Update

Some of the things I am currently working on at Dyed Bright Here:

I am still dyeing all of the individual colors a little bit at a time. I have at present count 38 individual colors to mix and play with to create my colorways. As of today, I have 19 of them dyed individually and have started the first swatch. I currently call them by the name the dye manufacturer gave each of the dyes. I am thinking of re-naming them. The dye may be called Kelly Green but on my yarn, I see it as "Jealousy". That way, once the project is completed when someone wants to mix their own colorway together it might be a mix of Love, Lust, Hope, and Faith.  

I also have a few colorways in mind that I haven't translated onto the yarn yet. So far the list includes:

Wild Woman--Purple, orange, sky blue, and ?

Brains--Pastel pink and grey

Oh, Baby!--typical baby colors, light blue, pink, lavender, mint green, maybe yellow

Swamp Thing--browns, dark greens, black

And then there's the upcoming LE colorways for Balticon 45 in 2011.

And, finally, some monochromatic colorways. 

The holiday season is currently squashing most of us under its big, green, hairy thumb (myself included). I hope you have a moment to sit back, take a deep breath, and enjoy all the wonderful colors of the season. Here's wishing you a safe, happy, healthy, and colorful holiday.  See you in 2011.

Love,

Sue

New Territory

I have decided to venture into some new territory.  I am adding other weights of yarn to my offerings.  I have purchased approximately 20 skeins each of DK, worsted, and bulky weight yarns.  However, I don't have the space (or the cash flow) to dye every yarn in every color at the moment.  So, I will dye to order.  I will be revamping my Etsy listings in the near future. I will post a listing for what I actually have in stock for each weight, a listing for each weight of all the possible colorways (this will be a dyed-to-order listing and so will take longer to get to the customer), and I will also post information in the shop news (maybe separate listings but I am not sure yet) about designing your own colorways.

The design-your-own thing is something that I have been moving towards.  I mentioned earlier that I am going to do mini-skeins in all of my solid colors to go with my hand painted colorways.  One of the reasons for wanting to dye some solids is to use the yarn as a design/idea aid for future creations.  It helps to have the yarn in front of me to see how certain colors work side by side.  And, if I have the colors in front of me, I might as well put them in front of you as well.  

All of the Limited Edition colorways have been created with input from someone else; a shop owner, an author, or a friend.  I have certain colors that I gravitate towards and find that sometimes it is a lot easier to have someone else give me a list of colors rather than have to pick and choose on my own.  So, why not let you in on some of the fun too?

Because it takes the same amount of time to do one skein of yarn as it does to do a full batch of five or six, there will have to be a cost incentive to buying a full batch rather than just one skein.  So, put simply, if you want just one skein I will gladly do that. However, the cost per skein will be more expensive for just one.  

The other consideration is that no matter how much planning you put into this kind of thing, it is extremely difficult to predict what the finished result will look like or how it will knit up.  Thankfully, I am almost always pleasantly surprised.  That said, once the yarn is dyed there is no turning back.  I will give you plenty of opportunity to select your colors and make any special requests beforehand but there has to be a point where it's a done deal.

As you may have figured out by now, there is not a whole lot of method going on around here but a whole lot of madness.  I have no doubt that there will be some minor glitches in this new hair-brained idea of mine.  I also have no doubt that it will be worth it.  Or, at the very least an interesting ride.  So, if you have any thoughts or ideas on any of this, please leave a comment.  Or send an email to me [Dyed Bright Here (all one word) at google mail dot com] or tweet me at Bright Eyed Dyer (again, all one word).

Decisions, Decisions

Just two days left for my sale!

Today everything in the shop is 45% OFF

Tomorrow will be the last day and everything will be 50% OFF

Keep in mind that there are three colorways that only have 1 skein left; First Kiss, Rhinebeck, and Zombies.

Also keep in mind that there are three colorways that only have 2 skeins left; Bumble Bee, Polo Ponies, and Spring Fling.

So, the question is: If you love any of these colorways, do you grab it today before it is gone? Or do you wait till tomorrow for the bigger discount and risk the color already being sold out?  Hmmmm, decisions, decisions.

Either way, happy shopping!

Colors Available

In yesterday's post I outlined what colors were going fast (or in many cases now, already gone). Today, I'm going to focus on what is available.

The discount in my shop today is 35%.  It will go up to 40% tomorrow, 45% Thursday, and 50% on Friday. The catch to a sale like this is the availability of the stock on hand... you have to decide where you draw the line between loving a particular color and how big a bargain you need/want.  Even at just 35% off these are some great deals!

Here is the rundown of what is currently in the shop:

There is just ONE skein left of:

First Kiss

Rhinebeck

Zombie

There are TWO skeins left of:

Bumble Bee

Polo Ponies

Spring Fling

There are THREE skeins available of:

Desire

Early Autumn

Primary Race

Punkin Baby

There are FOUR skeins available of:

Calico Cat

Crush

Patriot

And FIVE skeins of Hayride.

There you have it... If you are looking to do a project that is larger than the usual pair of socks this information will hopefully help you decide on a color.  Something to keep in mind if you like my colors but want to make something heavier; my sock yarn held double will work as a worsted weight. 

Sale Update

First of all, a HUGE

THANK YOU 

to everyone who has visited the shop lately and/or bought some of my creations. I appreciate your business.

Now, for an update on what is still available:

The discontinued and OOAK listings are all sold. 

I am OUT of STOCK on the following colorways:

Blueberries

Childhood
Island Breeze
Kiwi

KnitYeah
Marina del Ray
Mixed Berries

Opening Night
Sophisticated Schoolgirl

Uptown Girl

Today everything is 40% OFF.  Tomorrow it will go down to 35% OFF.  Then, it will start climbing again and will be back up to 50% OFF one more time on Friday.  The catch, however, is color availability...if you wait till Friday, will that colorway you are dying to try still be in the shop?  To help you make your decision of whether to buy now or wait, here is a list (with pics of course) of the colorways of which I only have one or two skeins still in stock.

THERE IS ONLY ONE SKEIN LEFT OF:

First Kiss

Rhinebeck

Zombie

THERE ARE ONLY TWO SKEINS LEFT OF:

Bumble Bee

Polo Ponies

Spring Fling

Once again, thank you very much if you have even stopped by the shop lately.  If you have a particular color or colorway in mind and don't see it in the shop; send me an email (Dyed Bright Here (all one word) AT G mail dot com--you know how to type it, the strangeness here is to avoid bot spam) or send me a tweet.  I am the @BrightEyedDyer on Twitter.  I will also do custom colors for you if you have a favorite sports team or want something in your school colors, or just want to pick your favorite colors.

HUGE Fall Sale!!

Hold on to your needles...here we go...

It's time for a HUGE sale at Dyed Bright Here!  Why?  Because I have too much inspiration for cool new colors and only so much space for inventory.  So, before I can go back to my beloved bottles of outrageous color and cook up some more insanity I need to clear out some of this sock yarn.

There is no limit to how many skeins you can buy.  I will also be updating the quantities available to accurately reflect my inventory. 

Sales dates and discount percentages are (OOAK and Special Clearance listings are NOT included):

Sat. 9/25      50% OFF

All Sock Yarn and Roving

Sun 9/26      45% OFF

All Sock Yarn and Roving

Mon 9/27     40% OFF

All Sock Yarn and Roving

Tues 9/28    35% OFF

All Sock Yarn and Roving

Wed 9/29    40% OFF

All Sock Yarn and Roving

Thurs 9/30  45% OFF 

All Sock Yarn and Roving

Fri 10/1       50% OFF

All Sock Yarn and Roving

Here's how the sale is going to work:

I have decided to change the prices in the shop rather than do discounts by refund through PayPal only because either way it's work but if I do it as a refund that means that you have to have funds available for the full regular price which can be difficult sometimes.  So, I will be changing the prices for all of the items in the shop each day.  For that reason, I will take the shop down at 8:00am est each day to do the maintenance.  I don't know yet how long that will take exactly but it will be back up by 10:00am est at the latest (hopefully a lot sooner).

In case you are curious what new color projects I am impatiently waiting to start; some of the colorway ideas go with names like:

Brains (light pink and light grey)

Zombie Food (same as Brains plus red, black, green)

Rot (black, brown, green)

Yes, my horror writing friends have WAY too much influence over my thoughts lately. However, there is also:

Cotton Candy (pink, blue, teal)

Oh Baby (typical pastel baby colors of pink, blue, yellow, green)

And, I am thinking of doing some little skeins of solid colors to use for toe/heel/cuff accents or to do your own stripes, or for faire isle in combination with the variegated colors.

So you see, my friends, I REALLY need to move the skeins of coolness that are currently overflowing my work space so I can play in the dye and make skeins of crazy coolness!

Welcoming Knitting Weather!

Fall is my favorite time of year. Hands down, no hesitation whatsoever, the best. Always has been. Even long before I picked up some sticks, some string, a book, and an obsession or three.  Now that I am a Knitter, my love for all things Autumnal has only grown.  I think most of us knit year round.  I don't know about you, but for me, in the warmer months I knit socks with itty-bitty cuffs.  When I knit at all.  As soon as that first cool day happens my inner knitting alarm goes off and look out wool here I come.  I know the weather will undoubtably become warm again off and on for a few weeks yet.  I couldn't care less.  Mother nature has tipped her hand and I know cooler days and nights are coming.

I tend to think of September and the beginning of Fall as the new year.  I guess that comes from all those years of school; first as a kid myself and now as a parent.  Time to clean out the closets, see what is still servicable (and still fits), time to fill in the gaps with new things.

So, I am cleaning out some of colors that either haven't sold very well in the past, or that I don't want to dye any more of for whatever reason.  In doing that, I am making room for the new colors that I have had so much fun creating over the past couple of weeks.  I have put on sale some really great deals so that I can free up more room.  I'm itching to try some more new dyeing ideas that I think you will really like.

There are two OOAK listings still up in the shop as well as seven skeins of discontinued colorways of my sock yarn.  My High Society Sock Yarn currently retails for $22.   The discontinued colorways are priced at $10.  As of right now, there are two skeins each of Georgia Peach, New Money, and Summer Garden, and one skein of Blue Skies.  Two skeins is more than enough yardage to make a really nice shawl; for less than the cost of one regularly priced skein.  So, if you are in the mood for a bargain, check it out.

The clearance and special listings are just the tip of the iceberg though.  The real fun will start this Saturday (9/25/2010 at 10:00 am est) and will continue through Friday (10/1/2010 midnight est).  I will put the details in my next post and it should be up sometime in the next hour or so....

Dyeing Jag--Part 2

My last post revealed the first 5 colors from my "dyeing jag" of the previous week.  Today's post is to reveal the last 5.  After those first colors, which in many ways were related, things got much more random...

The next color is "Island Breeze".  At this point in the dying I started looking at the colors I had and thinking, "Hmmm....what color am I missing today?"  Turquoise and blue came to mind first...

Island Breeze

After that, was still jonesing for more turquoise and I'll always be in favor of more fuchsia.  So, "First Kiss" came to be.

First Kiss

At that point, I needed to go a little darker and definitely needed some red.  "Patriot" is a mix of 4 reds, 4 blues, and the tiniest bit of white occassionally left in as well.

Patriot

After "Patriot" I was still looking for some red and blue but wanted to go a bit darker.  I also wanted to use some of the colors I hadn't used much of lately.  So, I used olive green, spruce, navy blue, and crimson.  It was starting to get dark outside when I hung it up to dry.  All I could think initially was that it reminded me of night.  Except for the dark red.  Blood?  And what about the slightly icky quality of the olive green?  Zombies!!  This must be a sign that I am hanging out with some strange people (or great people who just happen to write some really twisted, sick, and messed up stuff) way too much.

Zombies

And finally, one of my colors that I love and want to play around with some more is "Desire".  It has eight colors in it but the ones that always strike me the most are where the fuchsia blends into the sky blue, burnt orange, and vermillion.  So, I used those four.  I love it just as much.  But, since it is a lighter, pinker version of "Desire" I decided to call it "Crush".

Crush

I will be adding all of these colors to the color page and also to my Etsy shop.  I will be having a sale in the shop in the upcoming weeks.  I am phasing out some of the colors and adding these new ones so there will be some outrageous deals on the discontinued stuff.  Plus, I like the idea of "the early bird gets the worm" so I will again be doing a sliding scale discount where the sooner you stop in, the bigger your discount will be.  Watch for the tweets.  You can follow me on Twitter @BrightEyedDyer.

Dyeing Jag--Part 1

Lovelyarns in Baltimore has an annual trunk show/sale as part of their birthday celebration and I was invited to participate.  So, in preparation, I ordered 10 lbs of yarn and went to town.  I went on a "Dyeing Jag" and dyed all 10 lbs (41 skeins) in one day.  It worked out to 4 skeins each of 9 new colors and the last new color had my usual 5 skeins.  Ten brand spanking new colorways.  

I had a great time.  Naming them afterwards was almost as much fun as creating them in the first place. 

I was originally going to do 10 separate posts, one for each color.  That seems a bit excessive though.  But I am not about to cram all 10 into this post.  So, a compromise is in order.  So, let's see what looks good...maybe half at a time...

The first color is called "Punkin Baby".  Jake's first nickname when he was a baby was "Punkin Baby".  These days he is reading everything, including my dye bottles.  I just so happen to have an orange color named Pumpkin.  He saw this and immediately wanted to use it in a colorway.  I told him to pick out 2 or 3 more colors to go with it.  He chose Kelly Green, Cobalt Blue, and Emerald Green.  I am so impressed with his choices.  I think they make a great colorway.

Punkin Baby 

Next up is Mixed Berries.  This colorway is a full sibling to Blueberries.  Bright fuchsia and black with dark purple for depth.  

Mixed Berries

And the other full sibling is Kiwi.  Again the black, this time mixed with kelly green and charteuse.

Kiwi

The next two colors are first cousins of these high contrast yarns.  Instead of using black on half the skein and two other colors, I instead used a main color on half the skein and black and the secondary color equally on the rest of the skein.  Watermelon is primarily pink with black and green.  I did, however, also leave white between the colors to represent the white between the flesh and the rind of a watermelon as well as for the white seeds.

Watermelon

And finally, Bumble Bee.  In Bumble Bee I used bright yellow as the main color on half of the skein and then a balance of black and burnt orange on the rest.

Bumble Bee

So, except for Punkin Baby, the other four colors here are related.  The last five are pretty different.  And the names got a whole lot stranger.  

Coming up next...  Zombies.

Calico Cat

The last of the new colors for the Fall and Winter of 2010 (so far...hopefully there will be more) is "Calico Cat"

I plan on doing more versions of orange, black, and white for a couple of reasons.  First, Halloween.  Second, I know a lot of people who are fans of Scott Sigler and this color scheme plays prominently in his book "The Rookie" as they are the colors of the Kraken team. Many of these folks have football jerseys and I thought it would be fun for them to be able to make socks and/or other accessories to match. Third, I just love calico cats.  Yes, I am that weird sometimes.

This first version is designed to be mostly orange with speckled stripes of black, grey, and white swirling around the sock.

A rich true orange with highlights of black, grey, and white.

Perfect colors for Sigler fans or Holloween!

I love the thinness of the black/grey/white stripes!

That's it for new colors for now...
I have tons more color combinations and patterns swirling around in this crazy head of mine.  Hopefully I will find more time in the coming weeks as the kids go back to school to make some more of these a reality.

KnitYeah

The fourth new colorway for the Fall and Winter of 2010 is called KnitYeah.

I recently discovered when I started following @KnitYeah on Twitter that not only was she also from Harrisburg but she in fact lived just 4 blocks from me and her birthday is 5 days before mine.  Yes, the world is getting smaller  by the day.  It just so happened that I made these realizations on the day of her birthday.  We were talking about yarn colors so I inquired as to her favorite color.  The answer was unequivocally GREEN!

So, I took all of the greens that I had in my arsenal of dyes (I'm up to 6 different greens now), added a little royal blue and some gold and the result is "KnitYeah".  Of course, the first skein went to @KnitYeah herself as a slightly belated birthday present and as a thank you for so graciously allowing me to use her twitter name as the name for one of my colorways.

A mixture of light, bright, medium, dark, and olive green with blue and gold.

You can see the highlights of blue and gold here.

I love how the brightest and darkest greens match up and make these stripes that seem to vibrate!

The final new colorway, coming up tomorrow, is Calico Cat....

Blueberries

The next new colorway for the Fall and Winter of 2010 is "Blueberries".  I love the color turquoise.  I love just about any color with black.  I was originally going to combine just turquoise and black but at the last minute decided to also add royal blue.  This was a good lesson in why "going with your gut" is a good thing.  The royal blue adds a depth to the yarn that makes a huge difference.

I'm hoping to do something similar with black and other colors....

Turquoise and royal blue alternated with black.

Great for men's socks!!

I love the way it stripes!

Next up is KnitYeah!....

Hayride

Next up in the parade of new colorways for Fall and Winter of 2010 is "Hayride".  

Most of my colorways are of the 'painted' variety.  That means that when I am dyeing the yarn I lay the skein out on my work surface flat as a stack of ovals so that I can see the whole skein.  I then apply the dye to the skeins in sections, working it into the yarn by hand to make sure I have the saturation level I want.  The sections of color might be as big as half the skein, or as small as just an inch or two in length.  When I have finished, if it is a new colorway I draw a diagram that shows me which colors went where on the skein and add any other notes I might need to be able to replicate the colorway again at a later date.  These notes include things like dilution strength or other dye mixture notes.  Then, the next time I need to make a batch of a particular colorway I just pull out my notebook, open to the page for that colorway, and away we go.

Every so often I will do a colorway that is 'container dyed' instead of 'painted'.  This means that I put the skeins to be dyed in a container and apply the dye in a more random way.  I usually start by either pushing the skeins off to one side and pouring the dye into the container next to the skeins (for a more diluted, pastel effect) or by pouring the dye down over the yarn and then submerging the yarn in the liquid for more saturated colors.  In either case, I then turn the skeins over to expose the still undyed parts and repeat.  Depending on how many colors I am combining I will leave some yarn exposed for the next color.  This continues until I feel like I am done.  For new colorways it can be hard to find this point.  It can  be hard to find the line between not quite ready and overdone.  Later, when I need to repeat the colorway it is easier because I almost always keep a reference skein of these yarns around to remind me what it should look like when it is done.  The notes for these colorways are a lot different and much more subjective.  "Twelve pours of yellow, five pours of red" is the first instruction for "Early Autumn".  I kid you not.

Recently I had a request for a colorway that had pumpkin orange, brown, sage green, and purple in it.  I don't have a 'sage' green so I decided to use 'spruce' instead.  I decided to make this one of the container dyed colorways.  The result of those colors and that method is "Hay Ride".

The colors of hay, the hay wagon, indian corn, fall.

I love the speckles of purple and green!

Next up Blueberries...

Rhinebeck

The first new colorway for the the Fall and Winter of 2010 is called "Rhinebeck".  I wanted to make a colorway that reminded me of the fall foliage that to me is synonymous with the New York Sheep and Wool Festival that is held in Rhinebeck, NY in mid October.

I used two different browns, burnt orange, gold, and a handful of reds.  However, I didn't want to use primary red or yellow.  While those colors can certainly be found in the leaves at that time of year I wanted to avoid them since they are already featured rather predominantly in some of my other colorways.

The colors are placed on the skein in such a way so that similar colors line up together.  The effects is swirling stripes of gorgeous fall color.  Perfect for this time of year!

Reds, gold, orange, and brown swirling leaves

I like the tonality of the reds and golds.

Swirling around the sock.

Coming up next....

"Hayride"!

New Colors Fall 2010

So far, I have five new colors for the Fall of 2010.  They are:

Rhinebeck

Blueberries

Hayride

KnitYeah

and...

Calico Cat

I will be doing detailed posts on each of these colorways in the coming days plus adding a few more as they are dyed.