Camera's Opinion

This is the way my camera saw it but I think the flash washed it out a bit. I'll try day light tomorrow. Off to work now.

Mary's Nine Patch

Well, here it is. More or less the colors that it looks like in real life. To me, the upper right hand corner is a little more gray-green in reality.

Yardage Estimations

Just passing on some info: I spun about 6-7 yards of each color and it was just barely enough to do the 3 inch squares. I had to fudge on one or two. 8-9 yards would have given me less nail biting. The textured squares seemed to have a little extra body. That was good because those yarns were just a hair thinner than they should have been. The navajo-plied yarn was thicker than the others (should have seen that coming) so I used it in the middle square since that was my #8 square.

Heather's color thoughts

I'm joining the group a bit late, so expect my progress to lag the rest for awhile....

Last week, I stared at the color wheel trying to make my color choices. I wanted to choose colors that would challenge me in some way--I hate them or they simply aren't what I usually use in my projects. Surprisingly, none of the colors on the wheel fell into either one of these categories.

In the end, I chose violet for #1 because I like deep purple, but I tend to shy away from lighter/pastel versions of it. Blue is #2 because it is a good complement to the other colors I chose. Orange is #3 because it can be a challenge to control the hue.

Yellow is #4 because it will force me to discipline my dyeing technique to make it lemon or butter yellow instead of a deep yellow orange. For #5, I will thoroughly blend black with the orange because the outcome seemed like the most unpredictable for me. Blue lightly blended (maybe even just layered) with white will be #6. I've been spinning some layered batts lately and I liked the effect I got from it.

For #7, blue and orange will be plied together. I think I'll try a square with the straight colors and a square with the black/orange blend. Violet and yellow plied together will be for #8. While I enjoy working with color in general, this combination is probably the one I consciously avoid the most, especially the lighter shades. Lastly, violet and blue plied together is for the #9 square because I'm curious how a strong blue and a lighter purple will look together. I may end up plying a strand of blue/white and the violet together for an extra square.

I've got some washed locks sitting around and it would be a good de-stashing exercise to dye them up to make these samples. My hope is that this project will give me a lot more confidence with both dyeing and blending base colors into new and different yarns.

My dyeing experience has been based exclusively on Kool-Aid and food color paste using small quantities of finished yarns. It will be interesting to see how locks respond to the dyes and how I have to adjust my dyeing techniques to account for the difference in the physical volume of fiber.

Hope I haven't bitten off more than I can chew...!

FRAN'S ENTRELAC HAT

Presenting Fran's bee-yoo-tiful hat. She handspun the yarn from a painted roving using the techniques from Lynne's Spinning for Entrelac and Intarsia workshop. Wow!