Corona socks

OK - this is definitely a grab-yourself-a-cuppa-first kind of blog! At least it might go some way to relieving your lockdown for a while...

Got your beverage of choice? (Mine's a G&T tonight!) Then read on...

I mentioned in a post from a couple of weeks ago that I was struggling to find focus in this current crisis, and my creative urges had led me to knit socks. This is partly because it doesn't take much brain power; I'm very familiar with the pattern I use, so if they are plain knit or some of my odds-and-sods socks, I can knit a pair to fit myself (shoe size 3 and 1/2) in two or three days if I'm not doing much else.

I decided to call them coronasocks - for obvious reasons, I hope - and so far, as we go into week 4 (I think - I've lost count) of 'stay-at-home' in the UK, I have made rather a lot of them. I don't mind showing them to you now, because half have gone to their recipients, and the others are being parcelled up to be put in the post this week. Take a gander...

Pair 1 complete - red, white and blue.

Pair 2. Odds-and-sods purple and green

Pair 3 - yellow and grey odds-and-sods. Really pleased with this colour combo

Pair 4 - lace-topped burnt orange

Pair 5 - odds-and-sods random

Pair 6 - odds-and-sods turquoise, though pink and purple snuck in too

I'm currently knitting Pair 7, another odds-and-sods pair in green and orange; one sock's completed and the other is at the heel.

I did have to order some more sock wool, as a friend has asked me to complete a UFO (UnFinished Object) for her, and while I was ordering that, I got tempted and ordered these:

The heathery-grey ball is really luxurious, and I wouldn't normally have gone for something quite so expensive. The pink is an Arne and Carlos Pairfect - the yellow strand you can see marks the start of the sock (you cut the yellow off first!) and there's another strand somewhere else in the ball which marks the start of the second sock. Now, I have small feet, so I will have to wind off lots of wool to get to the repeat, then wind it back into a ball the other way so I end up with two balls of leftover that match, so that's going to be interesting!

Incidentally, I do get a bit anal about matching up the repeats in patterns, even if they are fairly random. I end up with lots of little balls, so I decided the other day to join them all together into one big ball. There will be a pair of 'Surprise!' socks knitted, once I've wound a ball of about 60g....

The other thing I ordered was a skein of undyed merino wool. I have always loved hand-dyed yarns, but they can be very expensive. I'd looked up how to hand-dye using food colouring, which seemed a darn sight cheaper - I decided I'd have a go. It was a lockdown project.

Here's how I got on...

You can find all sorts of tutorials and videos telling you how to hand-dye - I used this one to take me through the process, but there are many others. So I'm going to assume that if you want to have a go, you'll look it up and won't need me to repeat everything in detail...

So... The food dyes I used are Dr Oetke gel colours, and I bought the full range of colours. The only colour I didn't use in this first experiment was the pink, but it was good to try all the others and see how they came out on the wool.

This is the wool in to soak for half an hour in warm water, to which 3 tablespoons of white vinegar had been added. 

I laid clingfilm over my work top, making sure there was plenty beyond the end of the hank. The skein had most of the water squeezed out of it so it was damp. I got a small art brush and started to paint the colours in blocks... 

I had to manipulate the wool to get coverage throughout, but needed to be careful - any dye on my hands or splashed onto the clingfilm, and a colour would get transferred to areas where I didn't want it to be.

Now I had in my head an idea...I wanted to try to create a pattern in the colours that, yes, would follow the rainbow, but would also end up knitting as solid stripes with speckles in between. So in the spaces, I jabbed a gel-dye-laden fork all over the place, making sure the colours overlapped a bit. Here's how it ended up; 

The next phase is to fix the dye. I realised I couldn't simply roll the wool in the clingfilm, or I'd contaminate my carefully separated colours - either because of splashes on the film or where the two sides of the skein touched. So I overlay another sheet of clingfilm over the wool, pressed it well down and then rolled it. I ended up with a rainbow coloured sausage!

My microwave is a powerful one (900W) so I blasted my wool for 3 x 2 minutes at 50%, with a minute or two in between each heating. I think the sausage was well and truly cooked - you can see the condensation inside the film.

Most instructions told you to leave the wool to cool, but I was too impatient... I unwrapped it. It was flippin' hot, so I got a bowl of cool water and as I cut the clingfilm away (it had gone a bit crispy and melted together in places) I let the hot wool go into the water. Looked like rainbow spaghetti!

It took three rinses until the water ran clear - I probably should have done a couple more as the red dye was still leaking a bit of orange when I squeezed it out ready to hang to dry. Found a coat hanger and - 

Ta dah!

Now there is always an element of pot luck in how the dye actually comes out. My speckled sections had worked pretty well with green, blue, and purple...

But came out as more of a gradient between the orange, yellow, and red.

                                          

I have no idea whether this was due to the wetness of the wool when I applied the dye; whether I put too much of these lighter colours on the wool when speckling; or whether these dyes act differently on the wool for some reason. 

It didn't come out exactly as I'd imagined - but it's not bad for a first attempt! 

So there we are. My first skein of hand-dyed wool. And it seems appropriate that it's rainbow coloured, considering how much the rainbow has been used as a symbol of hope in these difficult times. I'll let you know how it knits up...but I may not get round to it very quickly (my fingers are itching!) because I've started to get back into writing again for the first time in ages. Might be time to give the knitting pins a rest and focus on words for a while...

Feel free to share any lockdown projects you've got on the go with me - always good to hear what everyone else is up to, creatively.