Play Silks

This afternoon, the youngest one had an impromptu nap. Taking advantage of the relative calm, knowing that my entire evening would be ruined as a result, the other two and I dyed the play silks I bought after the Waldorf camp last week. I think it was worth it!

We used Kool-Aid to dye the pink (Cherry) and green (Lemon-Lime) and used my Ashford dyes to dye the yellow-orange one. The blue one is from day-camp. They are truly lovely. We used hot water and vinegar to set the dye, with the exception that the orange one was also wrapped loosely in plastic wrap and microwaved for a bit and the green one was brought to almost a boil on the stove. The Ashford dyes bound very strongly to the silk and there was no residual dye in the rinse water at all.

Craft day with Mom

Mom has wanted to do some dyeing for a while so I headed over armed with yarn for me and Kool-Aid for both of us. Well, the Kool-Aid was for all of us actually, we drank the leftovers! Here are the results. A mother-daughter collaboration. Mine is the candy bright skein and mom's is the sweet paler one. A bunch of photos of dyeing in the works as well. I had to use yellow food colouring and vinegar to get the yellow. I added a touch of orange Kool-Aid to make the yellow a bit richer. I also used red food colouring (standard little bottles from the grocery store) to get the gorgeous fruity pink since the Kool-Aid was not cooperating with my FruitPunch colour scheme.

Ready to be wrapped and steamed.

The mixing counter.

Mom's skein in progress.

Mom's skein ready to be steamed.

Done!

Kool-Aid is versatile. My son recently attended a cool camp where they dyed silk with Kool-Aid.

A beautiful sky blue play silk that he loves. The purple tinges in the photo are due to the light from the setting sun I think. It's really a beautiful light blue, with water-colour variations in the dye intensity. I bought a few other play silks to dye with the girls, but I am having trouble finding yellow Kool-Aid. We are going to do green, yellow, and pinky-red. Maybe we'll have to settle for orange since I can't find yellow. I'm not sure food colouring and vinegar will work on the silk.

Snuggly Warm

The kids and I felted up some scraps of Cowichan wool the other week. I brushed it all up nice and fluffy with a metal hairbrush and then we put the scraps in some ziploc bags with some hot water and dish soap and the kids rolled and smashed and mushed until we got this lovely warm fire for Bunny.

On another note, I finished up these slippers, another Mohair Ballet Slipper from Beverly Galeskas' book Felted Knits. I have made several of these, but this was the worst one so far. I spun a really bulky yarn for the cuff and we died it with orange Kool-Aid, but it was tooooo bulky and the stitches did not felt nicely the first time round. Also the slipper cuff was stretched way out of whack in proportion to the slipper body. So, I cut out notches from either side of the heel, similar to how you would stitch a moccasin heel and stitched up the sides with wool and the joined the cuff with matching sewing thread (the original yarn was no good at all for sewing the cuffs back together). All in all, it went really really well. The seams disappeared, even on the cuff and we now have slippers for a small human that really likes orange and red.

Kool-Aid, Kool-Aid, I Love Kool-Aid

Actually I don't, I think it's rather vile. However, it makes grand colours on wool! Here are some mittens that I knit up from bits and pieces. No real pattern, just a hodgepodge of patterns thrown together. These are the first mittens I ever knit! The green yarn is wool that I spun and dyed with, you guessed it, Kool-Aid.

This is the mitten yarn ready for steaming.

Just to see what the colours ended up like, I did a small sampling of flavours.

More Kool-Aid yarn. This is the roving that I spun into this.

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And this is a mishmash of yarn, spun and ready for something.... some of it ended up in the mittens. We seem to have lost the mittens recently. I am very sad. They reminded me of parrot fish from a long ago trip to the South Pacific with my not-yet husband.