Daily Archives: April 21, 2010

Crochet for the road!  It’s decided.

I browsed around the net looking at yarn options and not finding anything that gripped my crochet imagination.  Then, eureka! I remembered that there were 4 skeins of white handspun wool yarn in my craftroon AND my little stash of dye out in the shed.  SORTED!

I seperated my yarn into many mini-skeins – winding between my thumb and elbow.

And I’ve got a new dye method – after an initial microwave disaster I moved operations to the oven.  My containers are teensy, disposable pie tins and each mini skein is dyed in it’s own tin.  I roughly followed the directions from this Hello Yarn tute. The tins went onto tray and into the oven at 180degC for 20 minutes. 

Last night I just switched the oven off when the time was up and I retrieved the tins this morning.   Which is a Useful Thing when you are caring for a very sooky baby.

I used Landscape Dyes for the pinks/oranges and Procion MX for the greens/blues.  I think I threw out my blue Landscape Dye as I can’t find it… so that’s why I tried the Procion on the wool.  I seem to recall that I had problems with Procion on wool in the past, but this time it worked fine.  I just added a good glug of vinegar to the dye mixtures

I’m chuffed with the results.  Jasper is too, even if he looks unimpressed here, the nano second before I took the photo he was smiling an pawing all over the wool with his vegemite fingers.

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