Dyeing success!

Yesterday, I spent time dyeing on my own while S napped. The results were a little strange. I used for the first time the fingering weight yarn from Wool2Dye4. Nice yarn, sold by the half pound (or pound I think). I didn't realize until today that I failed to do the first step yesterday as I was in a hurry. I didn't soak the yarn in the water/vinegar mixture. Anywho, I was back on the Kool-Aid bus and did this interesting green/brown/yellow mix. There's some white in there also but I realize now that was due to the fact that the yarn wasn't saturated to begin with. I wasn't thrilled with it in the cake....but it swatched very nicely. So much so that Callista wants me to knit her some socks out of it. Surprising because purple is nowhere to be found. And it actually came out sort of self-striping. Interesting.
But the real success was today at Linda's when we finally got around to using the acid dyes. She purchased the dye from Dharma Trading Company. We had a bunch of colors. She went first with russet, chartreuse, chestnut, and a red whose name is escaping me. It definitely came out looking like an autumn leaves kind of colorway. We basically laid saran on the floor and squeezed the dye onto the yarn then wrapped the sections, stuck it all in a bowl and microwaved. For mine we tried it a little differently. The colorway was sky blue, violet, chartreuse, and emerald. It was interesting this time because even though we soaked the yarn ahead of time, it was really hard at first to get the dye to stick so to speak and i can't really figure out why. Might be that the yarn was upright in ziploc bags......yes, it was easier to take six bags, stick a u-shaped section into each bag and then squeeze the dye. Some collected in the bottom but it was easy to just squeeze it up onto the rest of the dye.
Then we microwaved that yarn, rinsed, spun and we ended up with the yarn cake you see here (I took the pictures from two angles so that you could see more of the colors). The chartreuse came out really neon. I was kind of surprised by that. The violet I actually ended up overdyeing because it didn't come out dark enough the first time. So I whipped up some more dye in a mason jar and just re-dyed that portion. I'm going to keep this colorway for myself. And I am going to send the purple, green, yellow combo to my dyeorama pal because I think that she will probably like that the best. At least I hope so. I've got to get her some goodies, and she has a pup, so he's getting goodies for sure! Can't wait to see what my pal comes up with for me!