Seeing Green

We had yet another failed dyeing experiment this week. We tried dyeing a large skein of tan-coloured fingering weight yarn - over 400 yds - in the microwave (using food colouring drops done by Abi, so I don't really document the ratios etc.) using 3 dishes to try and get three slightly different areas of colour.  All were green. Unfortunately, for several reasons, the dye was only affecting small amounts of the yarn. Those reasons include 1) too much yarn in each dish and not enough water to distribute the dye and give the yarn space to move and 2) probably too much vinegar in the yarn causing it to immediately absorb the dye before the dye had time to reach the rest of the yarn.  After every round I'd look and find huge areas still of tan, so we'd mix and add more dye after pulling up the brown so it would catch the dye first... Eventually I had to give up and say UGH to the yarn above.  Also, we'd run out of blue and green and red food colouring.
The next day we got more food colouring, a very large bowl, and overdyed everything in one pot to achieve the yarn below.  Then I had to rinse it about 20 times because of all the dye added over the last couple days - far too much to be absorbed fully by the yarn. There is still a lot of wild variation, but I'm hoping it will look great when knitted...  My friends son suggested it should be called Jungle yarn and would look good with some red accents. Sounds like a design plan...

Not all green was horrid this week. I did finally finish this project started last year.

And we had two boxes of gifts arrive this week for Abi.  Today was Nana's box, which included this adorable outfit Abi immediately put on.

And magnetic dress-up dolls and craft stuff. Earlier in the week she got more dolls (and she's very happy to have a boy doll) and roller skates and other things.  That was a snow day, so she had to test out the roller skates inside. She's very good at it.