I Died This Weekend

Actually, I dyed this weekend.

Way more fun.

Prior to a recent knitting event, a pair of friends mysteriously announced, “We’re bringing a project. It will take three hours.”

We all speculated as to the nature of the secret project. Ideas were tossed. Needle-felting? “No way. We’d have to drive to the E.R. if someone got clumsy and stabbed themselves.” And everyone looked at me. Sigh.

So mystery it remained. You can imagine my surprise when a gift bag was thrust upon me and I opened it to find a pair of latex gloves.

Huh.

And beneath those, a skein of white yarn and a packet of Kool-Aid.

Score!

Now I was on board. And those of you who are well-indoctrinated crafters of the sticks and strings persuasion are there with me. But I’ll break this down for the rest of you. I understand that the wide world of fiber dyeing can be complicated and... uh... poisonous. Unless you use Kool-Aid.*

What? It stained Mom’s carpet on accident when you were five, right? So obviously the color takes. Use that Red #5 to a positive purpose.

So in a few short minutes we were wearing stylish garbage bags, armed with squeeze bottles of liquid rainbow and maniacal grins.

The maniacal grin might just have been me. I don’t know. I wasn’t looking at my compatriots. I was looking at my victim.

We dumped. We poured. We sprinkled. We squirted and squished. It was a lot like finger-painting in preschool actually. Everyone was suitably sarcastic and snarky at my very on-character selections of cherry and grape colorways. Comparisons to the general color schemes of my stash were made.

Hey, you don’t flash my stash out to the world, and I won’t flash yours. All six hundred pounds of it...

When all was said and done we had laughed ourselves silly, eaten more than mortal man should admit to, and we had ten skeins of yarns drying over the deck railing at the retreat center. We named them all.

Left to right:
• Green Flash
• Smashing Pumpkins
• Cake Ice Cream
• You Thought I Was Knitting But I Was Really at a Dead Concert
• A Study in Kelp
• Not the Virgin Mary
• One Too Many Glasses of Wine (Mine!)
• Fairy Godfather
• Even Geeks Wear Pink (Mine!)
• Rainbow Brite

And, the fruits of my personal labor, I present to you Lilac Dyes first ever colorways.

*Apparently Kool-Aid can be really bad for you if you stick your nose in the packet of powder and take a big whiff. Duh.