Adventures with Roving

The following account of my weekend is an adventure because I say so. So there. It makes my life sound more interesting.

Well, on Saturday I hit up Woolbearers with my mom and em and I indulged myself in some undyed merino roving. I'm so bad. It was $6 for 4 oz. Is that reasonable? I thought so. Anyway. So we go home and I pick up my spindle and the roving that I god the last time mom and I were at the store and I start to spin. I really enjoy spinning, and even though I'm really very bad at it (see picture below) it's relaxing and I count it as a brain excercise because when you're new to it you really have to concentrate so you draw the right amount of fibers.
This is the spinning from my first bump of roving, hand-dyed by one of the women at Woolbearers. It's full of slubs at all the joins. My mom says that I'm not OCD enough because I was just drafting from any place in the roving, without a thought as to color repetition or anything. That sort of thing doesn't bother me unless I want something to look a specific way. With this roving, I really don't. I don't know what I'll knit with it yet. Something that doesn't require smooth yarn.
Anyway.
So this undyed roving was calling to me and dredging up recollections of dying conversations with my mom. Finally, as we were walking through the grocery store to pick up odds and ends for dinner, we passed some easter egg dying kits and my mom stopped.
"Want to try dying that roving?"
"Hmm."
Silence for about fifteen seconds.
"Sure!"
So we picked up a kit and went on our merry way. Later that night, though, when we were to start the dying, we realized...
"Mom, I can't find any vinegar."
"Oh. I guess we don't have any."
And so the dying was put off. The next day (Sunday), we spent most of the morning in the car driving to the ass-end of Pennsylvania (we were up near Lancaster) and then back again so my dad could visit a woodworking store. It was boring. It smelled nice, like wood, but otherwise I was not much interested in it. Though they did have this really wicked looking wooden mallet...it looked kind of like what I imagine Mjollnir (Thor's hammer) should look like. Only smaller. On the way home we stopped to do some grocery shopping and picked up two more easter egg dying kits and a small, cheap crockpot. We almost drove away without the vinegar.
That night, I had plunged half my roving into a crockpot full of yellow water and vinegar.

That's my wool, chilling in the pot. I was very impatient and it was hard not to go down and poke at it every five minutes. Yami, who was over at the time, kept smacking me on the head every time I mentioned checking on it. Well, it came out a nice, sunny yellow and is absolutely lovely. Yesterday I popped in the rest of my roving with all three red tablets and, despite my most fervent hopes, my roving came out pink. It didn't even dy evenly; some parts are darker than others. Oh well.

There is my lovely roving, my first attempts at dying, enjoying some fresh air on my window. It's been pretty nice today, despite clouds sometimes obscuring the sun.

From woman's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world.
~Loves Labours Lost