The Yarnarian Dyes With Much Philosophy.

I was in a brown phase on Monday, and had a wonderful time playing around with the various brown bases that I own: Mahogany, chocolate, chestnut, plain brown (this one has a greenish tinge to it). I love the richness of brown in any form or value.

Most of the time, brown is such a warm color, but when I use my plain brown very diluted, I get almost a bronze color. And chocolate diluted produces a brownish pinkish beige. Browns can contain lots of red or green. In my early dyeing, I tried to reproduce the colors, but finally got smart and just bought a few. I don't need to reinvent the wheel all the time.

I love to take brown and add orange or red or chartreuse. Wow, what a difference those additions make. And take a pale brown and add blue or violet, and you get these very complex colors without names.

Usually I just pick a color and then explore it in a couple of skeins. Now I'm thinking of choosing a color and then dyeing all the skeins of the day with it and see what I can produce. That's the excitement of dyeing for me: playing around with color to produce still more colors. I love to overlap colors; you can get the most fascinating third color here. Even when the colors together produce mud, you can still get neat variations. Try dyeing a section of yarn in violet, and then an adjacent section in pale yellow and overlap them. Yeah, the overlapped part will probably look pretty ugly by itself, but when it involves two wildly divergent colors, the ugliness goes away and your eye picks up this neat interaction.

Here are some of the skeins I did yesterday. They are all still pretty soggy, but when they dry, I'll list them for sale on Etsy.

This one is Cafe au Lait, a mixture of 4 colors:




This one is Woodwork with lots of colorwork in it.



I did a few more skeins for the Winter Mystery Sock, but I won't post them here. If you want to see them, check Etsy later on today. 2 are a soft bronze, and one of them is the most beautiful brown going. If nobody wants this one, I'm keeping it for me. Like I need more stash!

Here are a few more skeins. The red and black on is for DragonYady on Ravelry. Everything else will get on etsy.






Mystery Sock Knitters: The previous post has all the beginning work to do. Have fun!

How are you all doing with the cluster stitch? Need help? Go to the PennyRoses forum on Ravelry, and we'll give you a hand. My sotm people are old hands at this one.



pencraftco and all you wonderful responders - Have fun with the sock. This week is easy. Next week we revv it up a little.