Now which hook was I using...

Had a very exciting arrival of a lot of Mirasol Cotanani (as well as more Sirdar Peru for the dyeing experiments), which I am making into a yoked cardigan. The problem? I started the yoke, ran out of yarn, put it down with hook. Hook became unattached. I have now picked it up a week later and am trying to work out which hook I was using! I'm making it up as I go along, so don't have a handy pattern to check from. At the moment, I think I was using a 4.5mm - I remember thinking that the hook was smaller than last time I made a yoked cardigan...but I'm not sure. I've been working on various projects with a 5mm hook this week, so the 4.5 feels weird in my hands. I've worked and reworked the same row with different sized hooks, but I honestly cannot see a difference between the 4.5mm and 5mm...so am going with my instinct!

Now some yarn:

This one is mainly black cherry kool-aid, with the end of ghoul-aid mixed in. There is some variation between the pinks, but it's a little too late to take pictures so the nuances don't quite show up.

Kool-Aid Dyeing

With a huge 'wet room' bathroom, and half a skein of Sirdar Peru in a neutral colour, I decided to hava go at dyeing. I ordered a 'dye equipment kit' from the internet as well as various different colours of 'Kool-Aid'. I chose 'Ghoul-Aid' for my first attempt, made one sachet up into a bottle (haven't a clue if that's the right proportions!) and then used a large syringe to squirt half of it onto the yarn, which had been soaked in lukewarm water for half an hour.

This done, I took a smaller box, filled it with water and suspended it over my larger box, then zapped it in the microwave. I was very tentative, and didn't get steam, but the water was hot and the water coming from the yarn was clear, so I decided it was dyed! Let it cool down for twenty minutes, and then sponged off excess water with newspaper. Washed with soap and rinsed in sink, then hung up to dry, which it is doing at the moment...so I await results!

The drying contraption! I didn't have anything in my bathroom to hang it up with, so put up my music stand and then suspended a coat hanger from it, and then attached a coathanger with the yarn on it to one side, and a weighted coat hanger to the other side. It seems to have worked!

The yarn - it isn't a bold colour, more of an antique rose - but is still very different from the starting colour! I do like it - I was rather shocked when the dye came out as dark blue in the bottle!