Dyeing Extravaganza

Last night was, in a word, insane. The Sock Princess showed up at about 5:20, and we got our pizza order in and started going through our yarn and our color samples. Julie showed up shortly thereafter, and we got right to work. The next several hours are mostly a blur of color. Fortunately, I took a few pictures so I'd remember it all. Here are a few pictures of SP showing the dyeing process:

First she picks out her colors:



Then she carefully and oh-so-artistically paints her yarn:



And what do you get? Psychedelic Sock Yarn!



We did a ton of dyeing. Julie did four hanks of pink cotton and two hanks of cobalt cotton/rayon. She also did a hank of fingering weight. SP did two hanks for her socks. And I did a hank of robin's egg lace weight, a hank of pinks (for Project Spectrum!), a hank of blue and green wool, a hank of orange and yellow (inadvertently getting a head start on next month's project -- or maybe I just like orange and yellow). And (drum roll, please) a hank of red lace weight silk.

The silk was a pain in the rear. I prepared a ton of dye and let it soak for hours. Then I started rinsing and found that there were a bunch of undyed spots. So I tried again. That was about 11 -- right before Julie left. I went to bed a little after midnight, after giving up on rinsing the silk again. This morning, I got up and went running back to my silk/vinegar-smelling kitchen to rinse it out and found *more* white spots. So I dyed it again (while gulping my morning coffee). In the end, I ended up dyeing it four times before I got everything (I hope) dyed. And then I couldn't get the color to rinse out. Finally, by the suggestion of Julie (who returned this morning), I ran it through the wash on delicate. Now it's a bit of a tangled mess, but at least most of the color has washed out.

Now everything just has to dry. I'll be sure to post pictures of all my gorgeous dyed hanks as soon as they're dry.

Now for the hard part -- deciding which lace yarn to use for my shawl...