It's not easy being green...

In most things in my life, if I try something and it does not work out, I hide it and try to forget about it and move on.  But with yarn dyeing, I don't mind sharing what I intended and what actually happened.

I wanted to do something fun with the yarn I dyed in my How To - Immersion Dyeing (Part Two - Multiple Colours, Twisted Skein), and thought that I would continue my recent obsession with mosaic socks.  I mentioned this to my husband, who took one look at the yarn and said "dark green."

So yesterday, I embarked on a dark green. But what shade of dark green should I go with? I wanted a sort of jewel tone to go with the tones in this yarn. I broke out my box of dyes, and looked at the greens.

My tickle trunk of dyes

I pulled out the Americolor Forest Green and the Teal.  Now, as a photographer and a baker, I should know better than to completely trust the little dots on the bottle, or the pictures that show up on a website when you Google a colour. But, I was thinking about socks and had apparently banished the logic side of my brain in the corner.  I showed the two colours to my husband and we both agreed that Teal looked like a nice colour, so teal it was going to be. A nice dark teal with the pretty pinks and purples.

I didn't take pictures through out the process on this one. Not really sure why...probably because I figured "it is just a solid colour...who needs pictures....", but I should have.

I soaked my yarn, then mixed up my dye stock, starting with 6 globs of teal food colouring. I say globs because Americolor does not come out in nice drops like Wilton Color Right does.... Added my 1/4 tsp dissolved salt, added the yarn, brought up to temperature and left the room for 10 minutes. Came back and it was looking pretty, but very pale.  So I removed the yarn, added in 6 more globs, mixed, and put yarn back in. No acid yet...just dyestock and yarn.

20 minutes later it was a very pretty almost Tiffany blue, but no where near where I was looking for, and there was lots of blue left in the water. So, I decided it needed yellow. In went 3 drops of WCR yellow and a tablespoon of my citric acid mix.

Walked away again (walking away and doing other things is the only way I can be patient), came back and had green, but it was too much of a mossy yellowy green, so I mixed up 8 drops of WC blue with 3 drops of WCR yellow. Took the yarn out of the pot, added the new dye stock, added the yarn back in with another tablespoon of citric acid mix, then put the yarn back in and left it for an hour. I know! Can you imagine?? I actually let it alone for an hour!!! Yay me.

When I came back, it looked nice and dark in the pot, so I added some more citric acid mix and took it off the burner (I needed the burner to make supper).  It cooled for about half an hour or so, then I pulled it out, tangled it putting it on the plate, let it cool a little, then washed and dried it.  I was lucky that when it came out of the dryer, it only took me a few minutes to fix the tangle.

I started out aiming for something like this:

A very misleading swatch of teal

And I wound up with this:

My pretty garden green

Not quite what I wanted, but it turned out to be the colour I needed.  I paired it with the other yarn, and started my mosaic socks.  The tones seem to match quite well.

The two yarns with their yarn baby on top

I am not working on my Impatiens Garden Mosaic Socks, and hope that this pair might actually fit me.

Close up of the yarn baby

Yet again, what I had in mind when I started out, and what I wound up with, were two totally different things, but it still worked out.

The moral of the story?  There are no mistakes in dyeing yarn... your yarn is just telling you that it wants to be something else, and if you listen, you might wind up with something beautiful.