Kool-aid fun :)

Yesterday, our friend Mandy and I set up in our kitchen to have some fun with fiber and kool-aid. We had a very good time and made a very big mess! Laurie helped us set up and took lots of pictures of our fun for us. Normally, I dye in the garage, but the garage was too crowded for us to use it and our car has a dead battery right now and we couldn't get it easily out of the garage. Actually, getting it out was not the problem, the problem was getting the car back into the garage. So, here's the chronicle of our day:

Mandy and I in the midst of all the fun!

Applying dye to superwash merino, Laurie said that in this stage it looked like bacon, Mandy agreed.

Sometimes being chronically ill has its benefits, we used syringes from a few years ago when I had a PIC line for 6 months, the syringes really work well.

I was using paper towel to test out my color mixes.

Mandy dyed some beautiful sock yarn, here is her yellow in the rinse bath.

Mandy's lovely yarn hanging to dry.

Me with my fiber, hung out to dry and yes, making funny faces (Laurie seems to like to take pictures of me rolling my eyes). Laurie said my fiber looked like bloody bandages in this stage.

A couple of years ago, Laurie dyed some merino/silk sock yarn for me at Tempe Yarn and Fiber and neither of us liked the color that it turned out, so we overdyed it. Two of the skeins were kind of peachy and the other was pink, here are all three in the dye bath. We used more of a kettle dyeing process than what we did with the other yarn and fiber (which was handpainted and microwaved). I liked the kettle dyeing better than handpainting, so I might try doing it in the future with a more variegated results. It was a big chore to try to get all three skeins to match each other.

Sock yarn in the rinse bath, looking all matching.

The three skeins hanging up to dry. They look pretty similar, but there is a noticeable difference between the different colors, not too bad but not perfect so we'll see what we're going to do with it. Might try dyeing it again...

My fiber all dried and fluffed. It will be interesting to see it all spun up. It's more orange in real life, the pictures made it look more pink than it is. I really want to spin it - but I'm working on some merino/bunny yarn and I'm excited about that too.

So, that was our day, lots of fun and beautiful yarn and fiber as the results.

BTW - the vessel that is in the last picture of my fiber is a lovely gift that Laurie got from our church friend's secret santa exchange and is beautiful.