I'd never given much thought to how I would dye...

Dying is a bit of an intimidating process; not many people do it anymore. Recently, though, my husband has become a spinner - not a crazy exercising cyclist, but a real spinner of fiber, straw into gold, and all that. Last spring he spun me some lovely soft gray yarn. He thinks it's lambs wool and mohair, but I think it's softer than that. To me it feels like lambs wool and cashmere.

I took one ball of yarn and wound it into a skein so the dye could more easily get at the fiber. I bought some "fiber reactive" dye at a local fabric store, then I searched the internet for instructions for the dye I had purchased. (Happened to be Jaquard Acid Dye. The instructions I found were here. ) Since the instructions talk about "pounds" of fabric and I only had a small skein of about 1 ounce, I had to do some math to figure out how much dye to use. In this case, the instructions said to use 1/3 to 2/3 ounce of dye for each pound of fabric. An ounce is 1/16th of a pound, so that's 1/16th of 1/3 of an ounce. Long math story short, I ended up putting about 1/4 teaspoon of dye in my pot. I was going for baby blue, but ended up with more of a royal blue, so I could have gone with much less!

In a nutshell, the method I used involves heating the yarn in water on a stovetop, and keeping it at a specific temperature for about half an hour. At just the right moment, you add vinegar to set the dye. As the yarn steeped, I kept the hole in the center of the skein from closing with a large spatula. (I should mention, when you skein your yarn, be sure to cut a couple of short pieces and tie your skein in two places to hold it together during the dying, or you'll have quite a tangled mess.)


















When your yarn nears the end of the dying process, most of the dye has been absorbed by the fiber. This is pretty amazing to watch. As you can see below, the water is nearly clear and the yarn has become a dark blue.



















Carefully remove the yarn from the pot of water, being careful not to scald yourself or let it tangle, and let it drain over the sink.



















Then place it on a towel, roll it up in the towel and squeeze out as much water as you can. The yarn will be surprisingly dryer at this point. Because I didn't do a lot of stirring during dying, you can see that there are slight variations in the depth of color in the yarn. (I like it that way!)



















Now hang the yarn someplace to dry for about 24 hours. I fashioned a crude hanger out of a small tube and heavy gauge wire. The cut ends of the wire are stuck into the ends of the tube so I could slide the skein onto the tube and then stick the end of the wire in the tube.
























Next I knit a little sweater for my as yet unborn grandson.



















It seemed like forever, but he can finally wear it!

Hearts Knit Together

Mosiah 18:21 "And he commanded them that there should be no contention one with another, but that they should look forward with one eye, having one faith and one baptism, having their hearts knit together in unity and in love one towards another."

When I was looking for a centerpiece idea based on this scripture, I came across this fun pattern for felted knitted hearts. They’re adorable and fast to knit up.

Please print off the pattern. It is free!

Pattern is here

I did run into a few roadblocks and misunderstandings in the pattern, so I wrote up this little tutorial for anyone who wants to knit these.

Yarn: I used Brown Sheep, Lamb's Pride, Cranberry Swirl, but any feltable yarn will do. (A yarn is feltable if it’s made of 100% animal fiber and says “handwash” on the label.)

Needles: Size 8.

Here we go!

On the row labeled "1st Hump" you put half the stitches on a holder (above) and cast on three stitches (below). I used the backward loop method.

When you're done with "Dec Row 2" it should look like this:

Now comes the part that really confused me. "Pull up tightly and secure. Sew seam down to cast-on sts." Basically, you snug that trailing thread up and sew the two sides together down to the 3 cast-on stitches you made right at the base of the first hump. Like this:

When you get down to the cast-on edge, it'll look like this:

Next, you "pick up 3 sts in 3 cast-on sts." So - from where your tail is from the seam you just finished, with a new piece of yarn, pick up three stitches, working towards your stitch holder.

Now knit across the stitches on your holder.

Proceed with the instructions for the second hump, and you'll have this:

Sew down to the bottom of the first hump, and continue down to about an inch from the bottom of the heart. I used the mattress stitch. Place your needle down between two vertical lines of knitting and pick up two of the "ladders" from the back side. Then do the same on the opposite side. Snug this up. Keep going back and forth, making sure that you always go between the same two vertical lines on each side, and you end up with a seam that disappears into the pattern of the knitted stitches. It's like magic!

You're now ready to stuff the heart!! The pattern says to use polyester stuffing, but I used my saved stash of wool ends. I keep them in an old sock until I need some fiber fill. Because the wool ends will felt down to a smaller size, you need to stuff the heart extra full!

Yes, I did get it all in there!

Sew down that last little bit.

And you're ready to felt. Don't worry that the humps of the heart are a little pointy. When it felts down, they'll smooth out into nice round heart humps!

(Note: I stuffed my red tails in there with the multicolored ones. Then I used my darning needle to thread my last two tails upwards into the point of the heart and out the middle of the heart. I trimmed them off after felting was completed.