Blugly

Yesterday we (my mom and I) began dyeing the wool for my Epic Sweater. We're just going to do this in stages because there's so much of it, which I know is a mortal sin, but we took careful notes so that we can repeat our steps when we continue next Saturday.

Here's a dyeing-with-koolaid tutorial for you. First, soak the wool in the sink with hot water and a few glugs of white vinegar for about 30 minutes. Yes, I measure liquid in "glugs", which is how many glug sounds it makes as it sloshes out of the bottle. I actually wrote down that I used exactly three for my soaking.
Then, we made up some colors mixing koolaid and food coloring. I had this vision that I wanted a nice, vibrant blue toned down with a kind of purposefully ugly non-color, shown below. The ugly color is dead-on, but the blue isn't as dark as I imagined. I decided the more neon color we got from the Berry Blue koolaid would work great, though. I figured the light gray color of the wool would help mute the color and make it richer. Next, we drained the wool and carefully squished the water out of it. You have to be very gentle with it, or it will felt. Felting is a fine activity, but not for my pretty wool that I want to spin.

Then we laid the wool out on a long strip of plastic wrap and began applying the dye in stripes, for a variegated effect. TIP: Wear gloves. My fingers are still green around the nails. I think this would be a pretty hot look if I were trying to seduce Frankenstein or a zombie, but not, perhaps, my husband.

Once the dye is worked in to the fiber - again, WITHOUT agitating the fiber so much that it felts, it gets rolled up in the plastic wrap and placed in microwaveable dish. Cook it for two minutes, let it rest for two minutes, repeat - until the water that comes out of the plastic wrap is clear. I cooked it for 8 minutes total, flipping the blazing hot mess over once after 4 minutes to keep the dye absorption even.

Once done, take it out of the plastic wrap and soak it again (without agitating it) in hot water with a little soap for a few minutes, then give it a rinse bath (keeping the water the same temperature), squish the water out of it and hang it over the shower rod to dry.

Here is how my wool looks this morning, all dry:

It's going to look so freakin' cool once I've spun it! I have some other fiber I must spin first, but it's going to take a lot of willpower not to play with this instead. I love this color. I shall call it Blugly, and it shall become my Epic Blugly Sweater.

Oddly enough, I haven't settled on a sweater pattern. I think I'll first see what gauge the spun, washed yarn turns out to be. I'm going to navajo ply it, which I taught myself how to do yesterday (more on that later) so it should work out to be in the DK/light worsted range. I'm thinking about doing something like the Mr.Greenjeans sweater from the Fall 2007 issue of knitty.com. But any other suggestions will be welcome! (Keeping in mind that only the last sweater out of 4 I've done was wearable, and I suspect my mom is just being nice about it.)