I Blame the Bloggers

And their nifty hand-dyes.

And Easter egg dye on sale for 36 cents after Easter.

And my "functional is better than decorative" upbringing, which looked at 8 inches of Easter-egg-dyed tussah silk knitted in brioche stitch and said, "What the heck you gonna do with that?"

I thought I'd dye enough more tussah silk to knit "that" long enough to call it a scarf.

After I had dripped dye onto it, I had dye left over, so I skeined off the two smallest balls and dyed one with the green/teal and the pink, which had taken the best the first time, and the other with the yellow, orange, blue, and purple, which had not taken very well.

The blue is still a wash. It came out almost completely when I rinsed the yarn, including out of the purple, leaving it bright pink. The silk doesn't take the yellow or the orange very much at all. I think the photo is brighter than the color in real life, but you can see that it lost a lot of intensity from wet applied color to rinsed and dried color.

But it was fun, it gives me some tussah silk to play with in other colors than honey-blond, and it was safe for my septic tank.

Skein Question

Q: Do I have to use my arm to wind skeins like your elbow skein? Because it hurts my shoulder when I do that.

A: No, you can use something stationary, like a chair back, or chair legs, or a warping board or warping mill. The important part is that the yarn crosses itself, makes an X, so it is a figure 8. It can be as long or short as you need, wound on anything handy, but as long as you get it to cross itself in the same place, the cross will keep the threads in order.

(Next time I wind a warp for my loom, I'll take pictures.)