Sunday morning, Easter Sunday, Athrun and Brock and I had a morning full of Easter Eggs. We set up a hunt for Athrun in the yard, we opened them and filled a bag full of candy, and we boiled and dyed a dozen real eggs while the cat spread the plastic shells all about the house. (Seriously, these are her favorite toys. She almost didn’t let us get them filled, she was so excited when we got them out on Saturday night, she kept trying to jump in the bag.)
Every year I get a package or two of the little PAAS egg dyeing tablets, which is enough to do about a million eggs. I know we’ll only eat about a dozen hard boiled eggs in a week, so I try not to boil more than that, or it just seems wasteful. This means we always have a ton of leftover dye stock. This year, we did rainbow colors, at full brightness, and the leftovers got used on sock yarn.
I’ve been digging rainbows lately. Our baby quilt is rainbow, baby and Brock are going to have matching rainbow socks, and it seemed like the only thing to do with our rainbow of Easter egg dye turn it into some rainbow sock yarn.
In previous years, when using up the leftover Easter egg dye, I’ve watered it down, put it in squirt bottles and used it on about a pound of top. This year, since I was thinking yarn, I soaked 4 skeins of sock yarn, still about a pound, but instead of squirting it out, I just dumped the dye out of the cups we used to dye the eggs straight over the yarn in six cross-wise stripes. Since the yarn was wet, the color ran a little bit, which I wanted, then I wrapped it in saran wrap and microwaved it for about ten minutes. (I have a really old microwave that works at about half capacity. If you have a new one, it should probably only take three or four minutes. Also, I only use my microwave on food safe dyes, because I don’t have a dedicated dyeing microwave.) Gave it a quick wash and hung it up to dry.
I love the white showing through!
Reskeined, you can see how short the color repeats are and how each color will just flash a tad when knitted, and that there is a lot less white space than it looks like in the earlier pictures. As soon as I can scrounge up some sock needles, I am totally casting on a pair of socks for myself out of this!
The other three skeins will be available for sale sometime after the baby arrives, so be on the lookout! (If you’re interested now, let me know, and I’ll reserve them for you, but I’m getting close enough to delivery that I am not prepared to make any promises on shipping.)
