Ready for High School Football 2014!

Are you ready for high school football?

Nephew # 1 is a junior and plays on both the offensive and defensive lines.  In honor of that, I have tatted two pairs of earrings in school colors.  I hope they hold up to all the  jumping around I do while cheering the team on.  

I did these earrings before in another colorway.
The pattern is in Tatted Jewelry by Marilee Rockley.
Pattern name is Keyed Up.
I chose to omit the bottom drop.

I need to re-block these!
Perhaps even to do them again.
These are my version of Time & Again Earrings
 from Marilee's Beaded Tatted Finery.

To tell the truth, I am still a little unsure of my finishing, of my hiding of the final ends.  And of my jump rings.  I need something better at closing jump rings that what I already have.

Don't worry, I'm still knitting.

The Kool Aid Experiment

An afternoon of fun with my friend Karla resulted in this:

LOOK at all the colors!!!!!!

Yes, we dyed it ourselves using Kool Aid.  Being crazy for color we experimented with mixing colors to create new colors, dropping several color on the same mini skein, and having a good time.

Tray # 1:  First color is Lemon Lime (that's the flavor).
 Next is a two tone of a blue and lemon lime.
Followed by Peach Mango, Black Cherry, and
another mixed skein.
The mixed skeins on this tray were done by Karla.
A great job!

We started with Knit Picks Bare, a lovely yarn that's 70% superwash merino wool, 30% silk.  I divided it up in to mini skeins of approximately 25 yards each, more or less.  I'm thinking they are a bit longer than 25 yards as I was not precise when measuring.

Tray # 2
Orange, another of Karla's mixed, a denim like periwinkle, Garden (yes, Karla),
Ice Berry Blue and an attempt for something brown which turned out
mahogany like.

It was simple.  Using the unsweetened Kool Aid, we mixed a packet with 8 oz (a cup) of water.  We soaked the yarn for at least an hour, and then the fun began.

Tray # 3
More mixing of colors.
Karla's Mai Tai, my skein own splotchy,
yellow (Lemonade with a few drops of food coloring),
Strawberry, and what we call Squink.

Using glass loaf pans, we placed a mini skein in one and then added the Kool Aid. Some are just one color, others were mixed.  And we tried our hand at variegated yarn and loved it!

All the glorious colors!

Then we covered it with plastic wrap and then nuked it for 2 minutes in the microwave.  We let it cool and check to see if all the color was in the yarn.  If so, we rinsed it and let it dry.

So fun, so easy.
Look is up on Pinterest or your favorite search engine.

I know we will try this again.  Maybe the next time we will keep track of our color mixes.

If you are a color junkie like us, you have to try this at least once in your life.

The yarn dried & re-skeined!
Top row is Tray 1, middle row is Tray 2,
and the bottom row is Tray 3.