Friday, October 27, 2006

Calling all multi-colored ninjas! (Or, dyeing to get to Halloween!)


And just for your viewing pleasure - a little pre-Halloween fun with Youngest Child. He's wearing a fiber batt I put together for my Halloween Fiber Exchange and a "Ninja Hat" that he made today. Now, how can he wear that AND carry his candy bag?

Actually, we spent the day around Ye Olde Dyepot . . .

I decided to take a page from Cast On's Brenda Dayne and try my hand at natural dyeing with avocado pits and skins. Also, I've been buying a lot of avocados lately and it seemed a waste not to give them a whirl. So whirl I did with my little Oscar - first the pits and then the skins.

Each batch went into a separate canning jar, then I covered the material with water and simmered them on the stove. After a very stinky day - the stuff smelled like bad meat! - I strained out the dye materials and then put a small amount of wool in each to dye. Just like Brenda said, the pits had a very nice dye liquor. In fact, the materials seemed perfect. The chopped pits changed from a white, slivered-almond appearance into chopped carrots right before

my eyes. The skins looked like green soup.


Despite my best efforts and a long time in the dye pot, you can see the results were not inspiring. In fact, it looked suspiciously - poopy. Yup, I think I can post that word here. So, I dyed the whole thing purple with Grape Jello and right now, plan to use it with my final Halloween Fiber Exchange yarn. Purple covers a multitude of sins!

1 comment:

Guinifer said...

The stuff on the left looked a little pinkish. Not altogether poopy. The stuff on the right, well, 'nuff said.