The Real Day 5 and an Easter Egg

I'm back! Did you miss me when my email and blog server were dead?

OrgoDay 5

Today was the 5th day of 'real work' -- we had a little less time, but still made good progress!

http://andfam.net/kim/OrgoDay5/OrgoDay5.html

Today we attacked the storage in the front hall ~ there's some built in shelves with a cupboard underneath, that I've 'curtained off' as storage because I just don't have (or want?) that much cutesy display stuff. If you were to come in my front door and down the front hall past some bedrooms, you'd pass this area.

Also, the coat closet doesn't have a door because long ago the carpenter ants ate the bathroom door, and the door isn't a standard size, so we replaced the bathroom door by stealing the coat closet door, which just has a curtain now. Is that weird?

So I don't know if getting those two areas cleared out doesn't look like a lot, but really, a lot of it was "nightmare" stuff to me -- things I'd stashed up there long ago and just made me weary to think of going through. But with Hollie to chat with and keep me moving (and guilt me into working with her ceaseless work, and me standing around realizing I ought to be working too) it wasn't too bad at all.

I think tomorrow we'll start on children's bedrooms!

And an Easter Egg ... of Yarn

In other news, I spent my non-organizing time on a craft project.

Yes, that's right, I didn't work on any decluttering and organizing without Hollie.

Aint no Orgo when she's gone ...
Aint to work when she's away ...
Aint no Orgo when she's gone,
and she's always gone too long,
and I find new ways to play ...

So yeah. I bought some undyed superwash wool sock yarn from http://www.knitpicks.com/ ... and read up on Kool Aid dyeing at knitty.com ... and finally decided Sunday evening to get to it.

So I knit a row of stockinette and a row of the funky zig zag in the sock pattern I want to use. I marked the start and end of the rows, then frogged it and measured and got about 40" per row. I decided I wanted 3 rows, more or less, of each color band, and that I wanted it to go blue, green, blue, pink-variegated, and then repeat.

So ... 3 rows x 40" = 120" per color band, which equals 10' per band. (right?)

4 colors before repeating = 40' circumference of the pattern.

So I made a 40' circle of some old burnt orange yarn, and placed it around two chairs around 20' apart, and then walked with the hank of yarn around, and around, and around.

You would think that would be one of those peaceful, mindless tasks, right? But it wasn't. It was really stressful! I had to keep carefully flipping the hank so that it didn't tangle as I went. And as careful as I was, I couldn't keep the tension of the big loops even, so some were saggy. At the end the last few rounds got tangled and I had to sit and carefully untangle before wrapping and I was just really stressed out by it. Plus it took a lot longer than I'd naively imagined.

After wrapping, I measured off a 5' (doubled) loop at one end, then two 10' sections next to each other in the middle, and let the last ~5' (a little more, I don't know where I measured wrong) doubled end be for the red. I carefully did a criss-cross banding to mark the separations and to hold the loops so they would tangle less ... for the pink I zig-zagged the loop back and forth and tied it loosely so I could just dip half of it in the pink, giving myself a few stitches pink, a few white, repeating pattern for those rows. I hoped.

Then I dyed the sections in Kool-Aid on the stove.

green = lemon lime kool aid, 2 packages
red = strawberry, 2 packages
blue = ice blue raspberry lemonade and berry blue, mixed, 5 packages total

A few things I'd do differently -- 2 packets strawberry was a much deeper and redder "pink" than I wanted. Plus I should've wrapped the zig-zag much tighter, effectively tie-dying the white section off, because it started to come undone and I got less white banding than I wanted. I pulled the red out early, before all the dye was absorbed, and so it bled onto the 'white' and made it pink. Oh well.

There's more pix at Flickr by the way, if you want to see the rinsing step and the hanging in the basement to dry part.

If I thought wrapping around the chairs was tedious, I hadn't even dreamed of laying out the 20' long band and then UNwrapping the dyed loops, trying carefully to pass the half-rolled ball over and under the places where it had twisted. It took me over 3 hours to roll it into a center-pull ball.

I'm really hoping there's some sort of yarn dyeing initiation that I just went through, and someone will say, "ha ha, now that you did it the hard way, here's the easy way!" because the Kool Aid part was fun, but the wrapping and unwrapping, not so much!

But in the end I got this pretty little easter egg, with which to make socks from. Do you think I'll get them finished by Easter?