Saturday, September 10, 2005

Playing in the Dyepots

A couple of days ago a fiber friend and customer asked for some "Sunset on the Beach" Corriedale. I didn't have any in stock, so I had to make some. I got up yesterday morning kind of grumbling at having to do all the work ahead, but I really owe Stan a thank you! I really enjoy working with color normally, but yesterday I really got to playing and enjoying myself a lot. I also did a run of the Merino/Tencel blend fiber with the same dyes (I hate to throw perfectly good dye away when there's lots more color before it's exhausted!) Then I got to thinking about plying, color varieites and methods and things that both Mona's Blog and the Twisted Sister's Sock Book deal with. Each deals with taking hand dyed rovings (Mona's beautiful yarn came from some of my Iris Garden rovings) and plying them differently to come up with different effects. Anyway, while I had the dyes still in the pots, I decided to dye a series of 5 pieces of roving for myself just like the ones you see above. Then I dyed 5 pieces of roving of the same colors used in the hand dyed to ply with the variegated stuff, but this time I dyed them a single color each. My intent is to ply the solid color with the hand dyed colors and see which one(s) I like the best! I think the effect will be interesting and of course, different depending on the color used as the solid. You can see that the colors are very pastel as the dye was close to being exhausted, but I think it'll be very pretty. I'll keep you up to date on the experiments as I get the fiber spun.

1 comment:

Alison said...

Those are beautiful colors! The shine is wonderful!