Goodbye, March.

There are the batt pictures I promised. I ended up only getting through four of the seven batt bags. Another of the bags turned into this yarn:

"Princess and the Parrot", 169 yards, corespun and plied with feathers and sequins:



In addition, I got a raw fleece from my LYS and I dyed it up with Wilton's. I have all sorts of fun, bright colors, and I've been experimenting with acidic conditions and Red #3 (it's lots of fun!).

Here's me skirting the fleece and some pictures of the post-wash product:








I really like it. Some parts are curlyish, while others still have crimp. Here are a few pictures of the brightest of the dyeing:






I still don't have any good purples, because I haven't picked up a violet dye yet. Mixing red and blue doesn't work out as well as I thought it might. I've had lots of fun and learned a bit dyeing this fleece. The majority of the fuzz pictured here was taken by the owner of the LYS, because I agreed to bring her back part of it seeing as how she gave me the fleece for free. I still have somewhere between 4 and 6 ounces of fleece left to dye, though, so once I decide what colors I don't have enough of, I can fix my predicament. I will definitely be dyeing more of the orange, and without the green. I also ordered another white fleece online today, and am in the process of acquiring a black fleece as well. I'm excited!! The method I used for cleaning the fleece was fast and easy. Very good deal.

That's all out of me for the evening...I've got to get to bed. I finished one of the dog hair socks, so a picture of that to come, as well as the yarn I make for the next one (I ran out after the first sock somehow...silly me, not planning well enough!). The sock fits perfectly, though, and he's really pleased about it. I'm glad, because this project has taken me wayyyyy too long. I'm hoping the second sock goes faster now that I know what I'm doing. Anyway, goodnight!

Kool-aid Dyeing.

I don't have any kind of setup for dyeing with commercial dyes, so I always have to resort to kool-aid and food coloring. I also use the microwave method of dyeing, because I don't like doing dishes!

Well, I picked up some roving for that dyeing project I think I mentioned in the last post. I got some white superfine merino, which I intended to dye blue and green (but ended up doing green, yellow, and pink), and some gray romney, which I dyed red.


I was disappointed that there weren't any blue kool-aids at the store, but I went with what I could find (pink lemonade, lemonade, lemon-lime). I used quite a bit of yellow, but it got eaten up by the green dye (since I worked in my bathtub, the slant caused the excess dyes to run all over the place). I'm not too upset, though, because it looks like watermelon. It's not what I was looking for, and I'm probably going to have to find something else to ply it with. I had plans for this soon-to-be yarn!

And the red:
I used cherry and tropical punch kool-aid and strawberry off-brand drink powder. The tropical punch and the strawberry worked fine, but the cherry didn't take as well. This is probably because it was at the end near the bottom of the slant, and some of the dye that should have been in the saran wrap ran down the drain. I also could have microwaved it longer...and the wool should have been more wet when I started to dye. Hopefully this will produce a slight variegation that looks nice. There are a few spots of gray that I can't decide on. Should I pick them out, or work the yarn with them in? We'll see once I get started. The watermelon is going to get spun up first.