"Before you go in there - Mom's getting freaky! First, she buys kool-aid. Then she sticks wool in it. And now..she's cooking it. In.... the microwave!"
Yes, its true. I've never purchased kool-aid for drinking. Forcing them to drink natural fruit juice. The cruelty! The freakiness!
It was easy, it was fun , not messy at all, and smelled fruity. First, what was once a skein of Brown Sheep in a natural whitish with gray became this in Berry Blue.
(its wet here, don't worry, it lightens up). A second skein failed to get discernibly green when dyed in Arctic Green Apple. The Arctic flavors, it turns out, are all opaque & frosty looking so maybe that's the problem. The second time around, in 2 parts Watermelon Kiwi and 1 part Berry Blue, a happy ending.
I'm now one toe away from the slippery slope of buying a bunch of natural wool on ebay , dyeing it and taking a table to the nearby Saturday morning farm market later this summer. I was telling this to my friend who, instead of saying how utterly ridiculous this would be, said hey, cool, I'll help. I told her she's an enabler.
Dyeing aside, I started to figure out that I wanted to knit with it. Maybe a scarf or shawl? I keep noticing scarves I like on other blogs from the Scarf Style book, which brings me to propose a
Book Swap
My copy of Alice Starmore's Fishermen's Knits is unloved. I bought it when I was on a guernsey/gansey kick years ago , then never found anything in it that called to me. I guess the three patterns I'd been fixated on at the time were enough. This has nice photos and much beautiful multiple cabling but I never could commit to a knit. True, it made me want to sail to the pub and share a pint with the fishermen but that's not the point, is it?
Wanna swap? Your copy of Scarf Style for my copy of Starmore's Fishermen's Knits. If you want to see some action from this book, take a gecko at Wendy's Inishmore Challenge, flying on her needles as we speak.
If you're interested, email me at ezisusATsnetDOTnet, and we'll exchange delivery addresses.
Please pass the word on this, I really like the two dozen of you friends who visit me but maybe you don't want to swap.....
5 comments:
Fiber from eBay is a very slippery slope. Do yourself a favor and don't start. Plus you never know what you're going to get. I've been less than thrilled with some of the fiber I found there.
Your Kool-Aid dyed yarn is so pretty in those colors! The plastic flamingo reminds me of my childhood in Florida.
Maybe you could post your book swap request on the S'nB group-- lots of knitters pass thru there.
Gorgeous colors! So cool and refreshing!
Re Fisherman's Knits: Now, don't let the small issue of ever actually knitting something affect your library. You never know. OK, Knitted Toys is one book on my shelf that I will 100% surely never knit from.
And if it's Starmore, at some point it will be a rare thing. I do like your idea of a book swap, though. SOMEbody's dying for Knitted Toys, I just know it.
Love the yarn you've dyed. Kool-Aid is just the start; then it's Cushings, then Prochem, and next you know you've got boxes of dyes in your garage, and more arriving daily. It's addicting. ;-)
The colors you acheived from the kool-aid dye are lovely!! Argh, you are really making me want to go out and buy some hanks to dye, but this is *not* a good time to start up another project. If you are looking for more yarn to dye, I highly reccomend yarn supplier Henry's Attic. Lots of cotton/wool/rayon/silk yarns that take dye beautifully. At the school where I studied weaving for a bit, we used their yarn exclusively.
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