Easter Egg Colours on Roving

I had a lot of fun making Ukrainian Easter eggs this year. But at the end I still had seven jars with Easter egg dye. Rather than just dump them down the drain, I thought to myself, perhaps they will dye wool. 

 I dug around in my stash and found some blue face Lester roving. I wetted it and laid it out on the saran wrap.

This is how it looked laying flat. Then we picked it up… Luckily with the yellow end up high.

There was quite an excess of die running out of it. I steamed it in the microwave for about six minutes. And then threw it back in for another four. It absorbed more of the color, but not all of it some of the dye stuff did wash out down the drain.

Some of it ended up on the lid of my washing machine, so I went back into my stash and found a bit of Merino cashmere roving and used that to soak up the excess dye on top of the washing machine. That’s the smaller pile in this picture.

Finally with what was left I had a couple gray bats that I used to soak up more of the dye stuff. That’s what’s in the white bowl in the picture below. 

Here’s how the rovings turned out. 

All in all a pretty satisfying using up of some thing that was otherwise going down the drain.