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Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Over dyeing the Red-Orange Alpaca


Over-dyed alpaca
Originally uploaded by acornbud
I kind of suspected this yarn would be more red-orange then is comfortable for me, but it was baby alpaca and I was in the market for red yarn. I have since found out that scarves for the Red Scarf project do not have to be red. Duh.
My whole dyeing adventure began with a desire to tone this colorway down...going more toward the rust side.
Since I was very happy with my Koigu experiment with Wilton cake dye, I started by dying the yarn red. Well big surprise, lol, it turned red. I imagined that it was toned down and little, but the visiting niece and sister brought me back to reality. It was still screaming red and just a touch less orange. Having only blue left I added just a smidgen to the dye bath, and squirted some around. I was terrified it would all be totally purple or even worse, felted.
So I'm stopping here. It still screams a bit but is more to my liking.

4 comments:

Zonda said...

Oooh love it! Glad you didn't felt it! It'll be a perfect scarf color!

Rachel said...

Actually, I think that's really a beautiful shade!

weebug said...

Personally, I think that it turned out lovely!

Beverly said...

Isn't it fun playing around with dyes!! By the way, you can always send anything you don't like to me.