What to do with those leftover Easter egg dyes...

So I dyed some eggs for Easter... because the kids wanted proper, colourful Easter eggs on the breakfast table to go with our "Hefezopf":

Those eggs did not take up all the dye, of course... so what do we do with leftover dye? Dye yarn of course! I found two balls of white sock yarn and decided I wanted to try a gradient dye.

Ingredients (assuming you did not just dye Easter eggs):

• vinegar
• 2 red Easter egg dye tablets
• 2 blue Easter egg dye tablets
• 2 balls of sock yarn à 50 g

Procedure:

1.   Soak both skeins in warm water with a dash of vinegar for a while.
2. Dissolve 1 red and 1 blue dye tablet in hot water with 4 tbsp vinegar. Pour the dye into the dye pot and add enough water to cover the wool.Dye both skeins a light purple.
3. Let the yarn dry enough not to cause to much of a mess in the livingroom when you roll the two strands into one ball.





4. Make a new dye bath using one red tablet. Put the ball of yarn in, making sure it is completely covered, start heating up the dye bath. When the outer layer does not seem to take up any more dye, start to wind the yarn onto a kniddy-knoddy VERY  SLOWLY. Caution! Hot! Go on until either all dye is depleted or you think you've got enough red-ish purple yarn on the kniddy-knoddy.



5. Wind the rest of the ball onto the kniddy-knoddy. Do this in a place where splashing water doesn't matter all that much... 



6. repeat step 3. Make sure you start at the red end.
7. Repeat steps 4 and 5 with a blue dye tablet. 
8. Let the yarn dry.
9. Separate the strands by winding them into two balls. Do this with no children around, because there's bound to be plenty of adult language involved.
10. (optional) Re-wind the balls into skeins or cakes to make them even more pleasing to the eye.

I just LOVE the result. Yes, seperating the two strands in the end was tedious... but I think it was totally worth the effort! Now I'm trying to decide what to make from these - leaning towards shawl...