Haps and Mishaps

All was going well. I dyed the roving red and orange in the microwave, just like in an earlier post. Then I cooled it. Then I rinsed it, and put it in the washer to spin, then it was time to dry it. Hot. Humid. Nothing dry within miles. Hm. Oh, what a great idea! Put it in the oven! Surely I have the attention span to make sure nothing burns up, right?

I put a hand towel on the oven rack and the roving on the towel, and turned the oven on. Now we have a gas stove, so you can't just turn it on to warm. You have to get it to light first, which happens at 350F. Then you can turn it down. And then after the oven is warm, you can turn it off.

That worked just great (honest!) the first several times I did it. I was very focused on how I needed to turn the oven OFF after things got warm for a couple minutes. And then I had a distracted moment; one of those times when you're doing fifteen things at once?

And I forgot to even turn it down after lighting it. And then I went and did a bunch of email business....and then I smelled smoke.

Could be worse. Could be much worse. This is the towel (trash) but fortunately I had used the towel, because the roving is just fine. Whew. That's it at the top of the page, and those touches of brown were part of the dye job, honest!

And in other news, this little dab of cotton/silk blend (the softest loveliest stuff in the world, probably) has been sitting around waiting for me to spin a swatch and figure out how to use it. I want to make a tank top. First I dyed it to see if I liked the effects of acid dye or procion dye. I like this acid dye test just fine; but I didn't really enjoy spinning the pre-dyed fiber. It was pretty but it was hard to get it even.
So I thought I'd try spinning a similar amount of undyed fiber and ply them together; it would make my swatch go further, and I'd find out if it was easier to spin undyed. Oh, it was so much easier to spin undyed. Whew.

Here are my 36 yds of test yarn; 1/4 oz.

And here is the knitted swatch. I got a lot of mileage out of that little bit of fiber; I knit on size US #3's and got a nice sized swatch with a gorgeous drape. It feels wispy and light. The slight imperfections in the yarn add interest without being annoying. Perfect for a tank top. Now I have to get the calculator out and figure out if I have enough fiber to make the pattern I want to make. This will of course require re-calculating gauge for the pattern...not my favorite activity.



And now for some inspiration for colors other than red and pink! I don't know what's gotten into me, but this should inspire me right out of it and into another colorway entirely.