You Are The Prototype.

I know I said that today's post would be about the yarn that I spun, but I'm too excited about the self-striping yarn I talked about yesterday that the spinning is going to be pushed back a bit.

I've been scared to try dyeing self-striping yarns for a while. I always thought the dyers that had self-striping yarns were wizards, and it just seemed like way too much work. Lately though, I've found myself wanting to give it a try. I found a warping board (to wind really long skeins) on eBay and bought it, and it arrived a couple of days ago. I took a skein of my base sock yarn to do a prototype with. I decided to title these socks "You Are The Prototype," because the song "Prototype" by Outkast has been in my head while working on these.

Yesterday I posted a photo of my first self-striping yarn experiment drying. It actually dried up really quickly, so I was able to wind it into a ball and take it to my Thursday knitting group to work on.

I tried to wind it into a ball like a lot of other self-striping dyers do, and this will probably be the last time you see one like this from me. It's a pain and not worth it for me. When the self-striping yarns hit my shop, you'll see them in skeins. Sorry.

Do you see that?! Those are stripes! And they look even to me! It was so exciting to see the yarn create the pattern.

I'm knitting some afterthought heel socks, so that's what that one line of maroon waste yarn is for. Once the sock is done, I'll take out the waste yarn and put the heel in there. Afterthought heel socks help keep the stripes even, because they get all wonky with the heel flap/gusset way of knitting socks.

Have you ever knit with self-striping yarn before? Do you like it?