![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Thursday was wash day, after a fashion: since apparently members of the knitting guild can participate in the guild's gift-shop booth at an upcoming fiber-arts show, I decided to tackle one of the items on my ever-present to-do list, rinsing out and blocking the slowly growing mound of "One Hour Scarves" I've been piling up in anticipation of just such a show opportunity coming along. Since this pretty much has to be done in the kitchen sink, it requires the sink be empty, which is why things have been piling up for a while.
Now, the reason the sink was emptied at this specific moment is an intriguing one: as I mentioned to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sleepykins and violachic when I dropped in on the latter's beach outing Sunday afternoon, I've begun dabbling in the bizarre art of kool-aid dyeing yarn, and on Wednesday night my first experimental subjects were ready for their rinse, so I was eager to see the results. It's more than a little unbelievable, not to mention enough to make you never want to drink kool-aid again, but yes, kids, the method described in the above-referenced article does produce fast colors in wool yarn...
And also on hardwood flooring, as I discovered during the dyeing phase of this project. You see, since the yarn available to me for this test-run was two commercially-wound tubes of Lion-Brand "fisherman's wool" from two separate abandoned projects, it had to be wound up into dyeable hanks, and said hanks came out too large to work with on any of the available surfaces in the house. So, thinking myself quite clever at the time, I spread out a spare shower curtain on the floor of my dining-room-slash-office and proceeded to make merry with the kool-aid solutions. Only to discover, when I went to transfer the soggy yarn into large baggies for its moment in the sun (since the hanks were also too unwieldy to heat mechanically), that there had been a pinhole in the shower curtain somewhere under the "red" side of the experiment...
Fortunately, this process is carried out with "raw", IE unsugared, kool-aid, or I'd probably be too beset with ants to sit here typing this; but as it was, a sizable tongue of fruity red liquid managed to drool its way towards my power-strip, and disaster was only averted by the simple fact that nothing touching the floor was powered on at the time. (This, incidentally, is also why I've been a bit scarce until now -- I've been allowing drying-out time.) It's interesting to see, BTW, that there's that pronounced a slope to the floor, and it probably explains why my chair always seems to want to swivel in that direction.
The result of this spill is that everywhere that the floor's original varnish has been worn away by the years that my desk has sat here, with my fat butt grinding away at the floor with chair feet and wheels, is stained several fetching shades of pink. My one consolation is that since the landlady is already on record as wanting to renovate our unit to match the rest of her remuddling job on the building, she can hardly say we "made" her have to refinish the floor...
The yarn, by the way, turned out very well, well enough to merit further investigation into this technique, although in future with properly-wound hanks of wool that are sized for easy handling. All the years of living with an artist and her constant pointers on color-theory did do some good after all...
Now, the reason the sink was emptied at this specific moment is an intriguing one: as I mentioned to
sleepykins and violachic when I dropped in on the latter's beach outing Sunday afternoon, I've begun dabbling in the bizarre art of kool-aid dyeing yarn, and on Wednesday night my first experimental subjects were ready for their rinse, so I was eager to see the results. It's more than a little unbelievable, not to mention enough to make you never want to drink kool-aid again, but yes, kids, the method described in the above-referenced article does produce fast colors in wool yarn...And also on hardwood flooring, as I discovered during the dyeing phase of this project. You see, since the yarn available to me for this test-run was two commercially-wound tubes of Lion-Brand "fisherman's wool" from two separate abandoned projects, it had to be wound up into dyeable hanks, and said hanks came out too large to work with on any of the available surfaces in the house. So, thinking myself quite clever at the time, I spread out a spare shower curtain on the floor of my dining-room-slash-office and proceeded to make merry with the kool-aid solutions. Only to discover, when I went to transfer the soggy yarn into large baggies for its moment in the sun (since the hanks were also too unwieldy to heat mechanically), that there had been a pinhole in the shower curtain somewhere under the "red" side of the experiment...
Fortunately, this process is carried out with "raw", IE unsugared, kool-aid, or I'd probably be too beset with ants to sit here typing this; but as it was, a sizable tongue of fruity red liquid managed to drool its way towards my power-strip, and disaster was only averted by the simple fact that nothing touching the floor was powered on at the time. (This, incidentally, is also why I've been a bit scarce until now -- I've been allowing drying-out time.) It's interesting to see, BTW, that there's that pronounced a slope to the floor, and it probably explains why my chair always seems to want to swivel in that direction.
The result of this spill is that everywhere that the floor's original varnish has been worn away by the years that my desk has sat here, with my fat butt grinding away at the floor with chair feet and wheels, is stained several fetching shades of pink. My one consolation is that since the landlady is already on record as wanting to renovate our unit to match the rest of her remuddling job on the building, she can hardly say we "made" her have to refinish the floor...
The yarn, by the way, turned out very well, well enough to merit further investigation into this technique, although in future with properly-wound hanks of wool that are sized for easy handling. All the years of living with an artist and her constant pointers on color-theory did do some good after all...