Dyeing self striping yarn and other adventures

As I mentioned in my previous post, I wanted to dye some self striping yarn to knit myself up a pair of socks. I am at a stopping point and can now share my progress with you! I started out by making a gigantic skein, dyeing the yarn, and then re-skeining this huge skein to wind onto the ball winder. Here is my yarn, freshly dried and waiting to be put into a ball and knitted with.


And here is this same skein on my very professional skein winder that made this skein the exact dimensions I was looking for. Exciting, huh? As you can see, one of the stripes will be a mottled blue and white...my Marm's idea :) Brilliant!

Now, I split up the skein into two equal balls, found the same point on both of them This is to get a result of socks that will stripe at exactly the same points...this is very important to me! By no means do I look down on you folks who like mismatched stripes, (on the contrary, I envy you your freedom, LOL) or knit one sock at a time! I only know what I like for my socks, and I do it ;) I also have found that I enjoy knitting toe-up, so that's what I do. I have fallen in love with the Turkish cast on method (tutorial here) because it's SO easy, makes an incredibly seamless toe-up cast on, and looks great to me! Here's what my socks are looking like after the toe increases are all completed.


I love, love, love how this yarn turned out and how the stripes are forming! The colors in the above picture are exactly how they look in the yarn (at least on my laptop). I decided on a simple 2x2 ribbed pattern for this pair. I love the simplistic beauty of ribbed socks, and they hug your foot so nicely! I just realized something- Congratulations are in order! I am knitting something for myself!

Ok, here's the back-

And the front-

So, onto the other adventures. I have been dyeing some fiber lately and wanted to try blending! I started out with about 1 ounce each of pink, teal, blue, white, and a grape color. This is what I got! The colors look pretty well blended, but they spun up very distinctly. My Marm spun it up, knitted a sample, so look for that upcoming bit of loveliness on her blog soon!


Ok, now this is not totally off the topic of knitting (these would show off some hand-knitted socks beautifully!), but I saw these and had to add them to my mental "buy as soon as possible" list :) Aren't they to die for? They're Keens and their shoes are one of my weaknesses. *sigh* I have had a pair of their tennis shoe type shoes all year last year and they have become a staple in my wardrobe. These shoes are addicting!