Happy Easter!

I didn't get to go to church because I have finally come down with that cold that everybody else has had all month that I managed to evade up until now, and I wish that people would stay home and not go out and distribute these things (I realize that you don't always have a choice though), so that is what I did. But I enjoyed a nice morning with good music and an otherwise quiet house. Easter is one of my very favorite holidays. I miss the choir programs that we used to have in church on Easter though, and just don't seem to do anymore. Maybe it's just here. Do you get the feeling that all the commercial stuff has taken over this holiday too? I don't mind the candy and the celebration of spring and new life and regrowth - I just don't want to lose the true spirit of the holiday.

Easter also means we get to play with dye. This is what I did after we dyed Easter eggs.



Pretty nice colors for Easter egg dye, don't you think? That is about 2 ounces of wool there. I didn't have any yellow because that got spilled before we even dyed any eggs with it, and the purple separated (purple easter egg dye always seems to do that - it did on the eggs too - it actually looks better in the picture). The colors didn't exhaust, so I could have actually put more wool in there than I did. I'm not sure what I want to do with all these little color samples - I have a bunch more samples about this size from a dye class too. I have thought about blending the similar colors together to get multi-tonal yarns that could be identified as mostly "red" or whatever color and would have enough for a project.

How I dyed the wool: The easter egg dye was in yogurt cups. I stuffed bits of roving into the cups and left it overnight. Then I added a glog of white vinegar to each cup and microwaved them until they were hot. After they cooled to room temperature I rinsed each sample until no more color was getting into the water (use warm or hot water - never any cooler than the fiber as it is going into cold water that shocks the fiber and causes felting), then set the wool out on a towel to dry.

I forgot to take a picture of it, but I also made an Easter Egg tree out of some of the branches I trimmed from the cherry trees. While the trees outside still just have buds, the trimmed off branches are in a vase and have leaves and blossoms on them. I hung blown eggs in knitted nets (from Elizabeth Zimmerman's Knitter's Almanac). They are very easy and only take about 5 minutes to knit.

This is what we saw when we hunted Easter eggs yesterday.



You have to look closely to see the hen sitting on a couple dozen eggs. My kids have an Easter egg hunt every day since the chickens don't stay in the chicken coop, and they knew this was here already. Out of 38 plastic eggs with goodies inside they found 36 of them plus two real eggs (fresh ones). I hid the plastic eggs but I can't find the other two either - maybe one of the hens will hatch them.