Ravelraiser '08!

As some of you already know, Ravelraiser '08 began this weekend - this is a push to raise funds to support this amazing free community. If you aren't on Ravelry yet, you need to be, and if you are on Ravelry, you've probably found yourself wondering what you did for patterns, yarn information, stash management, and daily knitterly online entertainment before it existed (or while we were on the seemingly endless waiting list last year!). What started out as a husband-and-wife team working on a weekend project has become a global knit and crochet community with tens of thousands of active members from all over the globe, in every age group and skill level. Ravelry has contributed so much to the knitting community, and now we want to give back. If you go to this thread and donate 10 lousy bucks, you'll be entered into drawings for fabulous yarn-and-fiber-related prizes, including the grand prizes - five (or maybe six now?) "Dream Stashes" - and the other prizes, which include yarn club memberships, yarn, roving, and gift certificates to several fine yarn establishments, including a $50 gift certificate to Eat.Sleep.Knit! You get one entry for every $10 you donate, and check out all of the amazing prizes!

I also thought I'd show you all the results of my Sunday activities. I am constantly surrounded by truly amazing hand-dyed yarn, and while I'd love to believe I could do the same thing, I'm really not creative and color-minded enough to do it - not to mention patient! About a year ago, I bought some Jacquard dyes and ten skeins of KnitPicks Bare in varying weights to play with, and after reading every free tutorial I could find, I set out about making a blue-and-brown variegated yarn (I'm a sucker for any brown-and-pastel-color-of-your-choice combination, if that's not really obvious). To put it nicely, the yarn came out looking really great after I knitted it up into a pair of Felted Clogs and felted it!

However, this weekend I saw that Sharon of Yarn Love and Three Irish Girls had a Guide to Gorgeous Hand-Dyed Yarns for sale on her website, and better yet it was downloadable. If you have ever had the pleasure of seeing a skein of Yarn Love yarn, then you know these ladies know what they are doing, so I decided to go for it. (By the way, the guide is awesome - it included directions for three different kinds of hand-dyeing and answered all of the questions the free tutorials had left me with.)

First I dyed two skeins with the Kettle-Dyed Solids method, wetting one skein prior to dyeing and leaving the other dry because I wanted to see how different they would look.

It turns out, not that different, but the dry one had a very subtle variegation to it that I think I prefer:

Next, I decided to try the Kettle-Dyed Variegated, which sounded to me like it could not possibly work, but I decided to trust the experts.

It turns out that it actually works pretty well - I love the end result!