I took 12 ounces of Brown Sheep combed top to the dye day. I tore it into four sections and the one on the right is the one Birdsong showed in her blog. She took a lot of pictures while she was deciding what she wanted to do. I had a hard time breaking away from my favorite colors of purple and green, and the first bump I did was in those predictable colors. The bump on the left is in Sara's primary colors of turquoise, violet and gold. I was surprised that Sara had them in her base colors, but they sure do look good.
I told Sue Flynn that I was struggling to break out of my color habit and she said I was leaning to Sara's favorites. I asked her what her's were -Swamp, she said. Swamp?! Algae, ooze and frog - so the bump on the right was my stab at Swamp. The frog got lost in the algae and afterwards I realized that, while I had underlined and starred a part of Deb Menz's book Colorworks, I hadn't internalized the information. She wrote, "Observe that the values of the cool colors are darker than those of the warm colors. The color on the color wheel with the lightest value is yellow. In a design, light values tend to jump out more than dark values do. A little yellow goes a long way because yellow at its most intense is the lightest color in value, and it is also a warm color." And that's why the algae ate my frog.
I also took two skeins of yarn that I spun from Brown Sheep mill end roving from Encampment, Wyoming. I had purchased the brown and white combed top that's wool and mohair. It's a little peculiar to spin because the ends are blunt from being cut from the mill, but it makes great yarn. The top skein again is the pure gold, turquoise and violet. The second skein is just gold and violet.
Here's a closeup so you can see how rich the colors are with the brown and white roving taking up the dye colors at different values. I'm going to try to do something like this with our Shetland fleeces. They're really little sheep but after a couple of years, their fleeces add up.
3 comments:
Color theory was something I studied often when I did embroidery. Value is so important to all needle art (all art)but can be hard to understand. Your dyeing looks great and you'll have fun experiementing.
Lovely! Luckily, with spinning, it's all infinitely variable. You can add other colors in the plying, or use with yarn of other colors to mitigate any perceived color shortcomings. Or overdye:).
I love the colors, can't wait to see the yarn.
And Sue does Sqwadgey. Swamp is just too ordinary a word for the depths of Sqwadge she likes :).
-hey sharon;
i absolutely L-O-V-E your rovings. especially swamp(sqwadge) and your purple and green one. can't wait to see the yarn when you are done. do you think that "sqwadge" would be okay for scrabble?
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