The Yarnarian: Digging out forgotten dyes.

Friday, September 3, 2010

Digging out forgotten dyes.

Beautiful Rachel Yarn!

Wednesday I was in the mood to dye. Lately, it seems as if I have to force myself, which is not a good thing if this is something you love to do. What happened was that Tues night, as I was working in the laundry/dyeing studio, I decided to go through my dye collection and haul out some that had been forgotten. Of course I then wanted to play with the colors, and Wednesday morning, that's just what I did. And I had such a good time. I played with avocado, teal, grape juice and salmon, plus of course I added other colors to the mix. Such fun. It was better than opening a new box of crayons.

I haven't done much with salmon. It is such a distinct color, and for some reason, I never combine it with anything else. But not this time. The first yarn is totally salmon with nothing else added. Then you can see how the dye solution morphed into 3 very different colorways. You add a bit of this and that, and voila, you get something totally new.

Salmon:

From here, the dye pot became Latte, and that became Harvest, which then turned into Sunlight.

Trust me, that was all done using the first basic salmon dye solution.

I also played with teal and avocado.

Here is the first one done with avocado, Greener, with just a pinch of turquoise added for a bit of sparkle.

And then the teal yarn, Bluegrass.

Then I combined them with bit of the Harvest solution to the colorway, Autumn Dreams.

Then I moved on to Grape Juice, and made Grapes, of course.

And that solution plus a bit of the leftover green solution, made Wildflowers.

And then a combo of everything floating around, Moody River.

I'm back to knitting socks again. This time I want the yarn to be the focus, not the pattern, so I'm using a simple rib pattern: k5, p2. The yarn is Rachel, the one I dyed above. Approx 400 yards of 100% superwash merino in a pretty tight twist which makes the nicest fabric.