Fun with colour

Some two years ago, several intrepid Canberra knitters motored up the highway to Waratah Fibres for a yarn dyeing workshop. It was a great day and I was enthused, if not very good at it. I bought some dye, came home and duly put away the notes and the dye. It all seemed a little too hard, somehow. On my last couple of trips to the States, I have brought back Kool Aid, with the intention of dabbling in dyeing. Apparently, it is a good acid dye for animal fibres (and I can't believe that anyone would ever really drink that stuff. It stinks!). I thought it would be safe and fun and a bit unpredictable. It is all three.

Avert your eyes now, if you can only look at beautiful saturated colours. In fact, you might want to go over here instead.

If you're still with me, I'll share my first dyeing experiments with you.

It's hard to know why I have this awful pink and orange fake fair isle in my stash. I love Patonyle, but whatever I thought I was going to do with four balls of this is beyond me.

Dye it blue, perhaps? Still it looks a little clownish.

Knitted into socks for little Bear? Gorgeous, no?

There is a group over on Ravelry that has inspired me to experiment a little. Not necesarily successfully, but it is fun nonetheless. One challenge was to try gradient dyeing. These are my results - subtle, I think, yet not too bad.

Another challenge was to take a lucky dip of three sachets of Kool Aid and use them, no matter what. So I lucky dipped a red, a purple, and oh no another red. A little crazy, not very saturated, but might make very cool socks or mittems for ma minette.I'll keep trying. I'll never aspire to be expert, but I can have a little fun in the meantime.