Dye Day Details

Some people have an idea of what my dyeing was about. Well, at least half of it! The blanks were from Machine Knitting to Dye For. I'm going to unravel and ball the yarn and make a hat using the pattern that came with the two blanks.

Now for the roving. I've been mulling over ideas about blending different colors of dyed fiber to get a color that I can't get by dyeing alone. I have about 100 grams of each colorway and I'll sample different ways of blending. Two I've done already are stripping the roving and blending by attenuating, which Deb Menz explained in during the SOAR retreat classes a couple of years ago. She also explains blending on a carder in Color in Spinning. I've tried a couple of times, but not with any planning or forethought. This time I want to take the dyed roving, try several methods and then knit up small samples. That way I can refer back to something I've done myself which always helps the learning process. After reading Deb's book and taking a dyeing workshop with Sara Lamb I came home and started my own samples to help me understand a little better.

This time I wanted to take two sets of 5 colors, each set would blend well together and one color from each set would blend with one from the other set. (Keeping up here? It's so hard to type out your thought process. Or maybe that's just me!) The magic will happen when the experimental blending starts. So here are the dye results.









For those of you who like to start with something concrete and then add your own touch, I've included my formulas. The color key is below.

5	1	2	3	4
MU10 Y10	WFR 100	MU20 S10 Y60 WFR10	M20 S10 MU30 Y20 WFR20	MU80 Y20

1	2	3	4	5
Y80 T20	V50 B30 T20	MU20 V5 B65 T10	M30 V10 B50 Y10	MU50 V10 B30 T10

MU=mustard
Y=yellow
S=scarlet
M=magenta
b=bright blue
t=turquoise
v=violet
These are Sabraset dyes from ProChem. I also used red from the Washfast line (WFR=Washfast red). My basic palette comes from Sara's handouts and Deb's book.