Soylent Greens

Charlton Heston died earlier this month, and at Lydia’s prompting we all said our goodbyes this week at our knitting group by rewatching Soylent Green.

It seems appropriate to remember the most high profile spokesman for the NRA as the leading man of 60s and 70s dystopian epics. To commemorate the event I resurrected some of the yarn I dyed last fall when I did a large batch of varied greens. This particular yarn came from the suitcase of old yarns I hauled from my grandmother’s house. It’s an old lace weight Shetland from when my grandparents lived in Ireland. Here it is before:

And here it is after:

I used Wilton icing dye in Periwinkle (about a tablespoon) and about a teaspoon of liquid green food coloring. The colors took very well and have survived a test wash. I knit a few skeins into a sweater that I disliked, and the rest have atrophied in a moth-proof bag until last week. Now, though they’re just as much blue as they are green, they’ve become my soylent wristers:

It was really nice to pull out my old dyed yarns and use them, as the dye workshop with Sachio Yoshioka was fantastic and has inspired me to do a lot more dyeing. It’s also prompted me to completely revise my technique, most of which I learned from the internet and which I’ve found to produce inconsistent (although often really exciting) results. When summer has fully arrived I’ll collect local plants that can be used for dyeing and write a post summarizing the technique he taught us. In the meantime, I’ve signed up for a weaving workshop.

If you’re interested in more photos of the wristers, click any of the images above to link to my flickr account. They fit me slightly loosely, and I think they might be a reasonable size to sell. For now they’ll rest up in my soon-to-be-sold-on-etsy trunk.