Teaching my kids the art of the fiber arts

Today was "take your kids to work day". My husband brought my older boys to work with him today, and I starting thinking that I could keep Morgana home with me and I could show her how I create my hand painted yarns. Thinking of it, our 3 year old Gabriel has been desperately wanting to dye his own yarn, after watching me dye my Alice in Wonderland series of yarns.

The day started off pretty darn nice. I slept in to 7am, which is wonderful on a school day. I made myself some coffee, and let my morning just come along slowly since I had plenty of time to kill while I waited for my husband to come back with the car.

The yarn journey started at Northwest Wools in the village. They both picked out some alpaca/wool blend to dye. Morgana told me she wanted me to knit a stuffed kitty, and she wanted pink and gold ochre for her yarn. Gabriel just wanted blue yarn so I could knit him a puppy.

Gabriel getting on with his blue painting!

Morgana begins with pink, after she figured out how she wanted to paint her color sections.

Gabe has used two blues, green, and now a third tone of blue. You can see me starting off my Trail Blazer red for my playoff socks :)

She added in her gold ochre to her pink.

Gabriels yarn wrapped and ready to be heated to set the dye.

She's all done! I think her colors look like a Spring sunset.

We wrapped up M's yarn and it's getting ready to be heated.

When Gabriel was done, he did red, blues, greens, and created some purples. He took some of my black dye I mixed up and he added a little of that to it. His yarn is heat set, and cooling here.

Go Blazers! Almost done painting the yarn. Black dye is sooo messy I had to really be careful using such dark colors to not let them contaminate each other or seep while keeping an eye on the kids and their dye. 

A little self-made bed he made while waiting for his yarn to set. Peregrin looks on in the background, admiring  his brothers work. For a 14 month old, he really did good playing calmly while we got three skeins of yarn painted. Seriously.

Not a great representation of the the colors, but here are their yarns, hand-dyed by a 3 yo and a 6 yo, and heated, cooled, rinsed and now hanging up to dry. Should be ready in about 2 days, then it's onto winding it into a knittable ball of yarn, and knitting these skeins into a kitty and a puppy.