Inspiration abound

Even if you're not a spinner, this is a spectacular photo group to browse for inspiration and ideas. I'm always astonished at the color combos that people come up with and what can be done with an already beautiful yarn made into something gorgious.

Happy Wednesday!

~Zona

I suck at dyeing roving

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.

Just poking my head in...

to say hello. Unfortuately, I'm blogless (where's the time?) so hope to be able to come here to hear a bit about what people are thinking/doing. Haven't decided entirely myself, yet, but have been in contact with my pal (and have been contacted). Gotta get going!

more dyeing resources

I've had great success getting info on dyeing from here www.knittersreview.com/forum - there's a section dedicated to dyeing towards the bottom of the page.

Hello everyone!

Jana @ whiteoakstudio

Dyeing Forums

Maybe I'm way behind on my perusing of Craftster, but I just noticed that they finally created a new section for dyeing here. It looks like the moderators already scanned and moved some of the dye-related posts here.

Also, there's a dedicated section on dyeing on the Knittyboards here.

Blog is Open

I just invited all the swappers for this first installment of Dye-No-Mite to join and author this blog. Welcome!

Please keep in mind the following:

• Don't reveal any info that could be a spoiler for your secret buddy.
• Withhold any temptation to snoop too much and find out what lovely person is spoiling you.
  
• Keep your posts related to the swap and swap theme.
  

Have fun!!!!

Get to Know Your Pals

Hello Swappers!

The swap officially began last week. If you have not contacted your pal yet, please so do ASAP so that your pal doesn't wonder what happened to you. Have fun!