I'm pretty good and intuitive with color. I can pretty much mix any color with the primaries: red, blue, yellow and/or the light palette: cyan, magenta, yellow. Zona can probably attest to that, since she has been over to my house for a few of our "Wine, Dye & Knit" parties. I can even get color changes when dyeing cellulose fibers. I still will not say I'm expert, not until I learn and master natural dyes (probably never get to it!), but I will say that I don't do a shabby job. Alas, not so with roving.
I found out that I suck at dyeing roving. I've dyed roving one other time. It was a small amount for needle felting, so I didn't care really how it turned out, but it was what I wanted, so I ended up being over-confident when I dyed 2 days ago. I needed to dye a commissioned project and wanted to dye for both my SP10 and Dye-No-Mite pals. My yarns turned out great. I then decided to dye some roving, some for one of the pals, and some for myself (My friend is letting me borrow her wheel for 2-3 months!). According to the roving dye master Zona, roving is easy peasy and sucks up dye like nothing else. Not for me. It took forever. It didn't help that I was using reds, oranges, and fuschias. I used those same colors for my yarns and the yarns turned ou great. I could not get color saturation with the roving though, despite having tossed in some synthrapol to help with the lanolin. In the end, I decided not to aim for the rich color I envisioned, for fear of felting the roving, which it kinda did and I ended up with salmon-ish and pink-orangish colors.
I wanted more deep bright colors like these:
and then add some hints of cool tones and rusty tones.
Maybe I'll try again in a couple of weeks. I'm planning to dye cellulose fibers next.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
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3 comments:
Bring the roving you dyed for me to see tonight. I'm sure it's not as bad as you think it is.
You have to remember that you can end up with roving that looks like a blotchy color-barf mess that will spin up into the most beautiful colored yarn you could ever hope for. I think that's my favorite thing about dying roving: the surprise you get when you spin it.
I don't think it looks sucky. Hope you'll show us how it turns out when you spin it.
I think it is pretty! The color will probably show off better as you spin it.
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