Kitties Love Yarn

I started with this....



(8 ounces of Romney top - it started as one long strip, and I halved it, and halved the halves, and halved the half-halves...)

Combining them with some off-brand egg dye kits, I ended up with...
( ooh, pretty colors... )



All kinds of pretty dyed fiber.

But wait, you might ask - doesn't the standard egg dye kit include a purple tablet? Yes, yes it does....and that was the one that failed spectacularly but not unexpectedly, because purple eggs tend to fail in the same way.

( The saga of Purple Fail )

I brutally ripped my Romney top into eight pieces. On the down side, the pieces didn't fit well into the Mason jars (or maybe they will when wet? I'd really rather do them all at once...) so I did one test sample in a glass baking dish, with the following observations:

1) You're kind of guessing what color dye you're going to end up with. I thought I had blue for my test sample, but it turned out to be green.

2) The color of the dye liquor is not necessarily the color of the dyed goods. In the dish, it looked like a fairly dark slightly bluish-green, and I was a little worried, but it came out a pretty good spring green in the end.

3) An hour and a half in the oven at 200 degrees is not enough to exhaust the dye bath. On the other hand if you turn the oven off when you can't keep your eyes open any longer, by the time you wake up in the morning it will be ready to go (and cooled to room temperature for a bonus!)

4) If I make a habit of this I'm going to end up with a lot of egg dippers and white crayons.

5) The prospect of making self-striping yarn by starting with several individual pieces of top in different colors instead of managing to control the color placement from a handpainted top feels like cheating.

I did take pictures, but didn't have time to get them off the camera this morning. If I have a chance I'll post them later this week. I'm going to do the others tonight, hopefully, but I also have to go to my FIL's and pick cherries...