Colour Blindness

I've heard from a few different sources that newborn babies can't see light colours. So why is it that so many baby clothes, blankets and other things are made in pastel colours? I think it must be that secretly the people who make baby items really don't like babies and are chuckling maliciously at the poor hapless babies that can't make sense of the lightly coloured objects around them, all blending in together into an incomprehensible blob.

Well, I have decided to be kind to the baby and give the gift of Koolaid coloured soakers and tie dye (the latter, mentioned in a previous entry, arrived yesterday). Yesterday I wandered down to the IGA and picked up 8 packets of Koolaid in orange, grape, strawberry and lemon-lime flavours. I then took the little wool pants that my Aunty Belle kindly knitted for me, soaked them in a warm water and vinegar solution while mixing up the Koolaid (without sugar) in a pyrex pie plate. I added much less water than called for on the packet, to intensify the colour. I then squeezed the first wool soaker to get rid of excess water and vinegar and then dropped it into the mixed lemon-lime Koolaid solution. As you can see, the result was an incredibly bright neon green diaper cover! Actually, it doesn't look as bright in the picture as it does in real life. Tim came into the kitchen while the green one was drying over the cupboard door and made a face, saying that it hurt his eyes.

The final step in the process was to microwave the covers. Yes, I microwaved each cover in intervals of 2 minutes, to ensure that the fibres didn't burn or melt. So the colour is set and shouldn't run when the soaker gets wet. I did rinse each one with warm water and no dye came out at all. This little experiment was so fun I'm looking forward to doing the rest of them. I've still got the two larger soakers to do. I'm going to get a little bit more creative with these ones. I'm going to "dip dye" one of them and paint the other with the dye. The dip dyed one I'm planning on doing a mix of blue and purple and the painted one I'm going to try neon green and purple. I like purple.

I did promise Tim, however, to leave the grey covers grey, so that he would occasionally be able to look at the baby without flinching.