Recently I bought some roving from Knit Picks. I went with the cheapest, mostly because I wanted to play around with dyeing it and had no idea how it would turn out. So today, with the gladiolus on my mantel as inspiration, I got to work.I used four packets of lemonade, two and a half orange, and two red. I lucked out at Marshalls the other day and bought their last ketchup and mustard bottles, which worked quite well, in my opinion.
After soaking the roving in a hot tub for a little while,I drained the water, put down some garbage bags, and went to town with the dye (I forgot to take a picture of this part). I then rolled up the whole concoction, put it in a big ziplock bag, and microwaved it for three minutes. Once it was cool enough to touch, I unrolled it in the tub (with another garbage bag for protection).
Here is the final braid (well, three braids, I split it up to make it easier for me to spin later on):
I definitely could have used less red and more yellow - it was hard to get the yellow to really show up. I think if I did it again, I would make the sections of red smaller, and a lot more yellow. Orange probably wasn't even necessary. I also should have used saran wrap to roll it up. That might prevent the red from taking over as much as it did. My plans are to spin a bare single, then use a different method to dye it green (probably stovetop). Then I'll ply the two singles together and see what happens. Originally I wanted to do green on this roving, but realized it probably wouldn't mix well with the orange or red. We'll just see how this all turns out :)
