The battle against dyeing a self-striping yarn was a hard-fought one, but in the I emerged victorious.

With help from Eunny Jang’s tutorial on how to dye self striping yarn, I calculated the proper length for each repeat and strung yarn out across the living room. Instead of doing the smart thing and test-dyeing a small skein, I did the dumb thing and test-dyed a 300 gram, 840 yard skein. Guess what that means? I walked .47 miles in a circle around my couch. I was almost sick from dizziness. Test skein #2 was done on a compact winding contraption that came apart halfway through the operation. Cue the tears.

After much trial and error I’ve finally got this thing down to almost a science. The only drawback to all my testing is that I dyed myself out of bare yarn and had to put in an emergency order for more. I’ve got a few of the prototype skeins available for sale. Each set comes with a small amount of pink yarn for use in creating a margin line down the sock.

So far everyone I’ve shown it to likes the idea of this yarn pattern, and several have commented that it would make a good gift for a teacher or student. Unlike the other colors which are one-time dye jobs, I think this will become a permanent part of the collection. The amount of time and work required in creating it will result in a slightly higher price, but I think the novelty will make it worth it. After all, using separate white and blue skeins would require a massive amount of ends to weave in.