You can wind your skein round whatever you like. A pair of doorknobs, a couple of fenceposts... really doesn't matter. In this example, I've wound a skein round a couple of chairbacks.
The important thing is to tie it regularly, so you don't end up with an irretrievable mess of yarn. In this case, the skein is just under 2 metres (80")round, and I've tied it four times (every 50cm or 20"). If you're dealing with something really slippy like viscose ribbon, tie it more times than that (maybe every 30 cm or 12"). You can see on the photo above that I've made one tie with the main yarn (on the right), and then three extras with a contrast; this is an acrylic, because acrylic generally doesn't dye so you can find your ties easily.
The other thing to make sure of is not making the ties too tight. If you do that, you won't be able to get the dye under the ties and you'll end up with white patches. (If that's what you want, though, tie away, and you can do it deliberately!) This second pic shows you how I generally tie mine.
Edited to add - I obviously failed to follow my own advice when dyeing some sari silk on Monday night. I added a couple of extra ties for security, but didn't check what the original ties on the skein looked like! So here's a classic example of what happens if you tie it too tight...
Gah. Back to the dyepot!
3 comments:
Creative use of white space, eh? Colours look lovely...
Shame about the day course - what were you going to be teaching? (apologies if you've already blogged this). I've bought some yarn from the handpaintedyarn.com in Uruguay - and most of the skeins have those white patches on. Fortunately it's blending in quite well as I'm knitting it up - the colours are in short lengths so the effect is speckled rather than striped.
The course was meant to be 'freeform knitting'. I re-dyed the silk and got rid of the little white patches - the recipient of that skein liked it, anyway!
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