Glow-Up Tegan - May 2021
So last months dye job was great for some of the colors, but not so great for others, hey it was my first time trying it out on so many patterns, so its essentially a first draft. Now onto the second draft!
The pattern I was most unhappy about from Aprils batch was Tegan, the color transition from the 2nd to the 3rd color was just to short and made it look like I had started to use a completely different thread from fuchsia to lilac. And guys, I love the Tegan pattern! She's one of my all time favorites to make, she's got it all!
So after figuring out the thread amounts for my Hera doily, Glow-up post to come soon, I decided maybe I will just use the extra 85 gms of thread I had left over and dye it the same color way with a few differences in technique to see what works best. Not the most scientific because the patterns call for very different amounts of thread, Tegan is about 80gms and Hera is supposedly 165gms, I' doubtful of that last amount but we shall have to wait and see lol!
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beautiful result, but breaks up the design.
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Anyhow, I decided that I would try and deal with some mistakes or poor choices made in the April batch with this lot.
In this experiment I used Golden yellow, chocolate brown and warm black as my colors.
1. The DOS for all the dyes used was the same amount, they were all 5% DOS. Very saturated colors which I like but maybe the layering of the colors on top of each other was occasionally darkening the one underneath. Or I could just make the 2nd color a lower DOS than the 1st and 3rd, this looked rather nice on my Idunn doily that went from saturated fuchsia to light peach to a saturated emerald green.
In this skein and the Hera skein I decided to only make the 2nd color a lower DOS to give it some differentiation from the 3rd, it wouldn't be as pale as the peach from Idunn, but it wouldn't be the same DOS as the 3rd color.
I was too chicken to do a sequence of lower DOS lol! I though at first I would go for 1% DOS for golden yellow, then 2% for brown and finally 5% for warm black. I'm still trying to figure out how to measure out and dilute my dye stocks to a proper DOS, will have to consult those experts on Ravelry soon about it.
Basic problem is that I measure my dye powder with teaspoons not with a special super accurate scale, and I typically work with very small dye lots and dye stock amounts, usually I will mix up a batch of 5% DOS stock with 5gms dye powder in 100ml urea water. For this experiment I wanted to do 2 different DOS techniques, which didn't work out so well. It's one thing to measure 5gms of dye powder into 100ml of water to get 5% DOS stock, its another to then figure out correctly how to water down that stock to a proper lower DOS. My previous pale colors were definite estimates and I was not being accurate or following an instruction, but I want to I swear!
As a result all I did this time was lower the DOS of the 2nd color to 2% DOS instead so it wouldn't be so stark against the warm black.
2. How the ball is wrapped and divided between colors. It occurs to me that perhaps I could improve on the spacing and mixing of colors based on how much of the ball gets wrapped loosely and tightly between colors.
This time around I did no tight wrapping at the beginning of the ball to ensure no or less white spots of color in the center of the gradient. I just wrapped it loosely to start, which made it an ugly little ball of thread but not a lot of tangles in the end anyway.
I also decided to double the tight wrapping between the 2nd color and the 3rd color, I figured this would add a longer transition between the 2nd color and the 3rd color because of course as the pattern grows and takes shape the doily gets bigger and each round needs more thread than the last.
In my last Tegan the color transition between the colors may have been the same each time but the transition between the 1st and 2nd color looked like it lasted longer and provided a smoother transition because it used less thread across more rounds than between the 2nd and 3rd color.
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1st color transition is visible and last for 5 rows to go smoothly between color 1 & 2
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last color transition here is barely visible and didn't last a full row to make the transition smoother between 2 & 3 color
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This seemed to work out well, the jump from brown to warm black was not so stark and the warm black transition for a long time through grey to speckled black to black quite nicely. I would still have preferred to see some more brown mixed in there on the transition or a lighter brown background on the thread, but so far I am happy with this.
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New Tegan longer transition from 2nd to 3rd color
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Would have liked to see more brown on the transition between 2nd and 3rd color but oh well
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For Hera, I decided to wrap it the usual way with the exception of the center which was loose from the start then tight then loose and so on, but I'm not going to count that as a success likely because it uses so much more thread so I have a lot more room to work with between colors.
This may have also been the problem, trying to use too many colors, most of them ended up looking like 3 colors even though some used 4-5, mostly colors that were too similar to each other to notice a difference and not enough thread to give them room to play.
Other issues I tend to explore
1. Not using enough dye stock to penetrate all the way through, usually I match the amount of dye I use to the weight of the thread and that seems to be enough to leave it dripping through the layers quite a bit but who knows.
2. Wrapping all the layers loosely between colors, it may be that the colors don't need to be wrapped so tightly between colors to create a good transition and mix and may be inhibiting it in the end. In this way I would wrap color 1 loose, pour the dye on, wrap more loose around it until I get more white than soaked through and then pour on the next color and continue wrapping loosely.
3. Using 2 many colors, maybe for now I will keep my ambitions set to 3 colors as I come to better understand how dyeing in my method works. 2 is almost always succesful for me, but 3 is still hit or miss.
4. Create a successive DOS sequence, start with center color at 1%, 2nd @ 2% and 3rd @ 5% DOS and see what the result may or may not be.
5. Watch out for the color pallets, my latest Camilla is a great example of this, it went from a pale peach to a pale lilac to a full %% DOS turquoise, and again I ended up with a very stark contrast between 2nd and 3rd color, even though the mixing between the 2 colors was extensive and produced a lovely midnight blue color, midnight blue does not transition to turquoise very smoothly.
