An ungreen thing

It was an impulse buy, from a discount rack, at a discount craft store. I normally don’t succumb to impulse buys, because the thread I dangle from will not support them and groceries in the same week.

But, I was in the big city (Nashville) which is a rare thing, waiting in the parking lot of a musical instrument store for the boys to make their cable purchase (modern musicianship requires an amazing variety of cables) and there was this Hobby Lobby next door. Coming home from the big city without even a tiny souvenir seems a bit too spartan, but normally it is something like a box of stevia for sweetening, or something for the garden from Lowes that I can’t get locally.

I wandered through the entire store and as usual couldn’t find anything that I couldn’t live without, till I saw the “spray on” dye. Yep, it is in a spray can like paint, and you spray it on t-shirts and tote bags and such. How ungreen and wasteful is this? You can mix up dye and sponge it on the surface with the same results without the waste of the metal and manufacturing of the can…with a mixture of much guilt and much glee I brought it home.

It is intended for cotton, of course, but I threw down an old skein of worsted weight handspun romney lamb two ply onto a piece of newspaper and sprayed one side of it and one side of a matching sample square of knitting.

I let it dry a few days (got sidetracked on to something else) and then washed them both vigorously, fully expecting the dye to wash out, but it did not. Then I unraveled the knitting and compared it to the skein, the color repeats where about what you would expect, the knitted piece was short repeats of pink and white, the skein was long repeats. But the surprise was, it was nice! Soft hand, pretty, color (cranberry, I think it was) Could it be obtained in another way? sure, was this insanely quick and easy? sure. Kinda like the difference between a home cooked meal and going through the drive through. Not something you would normally confess or encourage, but it was interesting.

I balled them both up and took this photo to document the color, then set them aside, till now.