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Thursday, January 20, 2011

Comfort Zones and Accidents

We all have them, and we spend time trying to step out of the former and avoid the latter. One that I have been fighting for some time is the concept of dyeing a skein of yarn that isn't my personal cup of tea. I remind myself time and time again that there are infinite combinations and just because a particular skein is not the first one I'd grab doesn't mean that someone else wouldn't fall in love.

In my teens, my friend and I used to mutually despise yellow. We even went as far as to be a bit superstitious about it, blaming unfortunate incidents on the presence of yellow in the immediate surroundings. At some point, that changed for me and, in this house as well as my last, I have had yellow or gold rooms. My current house has four. I am sitting here looking at two balls of golden yarn destined to be a shawl. Yellow has gained ground in my color world.

Dyeing can be thrilling, and sometimes there are unexpected results. A while back, I put some skeins in the pot with the three different dyes that make up the colorway. The secret to that particular colorway is to limit agitation so that there are flashes of color without much mingling and the natural color of the skein still remains visible. For some reason, I stirred the pot, literally. Oops. What came out was a new colorway because it shares very little resemblance to its cousin, and it may just be one of my favorites. And it has yellow in it.

1 comment:

Amy said...

I can imagine it would be so exciting to just throw colors together and see what happens. Well, maybe a little stressful too! You never know exactly what you're going to get!