New Crockpot+Another go at dyeing!

Now I have my own crockpot to use for dyeing I had another go at dyeing this unknown blended 2ply yarn I have. It looks a bit like cotton but it certainly doesn't dye like cotton!

I'd tried dyeing it and microwaveing the yarn but it hadn't worked out very well (probably more to do with the operator than the yarn!) So I put about 2 and a hald litres of warm water in the crockpot, 5 tablespoons of salt and about a teaspoon of tulip red dylon dye in 1 cup od warm water. I's soaked the yarn in a vinegar/water mixture, wrung it out and plopped it into the pot.

Left it overnight on low. In the morning, although the water wasn;t exactly clear it was pretty close and considering the colour I wondered it some of the old dye hadn't leaked out finally. (Probably not possible. Pretty unlikely that while you're dyeing one colour another one leaves!) I put a glug of vinegar in and left it for an hour before I turned it off and let it start cooling down.

I rinsed it in cold water and spun it in the washing machine and then hung them out. I'm really surprised given that they'd been soaking all night how differently parts of the skeins are coloured. There's still pale patches and dark patches. But it looks nice and far more interesting than the plain nude colour it was before. Now all I have to do is be patient and wait for it to dry before I reskein it all up and see the colour gradients really stand out!

Heaps going on at the moment but this is fun and at this time of year that's hard to come by, something fun without stress :)
Happy Knitting and Merry Christmas!

I love Second Hand Shops!

I've been looking for a crockpot so I can do some dyeing without using the same pans that I cook in and on Monday, I finally had some luck! The Drive-In Mart that we go to (a huge shop of just about anything and everything you can imagine!) had this dinky little crockpot!

There's no way my family can confuse this with our big normal one! A lady had bought it the week before but returned it because it wasn't really what she was looking for. Excellent for me! And just to further make my day, a large bag of blue roving and a smaller bag of some brown fleece, quite soft but very dirty. $20 for the lot, fibre and crockpot. SOooo Impressed.
Unfortunately I can't afford any dye at the moment and I'm beginning to wish very much that I had some of the professional powder dyes used by an awful lot of fibre/spinning enthusiasts!
Sigh, there's always something else to wish for.
Happy Knitting :)