Snow Day Arts and Crafts

as you may have heard, the northeast had a blizzard this weekend.  we got 22 inches of snow  (a mere fraction than what poor melanie and the mister had to contend with). 

here's rocky getting the hell out of the house as fast as he could yesterday morning (when a dog's got to go, he's got to go).

here's j manning the snow blower last night....no shoveling for him....it's got to have a motor and be loud enough to wake up the dead. 

(i'm sorry i don't have pictures of the new fallen snow from today, but that would have required my actually leaving the house.  i haven't showered or worn anything other than pajamas since saturday 3pm.)

anyway, since boston was pretty much incapacitated by the snowfall, i didn't have work today.  woo-hoo.

so i decided to do something that i'd been wanting to do for a long time but always was too chicken to try.  inspired by feral knitter, i broke out the kool-aid and did some dyeing. 

i started out by dividing some basic natural colored wool (i bought this stuff on ebay awhile back so i don't know what it is) into 1 oz hanks.

then following these directions for microwave dyeing, i soaked my hanks for 20  minutes in hot tap water. 

for the first batch i mixed up the following colors (i think that's orange, artic green apple, grape berry splash, and madtwister-raspberry reaction).

i started out by very carefully pouring the artic green apple in stripes across my yarn but ended up really creating ....

.... quite a mess!

my second batch included orange (again, i'm obsessed with orange these days) magic twist changin' cherry (yes the blue stuff), tropical punch and cherry.

i was a bit less messy this go around. 

finally, this is what i came up with.  batch 1 is on top.   batch 2 below. 

not a bad way to spend an afternoon.  no?