Dyet Yarns: reuse, recycle, reinvent!

I have two things to report on before I go off on a wild convention run this weekend. The first is that I successfully dyed four (FOUR!) batches of recycled yarn that I think will work great for socks. I used two different kinds of base yarns (two sweaters). The first is the one I wrote about in the last post. The light pink sweater that unraveled easily and smoothly ended up in 4 hanks, and I dyed two of them (for me! Yarn for ME!). Here’s how they came out, with a hank of the original pink color for comparison:

The first is a medium blue color with speckles of purple. After dyeing the yarn the base blue color, I dripped some extra dye over the hank and let the colors break on the yarn. It gave me quite a nice effect! I can’t wait to see how it knits up. I dyed this specifically with Wendy D. Johnson’s Rivulets Socks in mind.

The second is a coral-orange semisolid that I love. I haven’t decided what sock pattern to make with it yet. I’m sure I’ll get some inspiration somewhere.

In the mean time, check out what I’ve been doing with the other batch of sock yarn I dyed!

This was just going to be a swatch, but the yarn was so soft and pretty that it just sort of turned into a sock. And…It turned out to be self-striping! I LOVE how this yarn turned out. It is an incredibly soft wool/angora blend, and it has 10% nylon for durability. I have 2 more skeins of this color and 2 skeins in a different colorway (purple and gold). They’ll be up in the Etsy store at some point.

I have decided that 75 g is the perfect amount of sock yarn for me. The sock pictured above took less than 35 g of yarn. I am curious as to how much yarn other people have left over from a 100 g skein when they knit socks. Are we wasting 25 g of yarn when we make regular-sized socks? Obviously cables will use more yarn and lace may use a little less, depending on the pattern.

Dyet Yarns blog posts by Adrian "Nuri" Steinhauer are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Tags: angora, dyeing, FO, handmade, lessons, new, recycle, selfish, socks, wool, yarn