When a weaver says, “I’m destashing, would you like to come get stuff before I take it to the Goodwill?” always say yes. Fellow member of  Seaview Weavers Heather did just that, and not only did I get some nice fabric, but I seriously scored in the yarn department.  Among other goodies, a two pound cone of blue-grey fingering weight alpaca, which promptly set me thinking about knitted shawls.  The pattern I decided on for the first one is the Seascape Shawl from Fiber Trends, but I wanted the yarn to be bluer, not so grey. 

 

Here’s the cone, after winding off a shawl’s worth of yarn. Good thing it was on the floor, or I’d be suffering from Blue Lung Disease from inhaling all those particles!

 While I pondered colors I knitted a sample in a lace pattern I’d been wanting to try,  bound off, gave it a cursory wash, then threw it in the dye pot with about a 1/4 t. of turquoise stock solution and glug of vinegar.  About 45 minutes later

 

it was cooling in an exhausted dyebath.  Not really the way you are supposed to do it, but it’s just a sample, right? Once it was pinned out and all dry

it was a teal color — lovely, but not what I had in mind for the shawl.  I wound off more small skeins and overdyed them with different colors.

From left: Sky Blue, Red, and Purple.

The purple is a lovely dark shade.  The red is very interesting.  There are blue undertones and a dark red halo.  I’ll do something with this that involves grapes, I think, as it reminds me of the bloom that is on the outside of dark unwashed grapes. And the blue on the left is just what I wanted!  In the jar, the Sky Blue stock solution looked like it might be too close in color to the yarn, but somehow it intensified only the blue and not the grey.  I just love it.

I washed the  large skein, made more stock solution, simmered, and let it rest.

My husband peered into the pot on top of the stove and asked, “Blue spaghetti again?” Yup.

In other news, Sandy managed to figure out what the Mystery Object is, although both Bonnie and Syne had good ideas. It’s a fake pregnancy — my daughter is playing the very pregnant charcter Edna Louise in her school’s production of Come Back to Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.  Lisa may have Grossman’s Gams, but I have Bear’s Belly.

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