Autumn on the Plains Hand Dyed Mini Skeins

Fine Merino Wool ~ Sport Weight (or Light DK) ~ 5x20g ~ 5x60m/65y

Mini skeins are the funnest and easiest way to play with my season-and-place-inspired colour palettes. Use them to make a colourful stripey accessory, or combine them with full-sized skeins of a main colour to add a few interesting pops.

This is a hand-dyed tonal yarn with a tie resist. Each skein has four resist sections, as you knit they leave a pale-to-white fleck scattered across the stitches and tying different colours together. As a tonal yarn it’s primarily one colour but there will be lighter and darker sections throughout the skein, on some colours more than others.

This yarn especially suits striped projects (big stripes or small ones!) or strong geometric colour work.

Bundle 1 consists of colours 1-5, Bundle 2 consists of colours 6-10.

Why does the label say “dyed slowly with the help of California sunshine”?

I’m always conscious of the impact the things I make have on the world, so went into this dyeing project determined to be as low impact as possible. Since it’s an abundant resource where I live, I’m using the sun as my main energy source. 

My dying method is vat dyeing, meaning the yarn sits in dye-infused water until all the colour has soaked into the yarn leaving the water clear (in most cases). Heat is needed to both activate the dye and to set it into the yarn. To heat the dye water initially I put the vat with the yarn in a greenhouse, where the atmospheric temperature heats the water, as the temps cool at the end of the day I wrap the vats in wool insulation which traps the heat inside and lets the dye continue absorbing over night. The yarn takes between 24 and 48 hours to absorb all the dye. Then to heat set the yarn I put it outside in a solar oven, and leave it there for the entire day.

With a small number of the very dark colours or in cold weather when the greenhouse can’t get hot enough to heat the water, I will heat the vat and yarn on a stove for 5-10 minutes to get it to temperature, then immediately wrap it in the wool insulation to do its work.

What about the yarn itself?

I buy my bare undyed yarn from a company that supports ethical farming and sustainable practices. The wool is grown in Argentina and Uruguay and is muelsing-free. It’s milled in Peru without chemicals, and in a facility that uses mostly sustainable energy as well as sustainable water practices.

Non-superwash wool, so gentle wash in cool water and dry flat.