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Sunday, October 30, 2011

Gradations

I had my dyepot going for my overdyeing experiments, so of course my mind got busy thinking about what else I could dye. I decided on a bit of dip-dyeing. 
There are two skeins here. The one on the right is just grevillea. The one on the left is a mixture of grevillea and kangaroo paw. The trick is to guesstimate how much dye I will need for the entire skein. I'm not dyeing to full strength so it's not an exact science. I give each section about ten minutes. As each section of wool takes up the dye it leaves that much less colour for the next section. Ideally by the end there's just a touch of colour left for the last section. I didn't get it quite right for either of these skeins, so there was a bit of fiddling with adding another skein to the pot to help exhaust the dye or adding a few more crumbs of dye powder to strengthen the brew, but in the end I got some convincing variation in colour. Now to see how they will work up. 

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