Shades of Yellow

Here are some more results of my colour experiments.

My cool yellow (landscape wattle) with the tiniest bit of black (landscape currawong) on the far right, with increasing amounts of the black moving towards the left. The first time I saw these olive greens coming from the addition of black and yellow I was surprised and intrigued. I'm more used to it now, but it still tickles my fancy.

In the Pink

I picked through my boxes of wool tops this morning looking for some pink. Here's what I found.

I'm spinning it up to ply with my bonus bag of pink merino blend. It will be interesting to see how the different colour combinations turn out.

Second Thoughts

I've had this small skein of orange yarn for quite a while. It was initially part of my attempt to blend up a creamy yarn for a special rose brooch. Carded together with a lot of white it gave me a nice apricot colour. On it's own it was definitely orange. I made one or two flowers out of the orange, but soon tired of it. And although it wasn't a big skein, it was more than what I wanted in that colour. I decided to overdye it. I saved just a bit for comparison. I figured moving towards the red would warm it up for me and make it a more generally appealing colour. How far to go? I decided on my cool primary red--magenta--the landscape dye is named "grevillea". Here's the result:

It's much closer to the dye colour than I'd expected, with some subtle variations. I'm still learning about how strongly different colours dominate others when mixed. I know red is quite strong compared to yellow, but I really expected this to come out closer to the warm red colour. Anyway, it's an attractive colour and much more usable than the orange, so I'm happy with it. 

Hot

Our run of incredibly warm late winter weather continues--as does my pursuit of sunset colours. I bought some extra white wool top the other day to do some more dyeing experiments. When my eye hit on this orange, it had to come home with me too.

So, I have this running through my fingers at the spinning wheel and a skein in the dye pot brewing a pink-orange combination. The forecast is for showers later today, but I don't think I care!

Chasing Rainbows

I got back to some spinning on the weekend. And the logical follow-on was a bit of dyeing. Here's one of the skeins.

I was chasing sunset colours. That's a never-ending game. I came up with some happy products, which I'm planning to use for a few scarves. Meanwhile I'm learning a bit more about how different proportions of my dyes work out in the pot.

Creamy

I've been asked to make one of my rose brooches in cream. Cream is one of those difficult colours that can be interpreted in so many ways. And it's subtle, so not exactly something I'd like to try in my dye pot. One option of course is to just go for a natural wool colour, but my request is for something a little bit more than that. I've blended an unbleached wool with a faint dusky pink for my first attempt.




















I'll spin that up today and see how it goes. I also have a hand-dyed golden yellow wool top. I'll blend that up in a similar way. I figure with the number of black wool coats I see around the place every day, a few light coloured roses will find a good home.

Spin a Sky

Last weekend I promised myself a sky to finish off my little tweed landscape neck roll. Here is sky in the making:I've carded together some suitable colours of merino yarn with just a hint of silk. The first bit is a dark blue to sit on the horizon. Then there are some cloudy blues and whites, with a touch of pale pink-beige and surprisingly just a little green. The daylight was almost gone when I took the pic. I had to open the door to let in the last of the light. I got the spinning done before bedtime and washed the yarn, so this morning it's ready to use. That will be me happy with one more project done. With the blue sky added, I may even find that I can wear the neck roll myself. Now that would be a bonus.

Egg again

Our Colour Theory subject has two strands--no pun intended:)--one is mixing colours with paint, the other with embroidery threads. It seems that the sub-text is to make sure that we all have some basic skills in hand-stitching. We're tackling a couple of different stitches each week: seed and running stitch the first week, chain and blanket stitch this week. I'm not finding colour blending with six-stranded embroidery cotton very satisfying--especially not on such small samples. It difficult to get a real blend given the limitations of the medium. I keep thinking about how I could blend the colours using my spinning techniques or my dye pots, but that's not on the agenda just yet. Meanwhile, making a small, quick design using variations of only one embroidery stitch is an interesting challenge in itself.