Growing

I started making crochet flowers from my rainbow-dyed skein yesterday morning. It's a bit addictive so I made several. My friend L liked them, but suggested they needed to be bigger. I have  been making bigger versions of the various crochet flowers by using a thicker yarn and a matching (bigger) crochet hook, but this particular yarn is a one-off. Admittedly all my hand-dyed yarns are one-offs, but this one particularly so. I painted the colours onto the skein with thickened dyes to make a complete colour wheel for every two metres of yarn--I used my biggest niddy-noddy to make the skein. Doubling the yarn once it's been dyed isn't really an option because I need to keep the clarity of the colour changes. So I had to try something different.

To make bigger flowers with the same yarn I needed to increase the size of each petal--taller stitches and more stitches. I didn't know how far I could push it before the resulting fabric would no longer hold its shape, so I went step by step. I ran out of yarn before I found the limits of my system. It was an interesting experiment and the flowers are bright and fun. I need to do some clearing up around the house before I dare pull out my procion dyes to attempt some more rainbow skeins, but never fear: there are plenty of other yarns for me to play with in the meantime. 

Rainbow Riding Hood

There was much excitement among the Spinning Certificate Students at the opening of our exhibition yesterday morning. Most of us hadn't seen each others projects. And there was a lot of catching up to do after the summer break. I got M to try on my Rainbow Hood:

It was great to see what everyone had produced and lots of fun to match creations with creators. When it was all over, we settled to our Flax spinning workshop, so it was a long day, but worth it.

Rainbow Hood

I've been knitting up this hood since the weekend--making it up as I go along and seeing how far the yarn will go. It's the Rainbow dyed skein from our dyeing day in the Spinning Certificate. It's always fun with these random dyed yarns to see how the colours will knit up. In this case the lengths of each colour are relatively short. I love watching the colours appear on my needles stitch by stitch. These colours remind me of finger painting: simple primaries with just a bit of mixing. Actually I'm happy with how much of the blue, red and yellow are coming through compared to the more muddy colours.

Rainbow Dyeing

A whole day of dyeing at the Guild yesterday. I came home with sore feet and lots of samples. I need to finish rinsing them--the samples that is. I also made this lovely big skein in primary colours. This is a "cram pot" dyed skein. The idea is to use as little water as possible, so the colours don't bleed into each other. Of course, if there's not enough water, the colours won't be distributed through the skein. So it's a bit of a balancing act. I wouldn't normally use all three primaries in the one skein. I've commented before that red + blue + yellow = muddy brown. But This was a challenge, and it's turned out ok, I think. There are a few light patches and a couple of muddy spots, but lots of contrast. One thing that surprised me is that there are hardly any areas of secondary colour, so mostly the dye stayed where it was put.

I now have a new tool on my wish list. We did the cram pot dyeing in an old electric frypan. It was ideal for sprinkling the colours and keeping the water as shallow as possible. On the other hand, I'd better not acquire any more space occupying objects before I've tidied up a bit more.