Saturday, February 19, 2005

Joeli doesn't love me anymore

Yesterday I attempted to dye some cotton yarn. For it being my first foray into such strangeness, it worked well. I need more cotton now... still have gobs of the Dazzle Dye left. I opened an orange and a fuschia; both dye bottles have plenty of dye left. Maybe I'll dye some socks or raid the thrift shop for good t-shirts to colour.
News flash: this dye does not behave exactly as Kool-aid does. It doesn't soak in and bleed like Kool-aid does and it's easier to make solid colours. At least, that's how it worked yesterday.

I started with yarn in this form:



Two skeins of the white Lily Elite Cotton and two balls about that size of black and white Bernat Handicrafter cotton transformed into this:



One of the balls of Handicrafter I left as a center-pull to see what would happen.
The other ball had a knot, so I picked it out and wound it into two hanks. The larger of the two and one of the white skeins I dyed pink:





The center-pull ball? The dye didn't even pretend to soak through more than one layer of yarn. After a few hours I rewound it into a hank to expedite drying. Looks interesting, no? Nah.



The rest of the Handicrafter I dyed orange. Looks like an attacking pumpkin.



The last white hank I squirted both colours on in a random pattern to see what would happen. It looks interesting to knit, but I haven't untangled the hank yet. Let me just say....
Never put yarn in the washing machine and dryer, even if you tied the hanks in several places and ran it on the gentle cycle.
Pretty pathetic that I had to learn this the hard way. Three of the hanks were fairly easy to fix... the center-pull ball came out fine and was easy to turn into a hank for hanging to dry... but this last one?



But it smells so good!

In more mundane news, Fantasia came inside for a few minutes this morning. She's not a very cooperative model. She's playing coy and walking away from the camera.



What a nice chicken-tush!