I finished one Christmas Shawl!

Love how it came out. It’s light and airy, but so warm. I am afraid I might have to reblock it if only to attempt to make it a bit softer. It doesn’t bother me, but other parties might think it’s rough.

I tried kettle dyeing yarn this weekend. I did a warm and a cool batch…I far prefer the warm one in this case:

The cool thing is, I only used three colours to get this. Fuschia, Vermillion (with a splash of Fuschia dye mixed in), and Sun Yellow Jacquard Acid dyes. The variation took place in the process – the parts closer to the bottom of the pot came out stronger, and the parts near the top came out lighter. You can see the yellow is mostly mucked up, but that’s supposed to be expected during kettle dyeing. I like the subtle orange parts though. This is 100% merino superwash.

The cool one, I’m less thrilled with, if only because it’s not what I intended:

I wanted this to be all shades of blue, so I used Turquoise, Sky Blue, and splashed on some Lilac to deepen parts of the blue because that worked quite well for me before (although it’s completely invisible in this photo). I messed up with those black parts – I wanted to take the rest of the turquoise dye and add some black to it to make it less bright. But I added way too much black dye (hint: these things are freaking concentrated!) and I got greeny-black bits. I don’t dislike it, but it won’t work for the pattern I intended to use. The other thing about this yarn is that it’s 70/30 Merino Bamboo. The bamboo didn’t dye at all (I knew this beforehand) since you can’t dye it with acids, so the result is some whiteness running through it. It’s not TOO bad – it could really work. I might experiment on this one by overdyeing it with the fiber reactive dyes, which if done correctly will only dye the bamboo and not the wool. It will just be fun to see how it works.

I’ve started on the second Christmas shawl, and I reknitted almost half the Manon so far. I will finish that half tonight, and probably go back to the Christmas shawl before finishing it.