#long gradient

work in-progress on a lacey semicircular shawl. knitting with a long change gradient yarn. gonna knit till i run out of yarn, hopefully the piece looks decent!

more wip previously progress and yarn shots. shop is the blue brick here in canada, colorway is based on last year’s eclipse.

I ended up making three different styles for this series:

A long gradient

A short repeating gradient interrupted with a solid color

A white base speckled skein

All skeins were hand painted (which is just a fancy way of saying I poured the dye on them just where I wanted), carefully wrapped in plastic wrap, and then steamed to set the dye. I only did one skein at a time due to the equipment that I had available and so that I could devote all my attention to each one.

Process: Long gradient

This was the most complicated skein to dye due to the preparation that I needed to do to the yarn. in order to do a long gradient, you need to section the yarn up into smaller potions and apply varying strengths of dye to the yarn on each section. I used a pegboard with some dowels in it to wrap the yarn up in 8 roughly equal sized sections that were attached to each other. this was particularly fiddly and i had to take great care to not tangle the sections up. 

Sadly, I didn’t end up taking pictures of this step, but I will be sure to do so next time! 

Once each skein was wound into sections, i laid out a long strip of plastic wrap and spread the yarn out on top of it. 

I pinched the plastic wrap up to made little divider wells between each section so that i could control where the dye went a little better as I was applying it.

I had already carefully mixed and arranged the dye in the order I wanted to apply it, so i just had to work my way down the line. 

I carefully poured each of the dyes onto each segment. and squished them around.

Next I wrapped the whole thing up in the plastic wrap, and placed it into a pot with a steamer basket, put the lid on, and steamed it. I didn’t time how long I steamed it, I just kept taking it out and using tongs to squeeze it a little to see if the dye had exhausted.

once the dye had exhausted, I let the yarn cool, then carefully unwrapped and rinsed it in plan cool water. 

It last thing i did was to squeeze the yarn out in a towel to remove the excess water, and hang it on a pegboard out in the sun to dry. It was carefully watched over by Pico!

Process: Short interrupted gradient

For the short interrupted gradient, I made sure to lay the loop out so that the two sides were far apart from each other. I then poured each color on one half of the skein. The dye bled a little more than I expected, and the color ended up going much further than intended. Next time I will probably use a thickening agent to do this effect. I had to wrap this one carefully so that the dye wouldn’t bleed to where I wanted to stay white, so I sandwiched it between layers of plastic wrap, and was very careful when i rolled it to keep the color at the bottom any time I moved it.

Process: Speckled

I didn’t take any pictures of applying the dye for the speced yarn, but I basically just used the straws that I mixed it with to dab colors randomly. Then it got wrapped up the same as the rest and steamed!

Posts in the Victuuri yarn series