Have you ever hand dyed a yarn, with a specific idea in mind, only to have it turn out the complete opposite of what you wanted? This has been a reoccurring theme for me lately. I wanted to knit a cowl using one solid color and one hand painted yarn for contrast. I choose the Windsor yarn for this project. For the solid color, I dyed a light silver grey.
I thought the cool grey color would wash out softer muted colors, so I boldly painted the contrast skein bright, clear colors. When it came out of the dye pot, it looked like I just opened a box of crayola crayons. Not to be deterred, I forged ahead and started knitting the cowl. After about 6 inches, I realized that it was not the color way I imagined.
Hummm, what to do? Back to the drawing board? No, back to the dye pot!
From the original hand painted skein, I cut 6 lengths of yarn making sure I had every color represented in each piece. I used these yarn pieces to test several dyes to see which over dye looked best.
Knowing my main goal was to tone down the yellow and green in the original skein, I mixed the dyes and poured them into small cups. On the left, I used different proportions of magenta and yellow to warm the colors on the yarn. On the right I used a cyan, more diluted cyan and bright blue. To maintain the hand painted look, I used very little dye initially to slowly increase the depth of shade.
Once the test pieces were complete, I laid them out with the grey yarn to see which colors looked best.
I liked the warmer colors, so I added a bit more magenta into the dye pot and voila, the skein is over dyed!
I was so happy with the final result!
