The algae was my test attempt, and since I used scraps to dye it, I don’t have enough for the two 50g skeins. As a result, it’s MINE! The other 6 skeins, two of each colorway, are up for sale in my etsy shop. I rewrote my public profile in celebration and my sleep deprived brain thinks it’s hilarious. You should check it out.

In the midst of my dyeing frenzy, I overdyed some wool I got in my mystery yarn grab bag thing.

Ick. What would I do with THAT color?

This? Infinitely better. I actually want to use this yarn for something now.

In knitting news, I’m working on too many lace scarves. They take forever. I really want to be knitting something like a sweater that I can just finish in a couple days, jeez. I have been itching to knit the Textured Circle Shrug from GlamKnits, but I am absolutely adamant about NOT buying any more new yarn after my 80-skein Tuesday Morning binge. I don’t have enough of any given yarn to knit the shrug. So what did I do?

I unraveled a sweater. It’s 55% Acrylic, 45% Cotton, which is pretty close to Cotton-Ease, the last yarn I used to knit a shrug. Best part: I paid $6 for that sweater. I had every intention to cast on for the shrug as soon as I was done with my yarn dyeing project, but I got a newsletter from Knitpicks in my inbox last night.

Love at first sight. Yes, I don’t like cropped sweaters or elbow sleeves. BUT, I love purple, I love the cable pattern, the model is a cutie, and the pattern was $1.30. How could I say no? I intend to cast on for this as soon as I can. This requires… unraveling another sweater. And since the sweater I’m going to unravel is the same exact color as the yarn for the circle shrug, I’m going to… dye it first.

And on and on and on. This dyeing this is kinda addicting.

I got off my ass and finally started dyeing yarn from that sweater I unraveled a couple months ago.

I decided I absolutely HAD to dye some yarn last night, after drinking half of my vodka/rum/caffeine free coke last night, so I had to walk up to the store and ended up walking home with two gallons of vinegar.

Apparently vinegar is the magic ingredient for getting the color to stick, because after only a couple minutes after I dumped in the color, the water was clear–meaning the yarn had sucked up everything.

I’m using this awesome tutorial from Knitty, and right now I’m doing the hot pour dye method just to test to see if the yarn will dye well.

It will. I’ve already named this color “algae”. Guess what theme I’m going for. If all goes well, I’ll have some yarns up on etsy and MAYBE HOPEFULLY make some money from yarning around.