Dyed in the wool

When one's sister comes to visit and brings about 300 g of undyed sock wool with her, what can one do but pull the gloves on and make some colours?

The first lot I made a mega long skein up and down the corridor, but I really should have been mindful of keeping the tension even so it didn't snarl up in the vinegar soak. But I didn't, and it did. But anyhow, it dyed up great using the food colouring in the vaccola jars in the microwave method, inspired by Happy Spider. But still, how delicious does this look?and it turned out great, we managed to have it dyed, cooled, dried, untangled and wound up before my sister went home.

I also wanted to give my $3 fete crock-pot-especially-for-dyeing-yarns-and-fibres a go, and also experiment with using procion dye and acid on protien fibre.

First, put vinegar soaked skein in crock pot.
Look at that potential!

Then mix up some dyes. My sister requested purple, red and black. Allrighty then!
mmm, rich red! rich purple!
and black black. Black is a bugger to dye with, since getting a nice dark black is a supreme pain in the rrrrrrs. But it worked this time! Hooray for Drimarene K Jet Black.


Now to get the syringes ready for squirting the colours,mwahahahaha.and the pics stop there, folks :( why? I have no idea. I was doing the colour and my sister was taking some photos, but we got so excited about the dye that we forgot about the photos! Sorry, blog followers. Sometimes the process is more important than the documenting :) But the yarn turned out great, and the crock pot did a wonderful job. I can't wait to do some more heh heh heh.