Dyeing to use it

Every now and then I go on a dyeing jag. There's something about creating colours that I find incredibly satisfying and exciting. (OK, I know, I ought to get out more. A sore point at the moment - I have been cooped up with a sick Baby Bear all week. She is nice company but not being able to leave the house for more than a few minutes is driving me insane!)

I was going to have a go at dyeing with non-toxic stuff, as I had a fancy to use the microwave and we only have the one. I quite like my family and don't really want them to die a slow and lingering death from poison ingestion. After some Googling and suggestions from helpful Melbourne S'n'B members I had decided to give it a go with food colouring, which I always keep on hand for producing lurid icing when required. OK, nice idea, and I might even do it one day. One day when a certain 12 year old female has remembered to tell me that she used up the last of the food colouring last time she had a cooking session (butter biscuits with lurid icing). She pouted and said that she had told Dad at the time. Great, who does the grocery shopping? Me, that's who; telling the dog would have been as useful.

So I abandoned all thoughts of not poisoning the family and used the lovely toxic Landscape dyes that I love. Not in the microwave - in the dye pot (a huge stockpot that lives in the shed with DYE POT scrawled on it. I wonder if the spiders in the shed can read). And loved the results so much that I have given up most thoughts of non-toxic dyeing.

Pictures at the weekend, hopefully. I have 400 metres of 8ply drying at the moment, and another similar quantity in the dye pot. Have I mentioned that I LOVE dyeing! Yesterday's results were wonderful and I have high hopes of today's. This time I actually applied a bit of colour theory to the process (yesterday and today) and I must say the results were worth it.

I think I will be ordering some more Landscape dyes now.

The only problem is that I am almost out of the old cream Totem that I have been using. Which means I will have to buy more cream/off white stuff - probably Bendigo Woollen Mills as their prices are great and their quality pretty good.

I dyed yesterday's stuff to knit the multidirectional scarf from the new Yahoo group Multidirectional Knitting. I actually ordered some wool off Ebay for this scarf, several little skeins in the colours of the rainbow, but then immediately a design of my own popped into my head which I will use it for. That's the trouble with starting to design stuff - now I feel obliged to use only my own patterns and feel guilty every time I want to knit something else. I have the most lucious Lion and Lamb that everyone else is using for a Clapotis - I bought mine to knit something of my own design and now desperately want to knit a Clapotis with it instead and consequently it sits there doing nothing at all.

Time to check on the dye pot!