True Colors

More than just the episode title of last night's Deadwood (Hearst is a badass mofo that'd better not mess with Alma again!), I had a chance to try my hand at Kool-Aid dyeing again yesterday. Let's see what true colors I came up with. My goal was get a tri-colored yarn going from a nice bright yellow to a dark red. I figured if I started with the yellow first, I could then do the red and the middle would be orange by default. Well, not so much. I left one end natural, hoping for that end to be just red. So I covered it in plastic wrap and hung it over the side of the bowl. So far, so good.
Then it was time for the Fruit Punch. This clearly wasn't going to hack it, so I mixed up more fruit punch and threw it back in the microwave. Lemme tell ya, if you need to clean your microwave, throw a bowl of water in it and nuke it for a few minutes. The moisture makes the crud wipe clean really easily. Anyway. I finally came out with something somewhat resembling what I was hoping for. I didn't get a distinct band of orange in the middle, but now I know that overlapping colors doesn't necessarily mean they'll blend that well. So on my next attempt, I'm going to try 3 different colors, with some actual orange kool-aid involved, and we'll see what I come out with. Hopefully it'll look better than this: But I did finish something with Yellow, Orange and Red in it! Dunno what mood I was in to make me use those colors all day yesterday, but I did. I needed an instant gratification knit. I thought back to my first swap oh so many months ago, in which I swapped chocolate for yarn with Zonda. I wanted the Cotton-Ease so I could make a cozy for my Dell Pocket DJ. Other projects kept getting in the way, but finally yesterday I'd had enough. It was time. So, armed with my short row toe knowledge and the Random Stripe Generator, I cast on 13 stitches provisionally, did 1 set of wrap & turns, picked up my provisional stitches, and started knitting. When I got to the end, I cast off the front 10 stitches, started an i-cord on the next 3 - did about 6 or 8 inches of cord, grafted it onto the 3 stitches on the other side of the 10 bound off stitches, and kept knitting on the final 10 live stitches until I had a flappy-thing. I did a few decreases, made a button hole, did another set of decreases and bound off. Sewed on a button, and tada! Why such a short i-cord? What gave me the idea for a wristlet? New phone! My cell phone battery was dyeing a quick and ugly death. So I got a new one on Friday. Let's have Ripple model it for you. Heh, I'm not much for pink, but I wanted a Razr and I didn't want one that everyone here at work was toting around. So, pink it was. Until they come out with a chartreuse green one anyway. Heh.