You Live on the edge - You Dye on the edge

...that's what I do when migraines attack. My "what the heck" attitude takes on a life of it's own and this time I focused it on dyeing rather than dying. So I sorted out all the oddities of fiber and yarn that hadn't inspired me and gave them a chance to morph into something I'd love or they could hit the road. I really should have taken a "before" photo (btw camera has decided to behave again) but I'm sure you can imagine it.

From the top and left: 3 skeins of Briggs and Little wool, 2 white and one Christmas green....dyed together with Cushings Orchid. Obviously the white knew what to do and the green turned a bluish/mauve which was just fine with me as any color was going to be an improvement.

Bottom left: 8 skeins (2,000 yds) of mystery synthetic silky stuff from Equador. It was a creamy white and knew that protein dyes like Cushings weren't supposed to work on it but wondered if it would tint it enough and what the heck I was throwing caution to the wind. Anyway the results of stuffing the whole pile into a pot of Peach and stirring over low heat for at least 20 minutes couldn't have pleased me more. The color is perfectly even and the softest shade of peach.

Center: This is a pound or so of fleece that I put in the peach dye that was left in the pot from the 'silky stuff'. As you see it sucked up the color as fast as I could shove it in and so it's splotchy but figure it will blend pretty well when I card it. So once again I had a smiley face.

Bottom right: This is what was left of the fleece that I couldn't get in the peach pot. I'd read that Jello dyes nicely but only had Gelo the Mexican brand and only in Cherry. I had bought it with the intention of using it for dye as I'd wanted to see if I could get a good red from it. Well, I got hot chili pepper...what was I expecting :)

For the wildest experiment...this because I was too lazy to wind these into bigger skeins. Well there were 24 skeins. This is 100% nylon and lace weight (180 yds per ounce).
I had bought some Kool Aid "Berry-berry" and was hoping for blue. Well, for the first of the two batches I put 5 envelopes into the big pot and dropped the soppy nylon in and stirred...see the right of photo. Hmmm....MulBerry perhaps? The water was blue at least it was at the time I noticed the yarn wasn't blue. Well, so OK! I stirred and squished to get the color to the center of the skeins and decided I could live with color when I noticed that just under the outer layer there was "turquoise"!!! Double hmmm! Poking some more shown the the inside still looked white. At this point I decided that I might as well dye the rest of it the same. Well, this time the results were what you se on the left. By this time my eyes weren't just rolling they were crossed and rolling..."how did this happen". Of course I knew it had to be "me" that did it and sure enough looking back at the empty packets I notice one packet of "off brand" Berry berry. Obviously it had gone into the first batch.

But...isn't the skein pretty but how will it knit up?

Here is a close up of what is above and of a pattern I wanted to test. Perhaps it will work out well in the end. I'm thinking that a scarf using 2 skeins working from the dark end till it runs out then finishing the second half starting with the lightest end and finishing with the dark. You can see that I've gone from the mostly solid pinky color to where the blue is becoming dominant. If nothing else this will be unique.

I hope this has been of some interest or perhaps a warning of what not to do more than suggestions of what "to do".