A silky experiment

First off, let me just say... I like lemons. Lemons are good for so much more than lemonade. Sometimes, when life gives me lemons, I enjoy them just as they are. Some would say that being gifted with an autistic child is an example of life giving me lemons... but those people do not understand the pure joy of knowing that unique individual, who would not have been that particular unique individual had they been born with different wiring. No making of lemonade is required.

But sometimes, we can use the lemon for flavoring iced tea...

What does this have to do with crafts?

Recently, I had the opportunity of order some lovely custom-dyed silk from Mary of Camaj Fiber Arts. I even had the opportunity to pick the colors. Since my primary money-making ventures have been both jewelry and scarves, I saw an opportunity to tie the two together. I had previously done a custom order of making a scarf to match a necklace purchase, and many of my pieces would tend to fall into what I considered color schemes, I considered the possibility of making scarves, or even simply yarn, in color schemes similar to my jewelry.

I decided to start with making yarn to match one of my favorite stones: Fancy Jasper.

I chose colors that I thought would give me an good approximation to the coloring of the stone. True to my geeky engineering background, even went so far as to make a color swatch in paint, which I thought came close to the colors I wanted.

I have to admit... I was somewhat disappointed when I finally got my silk...

It just seemed too orange. Yes, I can see how that color is close to the color I chose... but not what I expected. All of the colors were brighter than I expected.

Ok... this seemed to be a situation where I could not quite accept the lemon as is, if only because I had some very specific ideas for this silk.

I needed to capture the deeper red color in the stone, and tone down the very orange segments. I started rifling through my dye arsenal to find the right shade. This one was too brown, that one was too pink...

And then, I found the perfect dye! Hey Kool-Aid!!!!

Is it sacrilege to blend Soffsilk(TM) with wool dyed with Kool-Aid?!?!?!?!

So, I dyed half a pound of mixed Blue Faced Leicester with several packets of Black Cherry Kool-Aid. It turned out very nicely, and picked up the darker reds in the Fancy Jasper.

I picked the large clumps of orange out of the silk (this is being saved for a later project) and blended the resulting silk with the dyed BFL,

The resulting thread was a bit too pink, and the natural Fancy Jasper stone is at least equal amounts of dark green, if not more green than red... The appropriate color green did not exist in my dye arsenal, but I did have some Aurora Heather Wool of the Andes roving from KnitPicks in my stash. For the second bobbin, I blended my silk with this rather than my Black Cherry BFL.

Now I had two bobbins made with the Soffsilk(TM), one blended with my black-cherry BFL, and the other blended with the Aurora Heather Wool of the Andes. Time to ply the two together...

All I can say is WOW!!!! It turned out lovelier than my wildest dreams!!! EXACTLY what I had in mind!!! It took some tweaking, but I am very satisfied with the result!

Now to turn my attention to the orange bits I picked out of the silk...