Since it didn't look like this skein would be good for much of anything useful, I decided to use it in additional experiments... BWHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Two packets of Mixed Berry Kool-aid and a few drops of black food coloring later:
Looks like the hot bath and subsequent drying did some good for it. I might even be able to use this yarn! Some very nice colors. And the orange-orange-orange-lemon lime over-dyed with the mixed berry and black somehow gave me the EXACT olive color I had been looking for originally! Who knew?
Time to try some spinning first and then dying. I decided to try my hand at spinning the Herdwick Top that I got from The Woolery. A bit scratchy, but it spins like a dream.
I plied a strand of this with a strand of generic white wool. I was so excited to start my dying experiments that I forgot to snap a pic of the yarn as spun! After several rounds of inadequately documented dying (but if I recall correctly, it involved Peach Mango, Mixed Berry, Grape, and Black Cherry Kool-aid and some black, red, and blue McCormick food coloring), this is what I have:
It really is a nice, if a bit chunky, skein of yarn. Since it is on the scratchy side, I don't think it will work for a scarf, and there is not enough for a sweater (only 145 yards). I have a few other ideas of what I can possibly do with it. The yarn itself is very pretty (imho) and would make a really cool fringe on a shawl. I am also considering knitting and felting a purse out of it. But right now, I am enjoying just looking at it!
I also dyed some more roving: I liked the way the lemon lime X2 + grape X2 made up before, so I tried a few variations, each on a 4 ounce piece of roving. The first was lemon lime X2 +grape X3, and the second was lemon lime X2 + grape X2 + black cherry X1. Here is a braid made from the resulting rovings:
The one on the left is a picture taken inside, and the one on the right was taken out-of-doors in the shade. In both pictures, the redder color is the one made with the black cherry. I am not sure why the lemon lime/grape roving shows up so green in the indoor picture, as that is not at all how it looks to the naked eye. I haven't begun to spin this yet.
Also, I wanted a longer niddy noddy. The one that I have is a Babe, which means it is comprised of PVC pipe sections.
Some of my skeins have been too long to make nicely with this version. I had some PVC tube lying around, and thought I would try to extend the device. The outer diameter of my pipe was a little smaller than the OD of the Babe pipe, so I wrapped the ends a few times with painter's tape.
I re-skeined a previous attempt that was too fat for the shorter version of the niddy noddy. The width was better, but it is kind-of on the long side. I might look for an in-between length of pipe, as this one might be too long. My daughter has claimed this skein of yarn, although she does not yet know what she is going to make out of it.
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