Years ago, back when I was new to the world of knitting and Joe and I were barely married, I knit a baby blanket for some friends of mine. I knit it with some Paton’s Look at Me in the variegated rainbow colorway, and to say that it was a wild jumble of colors would be putting it mildly. When my brother-in-law Dave saw it, he said “It looks like a rainbow threw up.” He didn’t mean it in a bad way, he was just being his usual amusing self. But that phrase has stuck with me, and every time I see something in wild rainbow colors, that is what I think.
For better or for worse, my newly died yarn reminds me a bit of rainbow barf…
This picture shows it all laid out just after I pulled the last chunks out of the dye pot, so the strands toward the bottom are still wet. It’s hanging up in the bath tub now and will hopefully be dry by tomorrow afternoon. Maybe I’ll get my nerve up to try to wind it back into a manageable skein while the girls are playing. When I wound it out in the yard on Saturday, Joe was there to help corral the girls, and it is the kind of project that needs to be completed all in one go. We’ll see.
Let me just say, I can’t believe how quickly I managed to get this project done. There was a lot of work involved, lots of iterations of get the yarn wet, measure the dye, assemble the dye pot, cook the yarn, let it cool, rinse it out, hang to dry. The good news is that Julie enjoyed watching me do it the first few times, and I was able to fit in the various parts of the process in odd moments.
Just so you know, I wouldn’t normally choose to dye up a skein of yarn with this many colors in one go. Remember, my main goal here was to make up a color card. Still, it’s fun yarn. Maybe. We’ll see how it looks knit up. Actually, I made a kind of big mistake. Somehow I counted wrong when I was measuring out the yardage, and when I got to the end of my line of colors I realized that I had to do the last several colors in longer stripes. I’m hoping it will look funky-cool.
Someone noticed that there is an already-dyed strand of yarn running along with my naked yarn. That’s some commercially-dyed yarn that I used to sort of cheat on the measuring. And speaking of measuring, someone else mentioned a warping board. I’m familiar with the idea, and I’ve seen several do-it-yourself versions around the web. It looks appealing, but who has the time to pull all that stuff together? Not me! Also, I don’t think I’ll be needing such giant skeins again any time soon. The only reason I wound that skein so huge was so that I could fit all those colors into it. Normally, I’d need a skein at most only about a quarter the size. Still, if anyone has an old warping board laying around that they don’t need any more….
In the mean time, Julie has been begging for a new pair of sunglasses for weeks now. I don’t know what happened to the ones she had last year. Today we were at Target and I finally broke down and bought her a pair. She wore them all afternoon.
Sophie is still in love with the sand box, only of course after I bragged about her yesterday, she went ahead and took a taste of the stuff today. Bleh.
Well, sand’s got lots of fiber…right?
Wow – you dyed that up uber-fast!!! It will be exciting/interesting to see how it knits up.
Children’s sunglasses are as prone to disappearing as socks in the laundry. Nice pick Julie – you look like a movie stah!!!
Glad to see I’m not the only one who dyed wool this weekend, although I have to admit that I used the clearance egg dye & microwave method. The house reeked of cooked vinegar, but I swear, the microwave has never been cleaner!
I also ended up with a blob of yarn the color of which doesn’t thrill me, but since I have two balls that make me very happy, I guess I’ll live. Now to get them knitted up into something, eh? =)
Now I’m curious as to what the sand looks like at the other end:p
Love the yarn, funky and cool!
http://www.rainbowpuke.com/puke2.php