Colourful

Although this week's letter at home is A, I believe today was more like a D day.  D is for Dinosaurs, which Abi and her friend painted many of (thank you Google images!).  D is also for Dyeing (with an E, not to be confused with the last post where I initially forgot to add the E consistently, although I'm sure none of you really thought I have a death wish. Not with Abi around. Or is that the other way around...)

First off I did my darndest to get some very light blue and purple yarn to complete the Decepticon hat.  White just will not suffice. It stands out too much.  This time around I worked with short lengths and a little dish in the oven.

Of course, Abi wasn't satisfied with these little bits of blue.  Now that I have all the yarn I need for the hat, the rest could be dyed by Abi.  She still wanted pink and blue, so we tried an experiment using a two-halved pyrex dish and the microwave method for setting the dye.
I think it worked out quite well.

 Abi mixed the colours. As usual she added a lot of drops and ignored my suggestions about the red.

 Rinsing. Trying to capture the shaded variants.

Laid out to be squished.

All in all, we are quite pleased with the results which will be a scarf.  I will definitely use this technique again.  And the microwave technique is brilliant. Two rounds of two minutes on high, with a short (2 min?) break between.  Much faster than the pot method!  And those are some bright colours. There was basically no colour left in the dish - except some pale blue, but I find there is always some blue even when blue was just a minor part of the colour mixture.