I've dyed and gone to heaven

Okay, so we've seen that the carding was completed by team Efficient Effort, and now you can see that one member of team Efficient Effort managed to spin up two singles in about a fingering weight, to be spun into a two-ply, in those spare hours remaining after working for 12 or so a day.

There was no lazy kate in sight, and no one around to help, so I wound them off into cakes to hopefully make plying a bit easier. The jury's still out.

Plied into something like a worsted weight for a total of 228 yards! Can you believe it?! That's the greatest length I've ever spun! It's also the loosest twist I've ever put on a skein, so I'm happy that the urge to over-spin didn't overtake me.

And it's so white! Compared to the blackish bits that I pulled out and spun, it's a very different colour (the new one is the bottom of the three pictured below).

The top two are navajo-plied samples and the bottom is the two-ply, as I stated. This is after its bath, all wrapped up and ready to head out to Robin's for the big dyeing event.

Gloves on and ready to go, we're getting loads and loads of instruction and advice from Robin (in the apron) and her friend, from whom I bought my wheel. The one holding the camera is the one not pictured, and I'm sure that's by design. Way to go, Mum!

We started with immersion dyeing, where the girl in red picked a nice deep teal and I picked a really nice blue. After that followed a rich red, and then we tried hand-painting. The girl in red hand-painted a batt and I worked with the recently-spun 228 yards.

Tying it up a bit to prevent a jumbled mess ... and then on with painting!

That's an instruction sheet there. We followed it. Mostly. It's from Maiwa, which is a business that I simply must get to.

Ta da! Here we have the rich red with the teal in behind, the blue to the left of that, and the minty green in the girl's hand (as well as below the blue in the picture, although that's hard to see). The hand-painted are at the back on the right, but they needed to steep overnight before they got their final rinse, so I'll take pictures of them later. This one in the front is fleece, not batting, and it'll be interesting to see how it comes out compared to the batts dyed the same colour.

All in all a very fun day, a very educational day, and the awakening of the part of me that really likes colour.   :O)