The Dye Pot

Cedars of Lebanon

A while back, I acquired a lot of Knitpicks Palette in their discontinued "Wood" color with the idea of working it into a circular shawl. While I still want to do the shawl, the actual work has been shelved for the unspecified future. And because yarn never lies quietly and behaves itself for me, I wound up experimenting with dyeing some of it.





Materials

100 grams, fingering weight, Peruvian wool (Knitpicks Palette, Wood)
Easter egg dye tablets - 6 purple
White vinegar

Method

Standard Crock Pot method.

Colorfast?

Yes

Color name

Cedars of Lebanon

The original shade of the yarn was a warm brownish-orange - rather like the ubiquitous maple furniture sets of the '50s. It was actually quite a bit more attractive than I had anticipated, though I had originally purchased it with intent to dye. In fact I had also purchased some burgundy icing dye for that purpose and will probably give that a try on some of the rest of this yarn.

I'm not sure what prompted me to try purple (undiluted purple at that!) on an almost orange yarn. I remember thinking that the result would either be interesting or horrible. As luck would have it, interesting it was :)






Notes: While the above picture seems to indicated a fairly uniform color, that's not really the result. It's a grey day here and I couldn't get away from using the flash - so I blame that. The yarn evolved from its original (uniform) orange-maple color into something much richer and more complicated. It has browns, auburns and shades of both red and purple. It is not wildly vareigated, but the color shifts are clear when you look for them. I am not a fan of "browns" at all but this yarn and the subsequent dyeing experiments I've done with it have certainly opened my eyes to the possibilities. This stuff is, to my eye, absolutely gorgeous - something I never thought I'd say about any brownish thing.

Posted by Robbyn on 02/12 at 12:48 PM