Dyeing stretches of yarn to create sets of patterns, images, and designs.
The Wikipedia article on Ikat
Stripes are a variation covered towards the bottom of this page.
One of the places this project started was people who thought that they could paint words or a picture on a blank, and that when the fabric was reknit (or crocheted, or woven) that the pictures would magically transfer.
Many were putting considerable effort in and getting nothing but variations on colored confetti back. I got frustrated by them making the same mistakes and expecting different results: hence, this project to show the dynamics of preliminary dyeing and how it transferred to a different format.
Yarn, when dyed, usually changes: it gets thicker, or thinner, sometimes more fuzzy or bulky. My mistake in the first sample was working with raw yarn.
I started by knitting a 28-stitch tube of fingering yarn using US 1/2.25 mm needles. I wanted the smallest possible sample that wasn’t too finicky to manage.
I drew a pear on one side using a magic marker.
This was unraveled, tieing pieces of tape at the color changes (think giant waxed dental floss).
I stretched it into a giant loop around studio furniture and made more loops (reversing directions, which is why the images are out of sequence), then retied the knots over all strands. The yarn was soaked in a salt-vinegar solution.
As the dye was heat-sensitive, colors were painted on in non-touching sections and set in the microwave. This helped keep the colors from bleeding into each other.
I cast on the same number of stitches but discovered almost immediately that the color blocks weren’t lining up. The skewing got worse with each round. I changed my needle size, frogged and reknit several times, trying to adjust my tension (has this ever worked?!).
Finally I measured out fresh yarn, boiled it with salt and vinegar, knit a blank tube, drew a pear on it blah blah blah.
There was minimal creep. The tube (rotated at right) was carefully clipped and flattened (graphic in header). I could have gotten it closer if I’d been more tidy, but this was about managing a new technique, not perfecting it. Using a warping board to hold the strands taut would have helped, as would have working at a larger scale.
My first striped socks were done with giant loops. I was then introduced to the technique of knitting or crocheting a blank to dye by my Netherlands’ friend BreiKonijn and working that up. So much easier!
Here, two strands’ worth of socks (determined by weight) were held together and crocheted loosely into a tube. The toe of the feet is in the middle (nominee for weird sentence of the day). After dyeing, the yarn was separated into two balls, and rewound to work from each end without cutting. Popping the balls into a plastic bag kept them from tangling and made the project portable.
The entrelac is worked two-at-a-time, magic loop. Almost all the fuss is in the setup. I’d done solid-color entrelac socks and the boredom almost killed me. Here, the freshly-emerging colors pull the project along like a runaway horse. The feet were done separately, joined only at the backs of the heels and whip-stitched on.
This content was amalgamated and expanded from old Ravelry Projects.