After making so much progress last Saturday, I was keen to do more on the Sunday. But my back was a bit stiff from hunching over the sewing machine so I decided to do something that didn’t involve sitting down. It was warmer and dry, so I decided it was Dyeing Day. Items on the list:

Dye poncho-shawl
Overdye socks I don’t wear much

The first project I tackled was converting this poncho my parents bought for me on a holiday to something a bit more my style.

These days I want my knitwear to be easily removed, preferably not over my head, and bulky white garments make my body look huge and my head tiny. Thankfully the two pieces of the poncho were easily unpicked. I sewed them together end to end to make a shawl on Saturday. Now I just had to dye it. For that I needed dye for synthetics, which I found at Lincraft.

There was a lot of shawl to dye, so I decided to dip dye the ends. I tied a string to the rail of the deck above and made loops to adjust the height. The instructions for the dye said to boil the item in the dye bath for half an hour to an hour, stirring constantly. The stirring was vital – at one point I let it go still for too long and the end of a piece of fringe began to melt. I don’t think I kept it up for an hour – more like half an hour.

Look at that strong colour! The instructions warned that not all synthetics dye well. Unfortunately, the shawl must be one of those kinds, as didn’t turn that wonderful blue. But the pale lavender it did change to is nice enough. Which is why I chose blue. No matter how pale or strong it turned out, I’d still like it.

It dried even lighter than that. Oh well.

Next I set about overdying four pairs of socks I don’t wear much because the colours don’t match much in my wardrobe. I used trusty Landscape dyes and it was satisfying, after the shawl, to see the wool suck in the colour. Here are the socks, back when they were fresh off the needles:

And here they are now:

Almost like having new socks. Almost.

Later in the day I did another Accessory project which I included in this post at first, but it looked odd so I’ve made that one a separate post.

Score for the day: 3 projects finished. One category defeated! Yaaaay! I wondered if I should eke out these posts, as I suddenly have a lot of them after a couple of months of not much happening here, but I like the diaryish feel of this blog that lets me look back on what I was doing at different times in the past, and so it may as well reflect the droughts and floods in my crafty life right now.