Life's Little Details: Knitting, Sewing, Green Living, Frugal Living and Cooking In A Little Corner of Southern French Countryside.

Monday, June 06, 2005

Been Dyeing To Tell You: Part III


Cherry/Grape Merino
Originally uploaded by Sheepish.
And, here we have the aftermath. I did pretty well. Didn't even ruin the pair of khaki pants I unwisely picked out this morning.

I have to say, this stuff, aside from tasting nasty (licked my fingers before opting for kitchen gloves), has the side effect of allowing you to take a nostalgic trot down memory lane back to hot summer afternoons filled with colorful tongues and brightly hued mustaches. Fun!

The procedure (not that I have any clue what I'm doing here):

I squeezed the vinegar water out of the skein then laid it out on a table covered in plastic wrap. Then, using one of my only remaining measuring cups (a real sore spot these days, but we won't get into how my children have recently broken almost every glass object in the house), I carefully drizzled a cup of the "substance" (can we really even call this stuff a beverage?) onto the yarn. Noticing that the yarn was not absorbing the liquid very well, I panicked calmly devised a plan to remedy the problem.

The plan: gently squish the yarn with my gloved fingers to help it along with the absorption process. That's roughly where we're at here. I left out the shot of the yarn sunning on the top of our heap car. I didn't figure you'd want to see that. Why am I not nuking the stuff in our handy-dandy microwave? Don't have one. Don't really miss it - well, at least I haven't till now. So, we're trying the Southern sun-tea theory of yarn dyeing. I'll let you know how that goes.