Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Graded colors

While at MD Sheep and Wool, I fell in love with graded dyed rovings, the shawls make with the yarns spun from them! I had seen one done by Fleegle but somehow it had not clicked.

I did not buy the Fiber Optic roving, because well I had done enough damage for one day and because (trust me on this one) I have plenty of fiber to spin, probably beyond SABLE status by now. I figured the itch would be gone and I would get interested in the next best thing...not so, its been almost a month and I keep going back to the website to look at the beautiful colors. I asked around and was told the dye effect is achieved with Lanaset dyes. Well I have a nice collection of dyes, not the right ones of course..sound familiar?

All of sudden it clicked while watching a plying video! Even if I did spin the right roving , split right down the middle, there is no guarantee that I would end up with the exact same colors on both lengths and would probably have to join at some point to end up with matching colors in both singles. What if I dye the colors separate and spin the singles then join while plying? it would be perfect, I don't even have to spin one continuous skein with all colors, the end goal is the shawl in graded colors, I can join while I knit! Problem solved.

I picked a pound of roving from my stash, the least favorite to over dye. If this works, I will do the same with a pound of lovely Merino Silk I have around here somewhere.

Here are the results: I think I like the set with 6 colors better than the set of 7, not sure. The lightest color is the one I started out with. Not bad considering it was over-dyed and I had to go for saturated and dark in order to cover the old lighter ones. What do you think?

Grade dying

Graded dying

3 comments:

fleegle said...

Lovely, my dear!

Cheryl S. said...

Hmmm. If you were doing some sort of colorwork, I'd say you definitely need the light color in the 7-color set. But since it's a gradient, I think I prefer the 6-color set. But I'm sure no matter which you pick, it will be lovely.

Rob Knits said...

Exciting project! I am struggling now with my tendency to choose colors that are all the same intensity, and so gradients are a struggle for me if the intent is to move from dark to light or vice versa. I am struggling with that in my (constantly changing) choices of colors for a Color Affection shawl.