Sunday, August 30, 2009

Tequila Sunrise



OK, I'll skip right over all the other 8 or 9 projects I have worked on since May and jump right to this cool Kool-Aid dyeing project. I have been wanting to dye sock blanks for a while, since I have the machine for knitting the blanks, and I thought it was such a neat idea. The members of our Steveston knitting group decided a while ago that we would give this a try. In July we ordered the yarn and in early August a group of us got together to wind the yarn and knit the blanks. Then Kelian kindly opened her home and we dyed our blanks using Kool-Aid and Wilton's cake dye. I'll post my blank from that night in a few days. Fast forward to this past week when I went over to the island and showed my dyed sock blank to my U of Ottawa bound niece. She has been knitting socks for a while and was very excited at this idea, so we bought some undyed yarn from an independent dyer in Victoria (don't worry - we also bought some of her very cool dyed yarns!), knitted up the blanks and tried the experiment again. Kirstie dyed a blank for herself, I dyed a blank for one of my nieces, and another niece, Jennifer, the die-hard Harry Potter fan, dyed a third one.

I have had a pattern for "Fawkes" socks in my queue for some time now. Fawkes is Dumbledore's phoenix, and lovely shades of red and orange. I told Jen if she wanted me to knit that pattern, she should dye her blank in reds, oranges and yellows. She did a stunning job of dyeing her blank, and now it's up to me to knit up the pattern. Startitis hit hard and I couldn't wait, so cast on for the pattern. I'm really liking the way it looks... but it looks more like a Tequila Sunrise than a Phoenix... :)

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