A busy day
Got up, made sandwiches, had shower, went to work, cursed the computer (why does it always decide to muck about when I've got important stuff to do?), got home, made dinner, went to Ex Tex, came home, watched EastEnders, went to bed.
No, I've missed something out.............. looked at my blog and I've had a comment! A comment!!!
Now I know that it's not just me and my family that have looked at these ramblings.
The aran chair cover is designed by Erika Knight and is in her lovely book "New Knits" - it's designed for a Tullsta armchair from Ikea but could be adapted fairly easily to fit another similar chair.
The dyeing, well, that was a bit of an experiment following some stuff I saw on an American site about dyeing with Kool-Aid (which is some sort of powdered drink, I think) and Easter Egg dye. I decided that the main ingredient in both of these must be food colouring so off I went. I mixed the food colouring (which is just bog-standard Supercook stuff) with water and some vinegar (apparently acid is good) and splodged it onto skeins of wool that had been thoroughly soaked in warm water and squeezed out. The skeins were arranged in a microwaveable dish (I knew those pyrex casseroles were good for something), covered the dish in clingfilm and zapped it for two minutes at a time on 50% power. When it looked done (i.e. there was no excess dye slopping about in the dish) I left it to cool then rinsed thoroughly in warm water. There was very little colour to be washed out during that rinse, which surprised me as I expected the colour to run. I put the skeins on the radiator to dry, the started knitting!
I was amazed by how vivid the colours were and by how easy the whole process was - be warned though, it makes your house stink of wet sheep. The next experiment will be to see how much I have to dilute the food colouring to get pastel colours, but that's for another day.
No, I've missed something out.............. looked at my blog and I've had a comment! A comment!!!
Now I know that it's not just me and my family that have looked at these ramblings.
The aran chair cover is designed by Erika Knight and is in her lovely book "New Knits" - it's designed for a Tullsta armchair from Ikea but could be adapted fairly easily to fit another similar chair.
The dyeing, well, that was a bit of an experiment following some stuff I saw on an American site about dyeing with Kool-Aid (which is some sort of powdered drink, I think) and Easter Egg dye. I decided that the main ingredient in both of these must be food colouring so off I went. I mixed the food colouring (which is just bog-standard Supercook stuff) with water and some vinegar (apparently acid is good) and splodged it onto skeins of wool that had been thoroughly soaked in warm water and squeezed out. The skeins were arranged in a microwaveable dish (I knew those pyrex casseroles were good for something), covered the dish in clingfilm and zapped it for two minutes at a time on 50% power. When it looked done (i.e. there was no excess dye slopping about in the dish) I left it to cool then rinsed thoroughly in warm water. There was very little colour to be washed out during that rinse, which surprised me as I expected the colour to run. I put the skeins on the radiator to dry, the started knitting!
I was amazed by how vivid the colours were and by how easy the whole process was - be warned though, it makes your house stink of wet sheep. The next experiment will be to see how much I have to dilute the food colouring to get pastel colours, but that's for another day.
posted by Annie at
10:49 pm
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