Denim Pinafore Started

The denim pinafore is coming along nicely.  I've nearly finished the first ball of yarn, despite the heat.  When I knitted the test swatch I didn't get any indigo on my hands, but now I've knitted this, I keep on getting blue fingers.  I don't know if it is because it is a different ball and I didn't rinse this one as much, or if the hot weather is making my hands more clammy, causing the indigo to come off the yarn.

The order of dyes I was waiting for arrived on Monday, so yesterday I did a little test dyeing of the silk and ivory yarn to check to colour was going to come out right.  The colour I'm using is Landscape "Mist", which is a grey colour.  And it did come out pretty much at the shade I wanted.  I'm still sort of undecided about the grey though.  It seems a bit of a boring colour to go with, but now I have a sample I keep looking at it and I've found it looks really nice teamed with blue.  Since the pattern isn't likely to arrive until tomorrow or Friday at the earliest, and I'm heading off to see family over the Christmas period on Saturday, I think I'll leave the dyeing until after Christmas, by which time I should be more sure of the colour.

I'm a little paranoid about greys.  I tried dyeing some tencel grey with the black Procion MX dye I had, and found it was actually a blue dye.  So this parcel of dye also had some grey Procion MX dye because of this (I also got brown Procion dye because I had difficulty mixing colours to achieve the desired brown).  My previous attempt at grey wool was a couple of years ago with Landscape "Quarry" (before the Landscapes Elements range of colours existed).  Thanks presumably to the chemistry of Armidale's town water, grey is *not* what came out of the dye bath.  If I use that dye again, it will probably involve obtaining some rainwater first.  I hated the resultant colour (I can't even describe it - it's a sort of green/deep aqua), which wasn't suitable for the intended purpose - part of a striped felted bag with brown, blue and purple.  I ended up making it into a felted pencil case.  That pencil case has been used a lot in the last two years, carrying odds and ends around several schools while I was casual teaching, and around various parts of the school I now work in.  It's indestructible, and distinctively mine, in all its ugliness.