In which I learn a new trick

I got a huge box of acid dyes from Mr. Jane for Christmas. Of course, I ruined the surprise by telling him, 3 days before Christmas, that I was going to head to a local yarn shop to buy some. He had to come clean to keep me from going. As a prize, I got to reach in blind and pick two out to use before the holiday. I picked sapphire blue and scarlet. Check out the huge mess I made:



I actually spilled some blue dye on the already ridiculously blue table and stained it MORE BLUE. Crazy. Since then, I have also been given a giant tarp as a gift, which I am required to cover the kitchen with whenever I get out the dye. I think Mr. Jane is fearing for our security deposit.

Some close-ups of the huge mess. I soaked the wool for an hour before I laid it out on strips of plastic wrap. I used some suction bulbs I got in the baby section of the dollar store to paint the fiber:





Then I rolled it all up in the plastic wrap (this is where the blue dye exploded out of one end of the roll and onto the table and chair, but not the floor). Rolls of plastic wrap went into the vegetable steamer for 45 minutes:



Thankfully, while I was waiting for this to steam, I read up a little on spinning hand-painted roving. I ended up splitting each length of fiber lengthwise into 8 strips to spin. Here's the yarn mid-ply:



The colors don't line up so much, but the red and blue look much better together than I thought they would. What we wound up with was one whole skein at 208 yards, and another overflow skein of 116 yards. This is the 208:



Hooray!