I have a confession to make. I am not a yarn dyer. I love the amazing work of so many dyers, and I occasionally treat myself to a wonderful hand dyed warp, or weft (or both!) to work with.
Even though I have an engineering background, and math is my thing, I don’t like the precision required to produce reproducible hand dyed yarns. I have friends who do amazing things, one in particular specialises in amazing naturally dyed yarn, in particular, her own handspun wool. She gets wonderful colours, and takes copious, detailed notes throughout each dye session.
This is not something that I will do. I won’t say I will NEVER do it, because that is an awfully strong word, but it is highly unlikely, at best.
What I DO do (hush now, I know I said doodoo, and yes, I giggled a little too), is decide that I want to dye something, grab whatever yarn and dye are on hand, and throw colours on the yarn in a wild experiment that will never be repeated.
I did this crazy colourful dye, because I couldn’t decide what colour I wanted to use. So I picked “all of them”.
See that blue warp on the loom? That was the warp that I literally took off the loom, and put in the leftover dye from the colours skeins. Here’s a better look:
and THEN I wanted to see what would happen if I put some blue and yellow in a pot with some bamboo yarn:
That experiment resulted in a giant skein of shimmering shades of delicate green, and yellow, with a bit of “greenish white” thrown in for fun!
My most recent adventure was intended to be greenish blue, with spots here and there of reddish brown and golden yellow.
I ended up with something that strongly resembles my oldest daughters’ mermaid tail!
Not quite the look I was going for, but I quite like it. I don’t know what I should have done differently to get what I wanted, but I suspect a different dye colour would help, and I probably should have done a little test dying before going crazy on a 15yd warp, but hey, it was FUN!
I am looking forward to weaving with some of these yarns, and a few more from my “hand dyed” bin over the summer. Keep your eyes peeled to see what I do with these, and I will do my best to post photos with some sort of regularity. (yes, I do realise that I have been neglecting my blog-owner duties, and I apologise for that oversight)
Happy summer!
Rock Lake Weaving 