More experiments in dyeing

So, I decided that the yarn I had dyed in a previous post was too heavyweight for the shawl I had in mind (it was thick enough to overwhelm the La Boheme yarn I was trying to show off).  And, since I woke up half an hour before my alarm this morning, I quickly dyed two small batches of yarn in a saucepan, one a pale gray and another a darker maroon/antique rose, and tested those out with the sett gauge.

The gray was a little too pale, too stark a contrast with the pink-purple La Boheme.  The other color was a little too dark, but definitely in the right family, so when I got home, I dyed another short snippet of yarn to a paler shade of the same color, and LOVED the results.

So I threw two skeins of silk yarn into the dyepot, added some magenta at about .25% DOS (.25g dye per 100g of yarn), threw in a little turquoise to purple it up a bit, then added a dash of black to “sadden” the color and make it less bright.  And presto!  I managed to get a very nice antique rose.  I’m very pleased with myself since this was not a color I had mixed previously, so I had to do some on-the-fly mixing to get the right shade.  It came out fairly even, although with some whiter areas.  These should be hidden by the color variation in the other yarn.

I did have a minor crisis after the dyeing, though – I tossed it in the washer to spin dry, then came back to discover (to my great horror) that it had moved on and was putting it through an extra rinse cycle!  I hastily stopped the washer and wrung out the skein by hand, but the damage had already been done – the skein was pretty heavily tangled and I’m not sure if it will be salvageable.  I think it will be OK with a bit of coddling, but I may wind up winding it by hand instead of with a ballwinder.

Tomorrow (after the yarn is dry) I will wind it up with a ballwinder, and then start working on winding the warp.

But first. there’s this yummy turkey soup I need to finish making…