I. Me. Sara, has dyed yarn. And to good effect. *sigh* happiness

I have those Twilight socks sitting on the burner and in order to make them what I really want them to be I needed to do this because the colors I need don’t exist in any company’s line of sock yarns. I know, I looked.

I popped in to Webs on Saturday to pick up yarn and luckily ran into Gail – the “Kangaroo Dyer” responsible for all of Webs in-house, beautiful hand-dyed yarns, the Franklin, the fun stuff she did with the Belle and the Berkshire, the Alpaca. She’s a genius. We got to talking and I mentioned that I was going to experiment with Kool-aid and she suggested food coloring.

Oh chickadees, I have food coloring! I do the cake thing, remember!?!

Gail steered me to an article on Knitty and I dove right in. I can see how this becomes an addiction, easily. Aurelia saw how much fun I was having and said I should do this a lot more. My this-will-ease-Patrick’s-mind response was, “Mama already has enough of our money invested in crafts, honey. Maybe when I use up a bit more of what I have I’ll do some more of this.” She shrugged and headed off to read her latest copy of Katie Kazoo.

I skeined off some small amounts of yarn, 20 yds each, and dropped then into a pot containing one gallon of water plus 3/4 cups white vinegar that was just below simmering. I then mixed my food coloring into 1 cup of, just off the boil, water. I add this stuff to frosting by the toothpick dip so I was a bit cautious at first and figured I could always add more dye. the first color infusion was just a bit of orange, I got what I wanted and took one skein out to drip dry a bit. I wanted graduated colors, sort of so I figured layers of dye would keep the colors related. The second infusion was the same amount of orange and a touch of black, third was equal parts of both colors and the last was just black.

Now, I didn’t leave the skeins in until all the dye was absorbed, I checked on them every minute or so and pulled each skein when it reached a color I liked. then I tossed what was left of the original undyed skein into the pot just to see what would happen while I heat set the four mini skeins.

I’m stoopid with happy over what came out. And good news for you! The pewter yarn- just under 100yds of fine-sport/sock weight yarn is now part of the Blogiversary prize pack!! WHEE ! So get your guesses in, only 7 days left. Your last clue is on Wednesday.

toots