Ero Swap

You may know them: the Belgian Boys, Bart & Francis. They can usually be found at the Dutch Knitting Days, and they offer an eclectic, intriguing collection of yarns and fibres. It’s always interesting to visit their stand and check out the latest trends and ideas.

Francis is also a member of the Dutch Karma Swap group on Ravelry. Last year, when we were planning the swaps for the coming year, he offered to support a swap with a special batch of super soft merino yarn from their assortment. It’s 19 micron 8-ply fingering weight yarn, very round, and good for dyeing. He was looking for more projects on Ravelry to promote the yarn (he is very enthusiastic about it). It’s soooo soft, it would make any knitter drool. Hence the name Ero Swap!

In this swap, every participant gets a skein of the supersoft merino for only shipping costs. Everybody dyes the yarn themselves, then creates a project for their swap partner with the yarn. Very inspiring to create both the colour and the project! The participants are adding nice patterns that can be made with this yarn to a special bundle. It is a secret who your swappee is, but it’s okay to share updates on the projects. After all, many participants love similar colours, so the surprise is not given away entirely.

Today I finally started dyeing my yarn. I received it a couple of weeks ago, but didn’t have time to dive in yet. Today I did my taxes first (phew) and then I was free to start playing with dye! Only… I did not have a dyeing pan yet, and I didn’t want to dye in the microwave. I have only dyed with Kool Aid before, years ago, and this time I was going to use proper dye.

First I soaked the skein. My husband took a glance and said “Hey! Spaghetti!”. Unfortunately for him it was not dinner.

I went out and bought a pan especially for dyeing. When I’m not dyeing, it will serve as a container for my dyeing stuff.

I looked at the dye colours that I had and selected two: Kingfisher and Cyclamen. I put a bit of powder in plastic cups and added water.

I started with dyeing the Kingfisher.

When looking at the dye in the cup, it seems very dark, but once it’s in the water, you can see that it’s not. It’s a bit between teal and robin’s egg blue.

I couldn’t wait to start dyeing the other skein! The cyclamen dye looked promising:

Again, in the pan the colour is much lighter (of course). It’s quite a nice purple, I think, right in the middle between red and blue.

Both skeins came out quite nicely! The colours are rather bright, but that may be good. I’m thinking of combining the two in my project.