Thursday, July 16, 2009

Needle Felting and Yarn Dyeing

I've been busy busy busy. I had one of those moments last weekend that I needed to dye some yarn, and dye lots of it while I'm at it. Because I was in such a rip and bust mood, I grabbed my homemade niddy noddy, got the yarn ready, all 700gms of it LOL and threw it in a bucket with water and a heap of vinegar.

Then promptly forgot about it. What a dork, I got completely side tracked. It wasn't until I was cooking dinner on Saturday night that I remembered what my plan was for the morning. Oh dear, what am I going to do.... gobbled down dinner, cleared the kitchen bench (yes I was naughty and couldn't be bothered clearing the craft table) and proceeded to dye said 700gms of yarn with cake gels.

Because I was rushing and wasn't really concentrating on what I was doing I had a wee accident with some pink dye solution....As in I spilt it everywhere. Now because I was lazy and working in the kitchen, there was a mad panic to clean our tiled floors and and the front of our cupboards that I neglected to see it running into the already dyed yarn waiting for me to wrap up and let sit. Oopsy. Wasn't much I could do about it once this happened so I will see how it looks knitted up, if it's too disgusting I can always re-dye it, but this time I will do it probably.

I'm not actually overly happy with the results to be perfectly honest. I've only ever dyed wool 3 times prior to this episode and previously I have taken my time, carefully laid out the yarn, thought about where the colours were going etc etc, this time I grabbed a bag, dumped the yarn on it, grabbed a big paint brush and let rip.

This is the result



Watch this space

Now for my other wee project, I knitted a bookmark, hand felted it and tried my hand at needle felting. It was quite enjoyable, I reckon there is something to stabbing a really sharp needle very quickly, I guess it's a form of stress relief.

The results are a bit rustic, but it is destined for someone I am doing a swap for so I hope she likes it.



I can see that needle felting will be quite addictive, I've already thought out a vest that I would like to make Cara. Kinda 60's revival LOL.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jo I think you did a great job of the dyeing!

sweetp said...

I think the yarn looks fine! I especially like the one on the far right. And the bookmark is cool too. I love needle felting, you are so right, its addictive and kind of soothing if you've had a bad day lol

Hannah said...

oh your yarn is beautiful!!!
i am slowley getting addicted myself haha

Sally Anne said...

The wool looks great and I especially love Cara's doll on the previous post.

Nova said...

yeah well done! the trick to making hand dyed yarn look fab is to reskein it too ;)

looking forward to seeing the vest!

Tie Dye Diva said...

Your yarn turned out great! Funny that you had a pink dye accident, my biggest dye mess ever was with pink as well: http://tiedyedivadesigns.blogspot.com/2008/04/why-i-never-want-to-see-pink-again.html