There’s been some colour play around here. Before Christmas, my friend Ellen (Scientknits on Ravelry) came over and we had a blast. She made tiny, high-pitched delighted sounds. We used the rough outline of this tutorial from So, I Make Stuff Up. We did acid dyes instead of Kool Aid.
While I discovered that the navy powder actually made purple in my water and then accidentally dyed black yarn instead of what I really wanted, Ellen made white Cascade 220 into magic. She had seen the yarn I used to make my Zuzu’s Petals and wanted to play with the technique.
First she balled up the yarn nice and smoothly.
Then she popped it into the green dye and rolled it around until the dye exhausted. Because the yarn on the outside absorbs most of it, the one end of yarn becomes quite dark, and the dye penetrates into the ball, producing speckles.
Then, unlike the tutorial, we rewound the yarn so that the green was at the center and Ellen had a new batch of white on the outside.
She doesn’t just look like a cunning and mad scientist, she is one, but I digress.
She decided she liked the purple that my navy dye powder produced and used that as her second colour. There are many dyes that are made up of more than one colour and so they can produce super-cool results. Look at the ball as she was unwinding it! Browns, purples, amazing!
Ellen made this amazing yarn. AMAZING. The speckles overlapped in the middle. We are delighted.
She’s knitting it up now. I can’t wait to see what it looks like! Here’s the project page if you want to stalk it like I do.
Such a wonderful, squee-filled afternoon :) The yarn in the photo of the ball where the theoretical “navy” split into plummy-purple and navy-ish knits up delightfully, and my brain interprets it as a mix of sepia and noir black-and-white photos, almost steampunkish… makes for a happy mad scientist!