Tuesday, February 01, 2005

The long-awaited hand-painted...


An experiment in hand-painting! Here are some instructions:

1) Wind the yarn into hanks, if it isn't already. Then loosely tie them at the top and bottom (helps stop everything from tangling).

2) Soak the yarn (like the above picture) in lukewarm water at least 10 minutes, to help the dye take.

3) Mix up your kool-aid. Use 1 cup of water per packet of unsweetened kool-aid. I used grape, blue moon berry, lemon-lime, and solar strawberry starfruit.

4) Use the turkey baster to put colours wherever you like (with the yarn laying flat and spread out on plastic bags or saran wrap). As a note, don't put too much on at first! After every spray of colour, take a plastic bag (or wear gloves) and press down on top of the stripe to disperse the colour all the way through the yarn, and to prevent bleeding and mixing from hank to hank or stripe to stripe.

5) After letting the hanks sit for a few minutes, place them in a microwaveable dish, cover with pierced saran wrap. Nuke for anywhere from 2 to 8 minutes on high, until water in dish is clear.

6) Let hank cool in bathtub completely. Once cool, rinse gently in lukewarm water, and hang to dry.

Ta da!

No comments: