A Good Yarn With a Sad Story.

I don't yet have a new project to dye wool for, although I'll be starting one soon.  But I do have a dear friend who was visiting and interested in learning to dye yarn, so I thought it would be a good time to try out Lucy Richard's Wooly Mason Jar Dye technique. 

And it was--we had a lot of fun last Saturday, even though we went "off-road" and did our own thing rather than following Lucy's directions.  Why?  Because I'd had no time to read Lucy's instructions and so hadn't done any of the prep work.  She has a very specific and relatively foolproof system that I'm interested in learning. 

Although we didn't follow her method, we still got into the dyepot and had a lot of fun.  Here are some photos from the day.

Oh, and where does the title of today's post come from?  Read on; the story is after the photos.  Pretty funny.

This is my buddy mixing up her dye solution.

The Lucy Richard method involves making dye solutions in jars. One of the 3 "starter" primary colors is Warm Blue, and that's what you see here on the right. We didn't have time to mix up all the initial solutions for this very exact method, so we ad-libbed and tried our own thing, which you see in the pink jar.

Having just rinsed the first skein of yellow that we tried, my friend is loving the color she achieved. A wonderful pumpkin hue.

On my back porch, ogling her drying yarns.

Still drying...

After it dried, we took the variegated blue skein and wound it into a ball. This is going to be lovely when woven. (She is a weaver.)

 
THE STORY OF THIS YARN AND THE TITLE OF TODAY'S POST:
We had gone to WEBS on Friday.  While there, my friend decided to pick up some white wool with which to practice dyeing.  After walking around in the warehouse, she spotted a poor...unfortunate...very small cone of white wool yarn sitting all by its lonesome on a shelf with a few other assorted fibers.  This cone of yarn was. very messy and disorganized, to say the least.  The strands of yarn in the upper part seemed to be trying to jump off the top of the cone and run away. 

It looked like a fiber in distress.  The tag said 100% wool and the price was only $2.50.

Next we spotted a sign on the shelf that said (I'm not making this up): 
"Good yarn with a sad story."     ???!!

Well, what could we do?  She HAD to buy it and take it home.  So she did.  We carefully took it off the cone and wound it into 3 skeins when we got home.  There was only about 40 ounces total on the cone, but it was enough to play with in the dyepot.

And so, our "good yarn with a sad story" actually got to have a happy ending.  It now looks far more glamorous, and my friend will incorporate it into one of her beautiful woven wall hangings. 

A very happy ending indeed.

Oh, and did I mention that she is now addicted to dyeing yarn?  Yup.  She'll be fabulous at it.