I'm having so much fun playing with this latest batch of yarn back from the mill. No matter the results, it's all an experiment and experiments - with no expectations - are just plain fun. The brown eyed Susan (Rudbeckia) turned out to be a bit underwhelming. I left the yarn in the dye pot for a full 48 hours, and even added modifiers, but the results were just a subtle shift from how they started (in the second photo above, you can see the undyed skeins on the left, and dyed on the right. Subtle! But there's always more dye to be added - perhaps these will be headed to an indigo vat. Or, I have visions of a striped shawl with all of these subtle tans and yellows. That would be lovely too. SO many possibilities.
I'm keeping careful notes of all of this experimenting, perhaps not because I think any of it could actually be precisely replicated, but because it's already fun looking back at the notes and seeing what we used, and what the day was like. It's a bit more dye journal that precise dye notebook.
The Queen Anne's Lace, on the other hand, gave me a solid shift in color and a lovely one at that (the undyed yarn is on the right in the last photograph above). It's a really soft yellow, but a true yellow, not like the yellows I get from tansy or golden rod. And again I think....hmn...stripey soft-colored shawl? Perhaps. It might have to be for Ani, who gathered most of these flowers for me ("Queen Annies" she calls them, and now I do too). Do you know how many flowers it takes to gather 400grams? A good deal! She worked hard for those flowers, my little one.
Next up, I predict a little less subtly! Some madder root is currently soaking and in a few days, yarn will be added to that for what I hope to be a bit of color. It's so hard to wait! But so worth it for the joy of seeing what plant makes what color....and all the many little ways we can tweak that along the way. Magic! Or science! All the same.