Spindle Me Right Round, Baby, Right Round

I recently decided that my yarn addiction would be better served if I could make my own yarn. It might end up being cheaper, or at least reduce my constant itch to go to the craft store. One of my swappers is the moderator for felting and spinning over on Craftster and she's just started a "Learn to Spin in 2010" thread. The timing was absolutely perfect, as I noticed the thread right as I was was surfing Etsy for fiber and spinning kits.

I ended up going with the spindle kit from MaineWoodsYarn, with the Autumn colorway. The kit comes with an ounce of undyed white wool for practicing on and I used it to spin my first ever skein two weeks ago. The entire process wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be and turns out, very addictive. I set the yarn the other evening and while it was plain ol' white and smelled strongly of wet sheep, I was in love.

Tonight I decided to try my hand at another first for myself and dye the yarn. There are several techniques to dye yarn and while a lot of them and get complicated, the easiest is probably too easy. KoolAid is a fantastic dye for natural yarns, and lucky me, mine was 100% wool. Knitty has a fantastic page on how to dye with Kool Aid, including somewhat of a color guide. I picked orange because, let's face it, I'm obessed with it. Also helped that it's the only color the store had that I liked. I went ahead and dyed it while I was making a quick dinner and love how it turned out. It's very.. Cheetos like.