You asked

Some of you have asked about dyeing self-striping yarn. The technique in Yarns to Dye For calls for placing two stationary objects 15 to 30 feet apart and winding a giant skein of yarn around them. That sounds like an awful lot of footwork to me.

You do need a big skein to make self-striping yarn, because the length of the skein determines the length of the repeat. If you use a regular skein of yarn, which may be, say, 72 inches around, you'd have a hard time getting much in the way of striping. If you laid the skein on a table and dyed it, you could get two stripe colors, each 36 inches long. Or 4 stripe colors, each 18 inches long. But that wouldn't make a very long stripe once it was knitted up. So reskeining is the key.

I poked around online and followed the lead of others who apparently also decided that walking in 30-foot circles all day is not a lot of fun. I built a warping board. Actually, I built two. Here's the first one, which makes a 22-foot long skein:

It's basically just a peg board (made with a piece of wood I found in the basement and a couple of dowels cut into smaller pieces. I drilled holes in the board and glued in the pegs. There are two extra pegs on the left hand side, which are necessary because the yarn does have to make a continuous loop. I start at the top left peg and zig zag the yarn across the board. When I get to the bottom, I carry it around to the left of those two extra pegs and start again at the top.

I made a second warping board that's a lot bigger to make wider stripes in more colors. I don't always use all the pegs. Here it is in action yesterday:

In this case, I'm reskeining yarn that was already skeined on the warping board and dyed in stripes. Now I have to put it BACK on the warping board and wind it off into a more manageable size skein:

The final result:

Stripes!

I'm not convinced that the warping board is even the best way to go about striping yarn. It takes forever to warp it. Then you have to tie it off in 10 or 12 places so that it doesn't tangle (a tangled 60-foot skein is almost impossible to sort out, especially when it's wet). I won't go into the whole dyeing process here, but maybe I'll take pictures one of these days.

I have dyed up all the yarn I currently have in stock. I was holding onto it for a wholesale order but the shop owner is on vacation, so I think I'll just post most of it for sale at A Piece of Vermont, maybe later today. Here's a teaser:

Here, by the way, is the first sock of a pair, knitted by my friend Stacey's mom using our yarn:

And, in non-knitting news, here is an unusual egg laid this morning by Portia, our "foofy-headed chicken":

Weird, huh?

Speaking of chickens, although I have 6 and they give just the right number of eggs for our house, I have caved and ordered two day-old chicks for May. I used to have a wonderful Easter Egger named Dorothy who laid lovely bluish-green eggs. She died suddenly of unknown causes (no fowl play suspected ah ah ah) and I miss the colored eggs. So come May, there will be two new Easter Eggers in the house. The colored eggs won't appear until September or October, but it's worth the wait. The chicks can look very different from one another, I suppose because "Easter Eggers" are kind of an Araucana mutt chicken. But Dorothy was adorable and had big "muff" cheeks. I'm afraid I don't have a photo of her, so I'll leave you with an old photo of Janet, Georgia Rae, and the late but beloved Patricia having a nice dust bath.

Comments

[trek]

Number Guy recently commented, "If we move somewhere where we can have a lot of land, we should get egg-laying chickens."

[Carole]

That warping board technique is pretty neat. I hope someday you'll share your dyeing tips, too.

[Scout]

How do you not get dye all over the board?? That looks so cool.

And I want that stripey yarn on the left! IS it for sale? Please!?

[Norma]

Very cool about the dyeing, but even more cool about the foofy egg to match the foofy chicken....and I wish I had chickens!!!

[Cindy]

You are a woman of many talents. I swear. The yarn is so damned tempting. Must.be.strong. Also, I want chickens. Our neighbors would have a huge hissy fit, but it would be so cool. There is absolutely nothing like fresh eggs with homemade bread and Canadian bacon for breakfast. Darn, now I'm hungry.

[Shannon]

That sock yarn is gorgeous! We've had a few eggs like that lately too - not from our own chickens, but we buy from a small organic producer. Maybe it's the time of year or something.

[Ramona]

very cool warping board and I love the egg. It looks like it's spongey on the outside.

[Donna K.]

Thanks for the dyeing info. Maybe I'll give it a try some day. I am finishing up the first skinny stripe sock. DD has decided that I need to purchase some more skinny stripe yarn.

Easter Egger's what a great term for chickens laying colored eggs. I'll try that one on my kids.

[JessaLu]

v cool warping board - you're so handy ;o)

That egg is somewhat disturbing...

On a completely unrelated subject, I purchased a JessiCurl sampler yesterday and tried it for the first time this morning. LOVE it.

[lynne s of oz]

LOL - I talked about making a warping board yesterday for exactly the same purpose but didn't use pictures (my warping board is still just four bits of wood and some long bits of dowel in the garage). Since I am a creature of no subtlty (today at least) I love the rightmost and leftmost self-striping yarns, though subtlty is good too for lace/patterned socks... I've tried dip dyeing for self striping. BORING!

[jillian]

Cutie chicks! Thanks for the info on how you do striping yarn. I have no interest in dying myself, but it is very interesting to know how it is done. I'll leave the colorwork up to you :)

[Michelle]

That is such a different looking egg there. Love the pictures below! Very nice of you to show how you make striped socks ;-)

[Lee Ann]

You do know that Martha Stewart named a whole line of paint colours after the eggs her chickens laid, right?

Just "chicking" :-)

[Diane E.]

Thanks for the great warping info!
Very industrious. We're getting chicks this spring. We are hooked on the idea since helping neighbors a mile away with their chickens. We plan to get a couple Arauncanas .
Nice site... Come visit me:)

[Rokko]

Hello ! This is very [url=http://www.google.com/bb497]good[/url] site !!

[pippi]

the pics are great!
but just thinking about reskiening gives me a headache!!!

[Kay Shumway]

I never thought about using a warping board for dyeing. Thanks so much for the idea!!!! I had wound it out on my 12 foot dining room table, not good enough I love your blog so much. I hope to meet you at the Vermont Sheep Festival this fall. I will try to track you down for sure. Ask Shelaugh if she remembers her weekend at Moose Mountain Lodge so many years ago

[Dimyanshan]

привет

[Sadagroogue]

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