Firecrackers!

I hope all the Americans out there had a fabulous 4th of July! We started the day with the parade. Leesburg does several good parades throughout the year - we've been to the Halloween one before, but this was the first time at the 4th of July parade. It was lots of fun. Of course, there are always political candidates in the parades, shaking hands and passing out stickers to the kids - by the end of the parade Caleb looked like a billboard for democracy. Except for the part of the parade where the local Corvette club went by (I think Mickael teared up a bit), we all had a wonderful time. For those of you who aren't Americans, I hope you also had a nice 4th of July, but I'm guessing it didn't involve parades or fireworks.

On Tuesday, I realized that I needed to get something knit. At this point it is a semi stealth project (this is getting bad - we now have different degrees of stealth projects), meaning I can sort of show it to you, but you can't see enough of it to see details until later. I knew I needed to start it pretty much NOW and I knew I wanted to do it in red. Fortunately, I had a few skeins of KnitPicks dye your own laceweight and some dye around here, so I tossed two skeins into the dye pot and started adding dye until I got the color I wanted. I have heard that red's are the hardest color to get right and if you've ever painted a room red, (or even your nail's red), you know that red acts differently from other colors. The red pigment is the smallest molecule of all the pigments (turquoise blue is the biggest) and it just acts differently. (For anyone who's never painted their nails red or painted a room red - reds are "runnier" than other colors. When you paint a room red, you must have primer and you'll still end up with 3 or 4 coats of paint on top to get an even coat.)

I knew I wanted almost a bright, clear true red, but I wanted it to pull just slightly towards the blue red side of the color wheel. I have pink undertones to my skin and orange reds are not a good mix for me. Landscapes Dyes have two reds: Grevilia is a cool red and Desert Pea is a warm red. I started with an even mix of the two, but then added just a bit more of the Grevilia to push the color very slightly towards the blue side. What you see above is what I got. I love it! I can't wait to start knitting with it. The only problem? I was talking on the phone to Christine* and didn't keep track at all of how much of which dye I used, so if I ever want to duplicate the color, I'll have to start from scratch. Ah, the joys of Seat of Your Pants Dyeing!

*For those of you not in Mystery Stole 3, Christine is my co-moderator. She is in charge of all things computer tech related and has organized the translation efforts. I met her when I did the first Mystery Stole, 2 years ago and she bailed me out from some computer issues. I frequently refer to her as Kato to my Green Hornet, because let's be honest here, without Kato, the Green Hornet would have never gotten anything done.