I'm Dyeing here

My friend Linda and I signed up to do the Dye-o-rama together. Yes, my friends, there really is safety in numbers. How the two of us got through today without imbibing gratuitous amounts of alcohol is beyond me.

I got to her house with S in tow around 11 a.m. with my paraphenalia--mason jars, latex gloves, Paas egg dye, and of course, yarn. She already had some yarn and some food dye (Wilton icing colors) to try. So, first we say, okay we need to get our skeins into really long skeins to get the dyeing going. She starts winding on two chairs, I start winding on two chairs, and by now it's probably about 11:30 a.m. She begins to get really tangled. Within five minutes of that, I too am in a wicked mess. Around 2:30 p.m. ( four freaking hours later) Linda has finally balled up her yarn so that she can now go back to the chair situation and actually wind the yarn around the two chairs. Not me! I'm still trying to untangle and it's time to pick up the kids.

I go pick up the kids at our school, she goes and picks up her older daughter to take her to Hebrew school and not until 5:00 p.m. am I ready to start dyeing the yarn. In the meantime, she gets home from her errand and starts dyeing her yarn, in what we hope will turn out as some sort of autumn colors, a green, a copper and a peach. Let's just say, that is not what she ended up with as you can see on her above referenced site.

I chose to do mine in the microwave instead of on the stove and I ended up with these colors using the Paas egg dye tablets. One color was supposed to be deep purple but ended up a weird mix because I accidentally put a purple tablet in with a green one. Whatever, it kind of looks cool. Darker than my initial Kool-Aid fiasco, but clearly not yet at the brightness I am looking for in the end. She's got the real acid dyes for us to try next, but important lessons here folks:

1) Take your undyed yarn and for the love of God and your own sanity, swift that sucker into a ball before you try to stretch it out on two chairs.

2) And, perhaps, though we were both loathe to think of this, do a swatch if you are unsure of the brightness or exact shade of color cause you don't want some horrified sheep showing up on your doorstep saying, "How could you, you lover of yarn, you yarn whore, create such a monstrosity as this?"