Hand dyed Heaven - YUM!

Is this yummy or what? I was going for Neapolitan and now I'm getting my spoon! The "chocolate" portion is actually a little darker than this. I used Peace Fleece Antarctic White for the base (gotta love PF for it's washability!).

THE PROCESS: I doubled over and tightly tied off two small white sections, then put one side of the skein in the brown dye (in a mason jar) and one side in the pink jar...leaving the little white sections sticking above the mason jars. Then the whole she-bang went in a pot filled with water and put on the stove on med-high until the water was clear in both mason jars


And YES, I got these colors with kool-aid! I'm constantly amazed at the color combinations you can get from those little drink mixes. The chocolate proportion is 10 pkts Lemon Lime to 1 pkt Cherry. It took 55 pkts of LL to dye all the brown sections plus 5 oz trim! The pink proportion is 5 pkt Pink Lemonade to 1 pkt Lemonade with a tiny amount of Grape. It took about 20 pkts of PL to dye about 7 oz of variegated yarn. Not sure it's cost effective, but who can beat the fact that I can mix, heat and dump the kool-aid dye with my twins running under foot with absolutely no worries (not to mention just having to rinse out my spaghetti pot when I'm done!).

This yarn is destined to become a tunic-style top based on this pattern for my darling 3yo. She loves ice cream and I hope she'll love this top!

OK, my blog has died of starvation!!

I-state-your-name promise hearby to do a better job of feeding this blog. Please don't call Blog Protective Services on me!

Haven't been posting--too busy knittin'!

Sorry for the long break in posting...I've had a lot of knitting going on though and I'll get started with the
the overnight soaker I'm working on for my toddler...kinda goofed on the rise and made it too long. I'm going to frog out about 2.5 inches, add the cuffs and the decoration.













Next are the Jungle Longies I'm making for the boys.

These were so much fun to dye, but a little tedious to knit because the yarn was a little thin...so it seemed to take forever! I dyed them with lemon lime kool-aid and then over dyed them with splotches of green food coloring to get that "camo" look. I want to embroider a dino on the hip in brown.

I also knitted a little hat for a sweet baby girl born at our church, but I forgot to get a picture of it!



I've got three more projects on the needles: a tiny soaker for the above little girl made in acrylic since mom doesn't want the hassle of wool (my Sunday project), a bulky hat knit with two strands of yarn, and another pair of longies...this time in an Aran weight yarn that should knit up faster! I'll post pictures of these projects another time.

Another Action Shot...

And here's Thomas in the Fern & Faerie with the Fair Isle band I decorated it with.

Action shots...

James in my recent experiments...changing to continental knitting, new ribbed pattern, and dyed a denim blue.

Finished Two Soakers!

Man, we're having a disaster with some disposable diapers that we got for free from Amazon - they leak like crazy! So I'm trying to catch up with our wool soakers. I really hate the PUL covers for our cloth diapers. I finished off two soakers that I had in progress...

This first one is a ribbed soaker...which means it takes FOREVER to knit up. But it should fit for a long time! I then dyed it with Denim colored dye...it turned out a bit blotchy, but it actually looks kinda cool. I think I needed to wash out the lanolin left in the wool yarn first. It's darker in real life than what shows up in the pictures (see the deck board color difference between this pic and the one below!) I think I'll try dying the yarn before knitting next time (although I already have a pair of longies started, sigh).

This one is a simple soaker pattern that is fast to knit up, but I used my inexpensive, although boring, yarn to knit it with. After it was finished, I decided to add a little fair isle border across the rise and I like it a lot more now. Actually, I had a lot of fun with the decoration and plan to do this again in the future...maybe with more colors and plan for a more intricate design!

I have one more soaker almost finished...the incredible turtle butt! Hopefully I'll be able to show it to you in a couple of days, along with some pics of these soakers in use.

Baby is cuter than the hat!

OK, so the baby is MUCH cuter than the hat, but I needed another warm hat for the munchkins and just had received my new interchangeable needles. So what better to do than to knit up a quick hat to try them out?

James looks so cute! I tried to get Thomas in a picture with the hat too, but he didn't want to cooperate.