My very first blog post

Welcome to my blog!

Hi everyone

My name is Lauriena, Miss Reena on Ravelry, and I am a knitter who likes to dye her own yarn.  I started dyeing my own yarn in 2013 using an Easter Egg dye kit, and have been hooked on it since then. This is my first yarn, and the beginning of the first sock made with that yarn.

I like to dye my yarn with food safe dyes, mostly because I like being able to dye my yarn, then wash whatever dishes/utensils I use and then use them to make supper. I don't like having to have separate equipment for my dyeing. Although when I forget to wash the pot out and then wind up with pink spaghetti, I sometimes think I should have separate ones, but since it is food safe dye, it just makes for a fun dinner conversation.

Most of my dyeing is done with food colouring, with the Wilton Color Right system being my current favourite type of food colouring, since it has some intense colours. For me, the more saturated and the more intense the colour, the happier I am.  I also have 30 different shades of Americolor food colour gels, some McCormick food colouring (both neon and regular),  a whole bunch of different Easter egg dye kits (I grab them after Easter when they are on sale), and whatever Kool Aid I can get my hands on.  Kool Aid has officially stopped making the unsweetened envelopes in Canada (grrr.....), so most of what I have is from the US. It is great to have friends in the US who are willing to help me get my hands on it.

Over the past couple of years, I have tested out a bunch of different techniques, some that I found online and some that were just sort of a "I wonder what would happen if....?" type of thing.  And, for the most part, I like that the yarns are all different. Even why I try to recreate a specific dye job, it always seems to come out different. Sometimes just a little bit different, sometimes wildly different. And for the most part,  I wind up being happy with what I get. And even if I don't like it, there is always at least one person who thinks it is amazing and will wind up getting some socks made for them out of it.

I post every yarn I dye in my stash on Ravelry, and in the monthly success tabs in the What A Kool Way To Dye group on Ravelry.  Once I knit with the yarn, the results go up in various groups in Ravelry, depending on what they are.  I love knitting socks, so most of my yarn winds up as socks. I am part of a couple of different sock knitting challenges, so the finished projects get posted in those.

I have had a lot of people ask me how I dye my yarn, how I get certain results, why I did things in a certain way, etc.  I try to make notes on my stash pages, but that doesn't always happen.  And I know when I was trying to do searches on how to do certain things, Ravelry stash pages did not usually come up in the search results.

So I am hoping to post a whole bunch of information on this blog, with the hopes that someday, somewhere, someone will be looking for details on how to do something and I might be able to help them!

I am sure the blog will undergo a whole bunch of changes over the course of the first few posts/weeks, while I get the layout figured out, change the formatting, change my mind a dozen times, and potentially wind up going right back to the same layout I started out with.  But that is the sign of a creative personality, right?

Chat soon!
Miss Reena