Saturday, December 31, 2005

Flashes of Autumn

Here's a picture of the finished skein and the start of my sock. As you can see from the picture, the autumn colors are pooling together, one on top of the other. I couldn't have done that any better if I'd planned it - which I didn't. But I'm going with it. And because the colors are pooling or flashing together I'm changing the name of this colorway to "Flashes of Autumn."

I like the colors and the variations in the green. It's like real leaves, lots of variation.

I learned several lessons. First, next time I will test the spacing of the colorway before I commit all of the yarn. I'll make a small skein, dye the yarn and knit up the sample to make sure it works the way I want it to. I just bought 2 more skeins of dye your own wool. One entire skein will be set aside for testing colorways. Maybe in the end, the test colorways will be run together to make one colorful sock.

The second lesson - one round on my size sock is a 36" piece of yarn (cast on 60). In this case I should have put at least 30" probably more between autumn colors to ensure they wouldn't flash together. My skein was 20ft. Here's the formula I used.
11" yellow
25" green
11" red
26" green
11" orange
36" green
11" red
26" green
11" yellow
25" green
11" orange
36" green

As you can see the 25" and 26" even up with the 11" to make 36" repeat which lands the colors right on top of each other. For someone with a different size leg this would yield a different pattern. Hmmm - now that's a thought.

Going back to the variation in the green, I got that by adding some yellow to one of the green pots. I also sprinkled the last packet of lime koolaid directly on the yarn and then quickly rinsed it or dipped it back in the dye bath. I really like how that turned out.

Bottom line, I love the colors and I love the way the fawn colored yarn added color depth. I will definitely dye more of this yarn.

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