Ideas can hit at the oddest times

I have been wanting to dye a self stripping skein of sock yarn for awhile.  I played around with variegated and tonal and they are easy enough to do but of course it's much harder if you're actually aiming for a specific colour.  Self-striping takes a lot more planning, or at least they do with me.

I finally determined how much yarn I knit with for 1 row. (33.5") and then I sat on the information for like 3 weeks before starting to do calculations to find out the yardage for 1 colour repeat that I want to do....I don't have anything big enough the yarn on.

With some late night ingenuity while trying to go to sleep, I pulled my blocking mat (aka: the puzzle piece foam mats people put down for kids to play on), pulled out some pushpins from my cork board and my measuring tape and went to work.  I didn't get to far before I realized that I didn't have enough space. I took out piece of paper and drew a diagram of what I had on my blocking mat, added some dots for the missing push pins, through in some numbered lines to make things even more confusing and came up with a good solution.  I still have a couple of things still left to purchase (like more pushpins) and something else to find (like the permanent marker I know for sure I own that I cannot find at the moment). I hope to have my first skein wound and sectioned off by the end of the week.

The first colour I really want to try is a self-striping I have called The Evil Queen, based on Regina from Once Upon A Time.  I also discussed it with one of my friends Cathy who is a major fan of the show aswell and she said it sounds perfect in colour (she also thought my idea for Archie was perfect as well).  The colours for The Evil Queen are going to be Black -> Purple -> Black -> White.  Only problem is that I don't believe I have any purple dye which means I have to mix and I have never tried mixing colours.  Do you mix the powdered dye or do you mix the liquid dye?  Or maybe I should try both on link 5 grams of yarn to see if I can create the perfect purple to use...time to pull out another test ball of yarn and chopping it up so I can test out colours that I have mix together to get the colour that I need.

Also, it is pretty fun to come up with different colourways names and what colours are a part of it.