i have been avoiding my blog. i'm sorry.
wow, i feel better for getting that off my chest. and now, back to some content.
ella and i have been working on presents to give her teachers. it started when i knitted a facecloth using this pattern--when ella saw it, she said, "hey, it looks like divine!--denember, mama, the tree that came to playing school?". and whenever ella sees something she loves, she wants to give it to someone--in this case, she wanted miss jenny and miss sue to have their very own divine facecloths, but theirs had to be green, because divine is green, not red, denember mama?
if you haven't tried to find 100% cotton, worsted weight yarn, in variegated greens, let me fill you in: as far as i can tell, there isn't any available anywhere in the western hemisphere. oh sure, you can get variegated green with lots of white, or variegated green/blue/white, but just try to find greens and only greens--i was beginning to wonder if the color green really exists.
so i quit trying to figure out why variegated green-only yarn doesn't exist and just dye my own. i used white, 100% cotton yarn (peaches and creme--i love that stuff), two different balls, so i could play with colors.
with the first ball of yarn i just dumped some yellow and blue procion MX dye in some cups--no i didn't measure the amounts, i just eyeballed it so there were different proportions of blue to yellow in each cup--i poured the dyes on the yarn, covered the dish and left it for the afternoon. ella helped me rinse it with the garden hose (note--if you really need to know if all the dye is out, rinse plant-colored yarn in a plant-free zone).
i had a lot of dye left over so i decided to do an experiment, i put the dye cups in the freezer overnight. the next day, when the second ball of yarn had soaked, i just plopped the frozen dye onto the yarn and left it out in the sun for the day.
the results surprised me, the first batch--the one dyed the "normal" way--was a lot less variegated than the one dyed with frozen dye batch. i'm not sure why, but i think it probably has something to do with the yellow exhausting before the dyes had completely migrated thru the fibers. at any rate, i like what we ended up with, and ella loves the facecloths.
well, would you look at that. i made a post!!!
