blue is beautiful

In between yarn club orders, I decided to use up some odds and ends of dye solutions that have been accumulating on my dye table. It's about time, since I botched a batch of yarn last night by confusing my purple and black dye bottles. Oops. They're pretty, but not what my customers are expecting to get.

I had a lot of blue and green solutions around. So I dyed a few skeins of Joy, a big skein of Colleen, and some random blue/green colorways. It's nice to just pour some dye in a pot and see what happens, instead of trying to match a stock photo.

It was a warm (for March) day, so I hung them outside to dry. I liked how they looked, so I snapped a photo. It looked better in real life, I'm sorry to say, since the sun came out just in time to wash out the colors. You can't see the interesting variations in shading in the Colleen (the semi-solid green skein) or the two sea-blue skeins at the other end of the line.



My husband rigged this clothesline for me last year. I like it because it's under the eaves of the roof. Maybe I'm the only paranoid dyer out there, but whenever I see photos of people hanging dozens of skeins outside to dry, I always think about bird poop. I've got drying racks that I put out in the driveway during warm weather, but I know that my little feathered friends like to perch on the phone lines right over them, so the clothesline is my first choice for hanging yarn. It also catches the breeze a bit better up there, and during the summer, the bricks radiate additional warmth.