Easter dying project - part 1

I took advantage of the first really fine day yesterday to dry some clothes outside. I came home to dry clothes and this taped to the outside of the front door of the little block of flats where I live.



Personally I think that what a girl dries on her baloney is her own private business, don't you.

Do you think that there are any rules against this?



On the left is Rowan 4-ply soft (originally white) and on the right is UK Alpaca DK weight (originally cream). I Was aiming for both mini-skeins to be bi-colored but there was a bit too much water and dye for the amount of alpaca and everything kind of swooshed together before it had a chance to cling to the yarn. I (more or less) followed the tutorial for hot dying from the Spring Knitty. The dye is Supercook Natural food colouring in varying amounts of red, yellow and blue which I had hanging around from a decorated cake some time back. I don't really like using food colouring in baking (both the appearance or the faff) so this works out nicely then. The tutorial on Knitty didn't say whether malt vinegar would be OK for the fixing agent so we'll see how that turns out when it's dry. It's good for for lots of other things though.

AFter about 45 minutes I fished out both mini-skeins and they were looking prety good. I'll post pics once they've dried and I've knit them into swatches. Full of enthusiasm I started hunting through the stash for other yarn that I could practice dying on and came up with another small ball of the cream alpaca. That's now soaking with the last of the vinegar. I'm off out now to buy more vinegar so I can dye this baby.



Cream top bought from the Knitting and Stitching show back in November and spun on the drop spindle.

A couple of belated FO pics.

Monkey socks knit from Schaefer Anne sock yarn in the colourway Milly.



Birch leaf socks knit from Regia sock yarn.