This Tuesday was relatively tidy. I am somewhat demented with uncharacteristic, pre-surgery-related tidiness and was away with my methodical and neat brother over the weekend, which somewhat subdued my Messy Tuesday urges.

I am sure there are unlimited messes in my future so I am not sad to have missed messy Tuesday this week and I have been love love love LOVING reading all the posts people have made about messy Tuesdays. I really enjoy reading about all the mess we make – or just accumulate – while in the process of doing other things and it adds another dimension to a lot of reading that I’m doing at the moment about the life and soul of objects, the meaning of things, the way that objects inform how we think etc. the flickr gallery is full of messy Tuesdays joy if you haven’t already seen it.

However sometimes the doing of the things requires a little tidiness. For instance, the koolaid dyeing experiment I embarked upon last night definitely required some tidy-up-as-you-go-along strategies for the avoidance of eye-meltingly neon-stained kitchen surfaces and utensils. I had a skein of white mohair that I wished to transform into some kind of green loveliness. A large Etsy-based conversation with the wondrous Skeinqueen of Berkshire about the perfect, semi-solid shade of pea-green sock yarn (I am obsessed with sock-knitting…) inspired me to try my own fair hands at producing the perfect shade of green.

Let us begin with the undyed mohair.

Already we see how this fiber years to felt itself. Just look at all those stray hairs, entangling themselves in the wetness to make a mat of woolen dreadlock… but I digress. Let us now observe the swirling blue waters of the blue raspberry lemonade dyebath. People, it’s a good thing you can’t smell this image. Blue raspberry lemonade and malt vinegar fair stinketh.

I basically did a very uneven job of 2 blue dyebaths (deliberately) to produce a patchy blue layer of dye underneath the greens and yellows. I wanted to achieve varying depths and lightnesses of green, so following the success of the first layer of dye, I made up a batch of very berry blue dye and plunged the yarn once again into blueness.

After this, I made up a batch of green dye which was a bit of an experiment. I used arctic ice apple or similar, which has some kind of strange colour system whereby the koolaid crystals are white, but the drink turns green. An ineffectual green dye results (never buy again for wool-dyeing, Felix…) which was improved last night by the addition of a sachet of lemon and lime to the dye bath.*

It looked like very old cabbage soup.

I then decided to make up a yellow bath to overdye everything with, and I wanted to temper the extreme vibrancy of the shades with something a little more subdued, so I used one sachet of tamarind dye and two sachets of lemon koolaid. I have heard that the yellow dye in the lemon flavour is not so strong, and it is definitely weak. When I saw no strong yellow happening in my dyepot, I poured successive amounts of good old supercook into the dyebath.

I have produced a very yellow-green skein of yarn… I’m not entirely certain I like it yet; it is still drying after successive washes that never quite got rid of the sickly vinegar/koolaid fragance but I think I will be able to make a very lovely wrap/stole from it. All I need now is to find a leafy lace pattern that I can complete on very large wooden needles, bombed off my face on morphine. Yes, this yarn is for post-operative knitting joy. This time next week I shall be in theatre having my toes broken. But a week from this afternoon I shall be casting on the lovely green wool, which is a far happier focus.

*I followed the instructions here for my koolaid dyeing, using always 1 part vinegar to 3 parts water.