Inspired by Punxatawney Phil’s call of an early spring, and armed with Hellen Buttegieg’s organzing principles, today, I continued with my efforts to get my yarn situation in order.

Having tied together all the scrappy little ends I was able to find and rolled them into a ball of yarn, I turned my efforts to reclaiming the wool in the squares I had made in my second iteration of the project known as the Big Rug.

The first step in the process is to unravel the yarn. Because Lamb’s Pride is 15% mohair, this can sometimes be a bit of a challenge, but with a small pair of sharp scissors at hand, I was able to get a foothold on the transformation of my yarn from this:

to this:

Clearly there is a lot of work still to be done.

For any of you who haven’t had the opportunity to watch an episode of the show “Neat,” there is a section of the show known as “the purge.” This is where the rubber meets the road, and Hellen Buttigieg, the show’s host and organizer does whatever it takes to get the job done. Frequently, she has a trifecta of categories for the stuff to be sorted into. In the “Messy Maria” episode, Hellen creates three categories for Maria’s clothes: Love it, like it, or leave it.

As I unraveled the yarn, I realized that there were definitely several colors I would put in the leave it bin if I had one handy. Because of their lackluster hue, I would not even be able to use them for joining the hexagons. So today, I tried dyeing two of the offending (to my eyes) yarns with Kool-Aid.

I had heard that dyeing fiber with Kool-Aid was easy, and today I set out to learn if what I had heard was true.

Using the directions, I found here, I got to work to see if I could transform the yarns from the something I wanted to put in the “leave it” bin to something that I could at least use to join the hexagons, if not in the hexagons themselves.

To that end, I assembled the requisite materials:

wound the yarn to be dyed into a skein:

tied the skein with string so it wouldn’t tangle during the dyeing process:

soaked the skein in soapy water:

put the yarn in a pot of water with two packages of Kool-Aid (I will try three packages of Kool-Aid next time), and followed the directions for the stovetop dyeing process:

When I removed the yarn, none of the dye was left:

and I now have a bright orange yarn that I can at least use to join the hexagons:

Inspired by the ease and success of my first effort, I went through the same series of steps and transformed this once pastel pink into a more vibrant pink that I may even include in a hexagon or two:

Unlike the show, I do not have an entire clutter crew to help me, and I am not able to edit the process of my life to fit into a thirty minute (with advertisements) program, but I am pleased that I have finally settled on an iteration of this project that I like well enough to finish and that I am learning how to get myself organized, one skein at a time.