Inspired!

You never know where inspiration will find you. Today it was waiting for me over at Jeremy's blog in the form of a mini-tutorial on crock-pot dyeing. I've had Kool-Aid and dyeing yarn on hand for months but had just never gotten up the gumption to go ahead and try it. Then this morning I caught Jeremy's post and bam! I pulled out the crock pot and cooked me up some yarn.















I used 100 grams/880 yards of Knitpicks dye-your-own merino. Here it is soaking, pre-dye.















I wanted graduated shades of deep red through light orange, so I used Kool-Aid in (left to right/light to dark) Mango, Orange, Cherry and Tropical Punch. After soaking the yarn, I sprinkled the Kool-Aid directly on top in the order shown above.















Here's how it looked right after I added the dyes.















And here's how it looked after about 3 hours in the crockpot when all the dye had been absorbed. As you can see, the reds migrated quite a bit. When I first pulled the yarn out, I thought I would have very little orange to show for my efforts.




















I shouldn't have worried! While the reds migrated across the surface of the dye pot, the oranges worked on the underside of the skein. Some came out very light (that's where the mango came into play, I believe) while others were more vibrant. Nothing was left pure white, which is exactly what I was going for; the skein moves from nearly yellow to deep red (I wish I could have gotten a shot that shows off the colors better). I think I'll call it Sunset Fire.

Currently in the crock pot: some light grey heathered wool (fiber this time, not yarn) that I'm trying to dye straight red, possibly with some variegation light to dark. I don't know how this will turn out -- if it's too much of a matted mess I may wind up felting it instead of spinning -- but boy, is this fun! Thanks, Jeremy, for being my inspiration today!