Experimental Results

So what did all those lovely little balls of wool turn into?

Experimental Results

Julie and I started with about 12 1/2 ounce pieces of Blue Faced Leicester. Why BFL? First, both of us like spinning with it. Second, it's not so hard to get a lot at a reasonable price. The results of our dying experiments surprised us a little bit. Reds, yellows, browns and greens dominated our dyeing process. Pretty strange coming from the original blue undertone girl. Yet I found it almost impossible to put down the warm fall tones.

In the end, I played with three sets of colors.

Sunset

This is a blend of yellow gold and some varying shades of red violet and red violet mixed with red and red violet mixed with scarlet. It reminded me of the colors that you see at sunset as the sun hits the horizon. Both pieces were dyed with the same set of colors. The upper piece has less yellow and a bit of undyed area (on purpose) while the lower piece has a more saturated bit of red-violet in the corners.

Hawaiian Shore

This set of colors are all diluted directly from regular stock dye colors. The intent was to use different depth of shades and see how that played out. The end result is something that reminds me of the color of the ocean when I was in Hawaii. I wish now that I'd tried another piece with these colors -- one where I used the lightest color as a solid background with splotches of the others. Fortunately, it's not hard to get to these colors, so I should be able to try them again the next time I dye.

Autumn Leaves

If you can believe it, both of these pieces are dyed with the exact same set of colors (the palette I featured yesterday). Pretty amazing the different effects that can result. I'm quite fond of both of them. I find myself amazed and surprised by my love of the brown. Normally I have no interest in brown at all. But, in this case, it brought the whole set of colors together for me.

One thing we were more careful about this time was not oversaturating the fiber with the dye and then cooking them longer than we did last time. After letting them cool, we found that when we rinsed them, almost no dye was released. On our last dyeing adventure, our pieces hemorrhaged dye after the setting process. Getting those bottles with the squirt tops really made a difference because we were able to control the amount of dye that we added to the fiber a lot better than before.

Now the adventure will be in spinning them up to see what happens when the roving becomes yarn. I actually like all three of these colorways, but the proof is really in getting some yarn spun up. The last batch surprised me a lot and some of the rovings I loved in the just dyed form made up only so-so yarn in my book. Do you have a favorite? One you can't abide? I'd love to know.