Tea & Coffee Dying

In May 2007 I knit a pair of socks for my Brother in law, These socks in fact;
The yarn was Trecking un-dyed, and so I decided that Tea & Coffee would be a bit of an adventure. It wasn't, if anything it was far too easy! so here's the stupidly simple instructions on what I did!

Materials

2 big pans
a jar of cheap coffee
a bag of cheap tea bags (why waste the good stuff right!)
a large jug of white vinigar
100g undyed yarn, tied in a meter skein

How to do it

1. Put your yarn in a bowl to soak, you need enough water to cover it, and a 1:5 solution of vinigar, leave it there while you start getting everything else ready

2.in one pan, disolve around 4 tblespoons of coffee, with a good 3 second glug of vinigar, in the other put in around 10 tea bags with a similar amount of vinigar

3. Bring both pans to simmering point, giving the tea bags a good simmer to make sure the tea is stewing

4. put one end of your skein in one pan, put the other end in the other, you should have some yarn in the middle, between the 2 pans that is not immersed.

5. start spooning the tea up the un-immersed yarn on the tea side, and the same for the un-immersed yarn on the coffee side (spoon coffee onto it...the solution not the granules ;). Keep this up for around 5 minutes, or until you can see some colour on this section of yarn.

6. Make a mug of your favorite tea or coffee, sit and drink for about 40-50 minutes, going back and ladling some more tea and coffee on the exposed yarn around ever 10 minutes (you only need to make sure that there is some colour going into the yarn, you don't need to stand there for 5 minutes each time)

7. IMPORTANT POINT the yarn will not take up all of the colour of the tea and coffee!
after about an hour, take the yarn out and leave it to cool somewhat.

8.once the yarn is cool enough to touch, rinse it in water the same temperature as the yarn,

and voila, tea & coffee yarn!