NyHavn Canal in Copenhagen

My first paint-by-numbers picture, finished and hung on the wall :)

To my utter shame, I bought the set of canvas, brushes and paints two years ago, but only at the beginning of this year I found the desire to open it and try it. As I had suspected, painting by numbers turned out to be totally my thing, very similar to cross stitching and puzzle assembling. Some days i would paint for hours, listening to an audiobook. 

 

However, I do not intend to fill the house with my "paintings", so probably one painting per year would be my limit, I would like to have more time for my other hobbies too.

A close-up of the painting. As I had never had any experience with painting with acrylic paints, the thought that the paints might dry, had never occurred to me. Unfortunately, the quality of some of the paints was very poor and I suspect it is because they were too old. The quality of the set is also not very good, I've seen better versions of this particular painting, with more harmoniously selected colors. I am especially unhappy with one of the blues of the sky, but as a whole I like it a lot and I really enjoy watching it on the wall in the kitchen.

Here are some photos I took in the course of the process. It all started on January 09.

January 10

January 13

January 14

January 15

January 16

January 18

January 19

January20

January 21

January 22

January 24

January 25

January 27

January 31 - final day! The last tiny small areas are covered with paint :)

Cotton Dyes

I finally opened my cotton dyes and did some dyeing. I had two balls of white yarn, about 80 g, unraveled from old projects. I knew the yarn was rayon and probably some acrylic, and because rayon is made out of cellulose I supposed I should be able to dye it with cotton dye, as it is intended for natural cellulose fibers like cotton, linen and hemp. I skeined all of the yarn and dip dyed it in purple dye.

I had thought that all of the yarn was the same, but the dyeing revealed its different origins - one of the balls was from an older purchase and it had larger viscose content, so it took more of the purple color, while the other ball had more acrylic content and it took less of the dye.

Here the difference is quite noticeable:

The two balls wound separately.

And because I had quite a lot of dye in the pot, I decided to overdye a ball of neon blue cotton-acrylic yarn. First I dip dyed it in the remaining purple and then I made a new dye bath of burgundy dye and dip dyed it in it from the other end. I'm quite please with how this cotton-acrylic yarn took the dye - the original color and the new color.

I decided to use the newly dyed yarn to make a mitered square cover for the settee on the balcony. I have plenty of scrap cotton-acrylic yarn and I bought three more colors of cotton dye, so it'll be fun. The only thing I have yet to decide is whether to knit all of the squares separately or to connect them as I go - lots of pros and cons in both directions, but I feel like I'm leaning towards the separate knitting and rearanging them by colors and connecting them when I finish the knitting.