This has been the winter of my discontent. Well, ok, not really. But it has droned on and on and on. Color to the rescue! Enter a favorite flashy flower of mine, the Hibiscus.
I love the way the yellow goes into the orange and then the pink, hovering in shades of coral. To make this happen in wool, I needed for my dye colors to ‘break’. This happens when you blend a couple colors of dye, but they attach to the fiber at different times, so you get a lot of variation where one color stuck more in one spot, and more of the other over there. The best candidate for this is always Superwash, as the conditions don’t need to be as extreme to make breaking happen.
Our wool is Superwash Corriedale, which I surprised myself by liking a lot (I have a love-hate relationship with Superwash Merino. Corrie is much easier to handle). Anyway, I decided to dye this in a gradient, which is my favorite for designing a yarn, as you can do so many things. Spin it straight and chain (or split and ply), make a fractal, pull it all to bits and grab them randomly, use it to load your blending board for striped rolags….seriously, there is so much you can do, and I’m excited to see what you club members come up with!
The yarn is Tiger Twist II, and I went back to a dyeing technique that I haven’t used for a fair while, and is frankly a lot of fun. These are dipped in the round, which gives me really great transitions between the colors. The yarn will make a mini-stripe spiral up around a sock, or you could try your hand at planned-pooling in the round.
Are you missing the fun? Join us for March, the color’s fine!
