Skinny Skeins

I need to have a lot of different colours for my triangles blanket. So I spun and plied 200 g wool and then wound skinny skeins - 25 times around the niddy noddy instead of my usual 50. I finished up with 13 skeins,  I was happy with that.  That's quite a lot of dyeing, even in the microwave. To save time and energy, I did some two-in-one dyelots. I mixed up the dye powder, water and vinegar in a plastic tub, put one skein in and left it for a minute to absorb some of the dye and then put a second skein in. They could then be 'cooked' together. If you use a 'straight' dye, the second skein should be a paler version of the first. But when you mix dyes, the different elements are sometimes absorbed at different rates and the second skein can be quite a different shade to the first. I hope the photos below  illustrate this:

That's a sneaky way of dyeing fewer dyelots but still finishing up with a lot of different colours. One thing to remember is that if there is too much dye in the water, the second skein can be pretty much the same as the first, because the first one couldn't absorb what was in the water.