Last night was my first attempt at dyeing self-striping yarn. I started to wind my yarn around two chairs, like this, but almost immediately it got tangled. I sat down to straighten it out, and within moments it looked like this:

I worked on it awhile longer, succeeding only in making it more hopeless, so eventually I just chucked it in the trash. I'm so annoyed about that. What a waste of 440 yards of perfectly good merino wool. Lesson Learned: Wind the hank into an easy-to-handle ball BEFORE stringing it onto the chairs.

Of course I ordered more than one skein, so I broke into the second one. I managed to get this one wound, and all set up in the dye pots. The colors I chose were a baby blue, a sage green, and a light yellow. Well, apparently I put way too much dye (Wilton's cake dyes) in because the colors aren't even close to what they are supposed to be. When hanging the yarn to dry, I noticed that that colors were all splotchy. I was reluctant to stir them because I didn't want to yarn to felt, but another Lesson Learned: Stir them, at least a little, for more uniform color. At the very least, I was hoping for a sort of mottled tye-dye effect instead of just a plain old horrible dye job effect. This morning I worked the beginning of a sock to see how the stripes would look. Not too bad, I suppose, for my first time, but I would rather have the lighter colors I was hoping to get.

Emma and I often count things together, which pretty much consists of my saying the numbers and her repeating them, or sometimes just my saying the numbers and her ignoring me. Today we were at Price Chopper, just walking through the aisles, and suddenly I noticed her pointing to the flowers on her pants, one by one, and saying, "One...two...free...four...five...sits!" Wow! This evening, I've been encouraging her to count more things and it usually goes, "Four...free...four...five...four" or something like that, but sometimes she does get it right. Those times may be luck, but either way, I'm pretty impressed!