Well, we’re finally home - and not a moment too soon either.  The cats were beginning to feel like they’d been abandoned, except for the hour or so we visited every day to feed them and tidy the litter box.  The degus and the gerbil didn’t miss us so long as they were fed.  To rodents, personal attention isn’t nearly as important as toys and treats :)

Dad is doing better - much better.  He can navigate around the house reasonably well now (even into places he shouldn’t be attempting - like down the cellar stairs) and can manage to look after himself again.  In true dad fashion, the better he felt, the more disagreeable he became.  I do understand that facing the fact that the extent of your freedom may be limited to the energy you can supply to the effort may be very daunting - especially when you have managed 85 years without any real problems.  And I know it’s hard to have things done (like washing dishes, cleaning clothes, general upkeep and so forth) in ways other than you’re used to.  Still, we were there three weeks and I’m pretty sure all parties involved were breathing relieved sighs at the end.

I did do some knitting, but nothing was finished - I was just too tired and stressed to be able to focus enough.  I did do a dyeing experiment though and it came out just fine.

After Christmas, Michael’s had a sale on (among other things) Patons sock yarn.  When I checked it out, the only solid color they had was a natural cream.  I had been hoping for something a little more interesting as I wanted to make something for my aunt, dad’s younger sister.  She had been calling every other day just to see how dad was doing and had been over to visit several times always bringing something delicious and homemade with her - apple pie, peach cobbler, blueberry pie, etc. I wanted to do something nice for her so on her last visit, when she admired Myria’s Dana Victoria mitts (she said, jokingly “Did you make these for me?”), I knew what to do!

Now dad doesn’t have a crock pot - at least that’s what he said when I asked him.  I did discover one lurking in the basement later on but…  So, as this was washable wool/nylon, I decided to hazard doing the dyeing in a pasta pot on the stove top.  Okay, I had the pot and the yarn - all I needed was some Kool-aid for the dye and some sort of acid to make it stick to the yarn :) 

My next trip to the store provided me with 4 packets of Kool-aid - 2 Black Cherry, 1 Strawberry and 1 Orange.  Now all I needed was acid.  Dad did say there was white vinegar in the cupboard which is what I normally use.  But I know my father well enough to know he would never have stopped complaining about the smell if I actually did use it.  So I read the Kool-aid packages carefully and discovered that all of them contained both citric acid and ascorbic acid.  Hmmm…would that be enough to enable the yarn to take up the dye?  I decided to maximize my chances by brewing some strong tea - 6 teabags worth in about a quart of water - to add some tannic acid to the party.

I wound and tied the two balls of sock yarn into a big hank…

I could have done this at dad’s, but I brought it back to our apartment on one of our cat-feeding visits.  Being able to use the swift made this job a lot faster and easier and I just tucked the finished skein into my purse for the return trip :)

Then for the soaking…

I would ordinarily soak wool for 30 minutes to an hour.  Because this stuff is machine washable, however, I felt free to squeeze it in the water and jostle it around because there was no danger of it shrinking.  It was completely saturated in just a few minutes.

Then I combined the tea with the Kool-aid and dumped that into the pasta pot, adding water (and stirring to make sure everything was well combined) until the pot was about 3/4 full.  And then I added the yarn.

I turned the heat on and let the liquid come to a boil, then lowered the flame so the pot was just simmering along.  It only took about an hour for the dye to exhaust and this was what I had at that point - ‘scuse the steam :)

You can see pretty well that all the color has moved from the liquid into the yarn and that the liquid is pretty much clear.  Yippee!!  The combination of citric, ascorbic and tannic acids worked beautifully in enabling the yarn to take up all the color.  I’m going to have to remember this when dyeing with Kool-Aid in the future - I probably don’t need to worry about adding vinegar.

Next step was washing, the mandatory roll in the towel (the yarn you saucy girls, not me!) and hanging it up to dry.

Side note:  Does anyone know what the ideal humidity for a home should be?  Is there even an ideal humidity?  Dad’s house is so dry that Myria and I both had sinus problems all the time we were there - not to mention we had to practically bathe in lotion to keep our hides hydrated :)  It was good for the yarn though - it pretty much dried overnight :)

This is what I wound up with - and while the picture’s a little fuzzy, the color is accurate and I’m calling it Rusty Venture.

And this is what I’m doing with it…

I had to modify the pattern somewhat because my dear aunt has little tiny hands - as opposed to the hooves that both Myria and I sport.  So I cut back the repeats of the pattern, going from 6 down to five.  That changed the stitch count from 72 to 60.  I actually cast on at that point and began the first mitt, but the more I looked at it, the less I felt it was right.  So when my aunt visited the next time, I measured the circumference of her hand (ruining any chance of making this a surprise gift) - just over 7”.  My hand measures 9”.  So I checked my gauge and decided that the purl troughs didn’t need to start with a width of 5 stitches and subtracted 2 stitches from each one.  Then I frogged the first attempt and cast on again with 50 stitches this time.

This is going to work very nicely :)

Thank you all for your kind thoughts for Myria and my dad - we appreciate them very much.  For myself, thanks for your patience - I’m back and, hopefully, will stay back for a while.

Oh, and if you’re interested, Chatters will be open again on Saturday night!