Limited Colour & Experiments

As you already know NDS has had an incredibly busy year, we've done 6 shows and dyed hundreds and hundreds of kilo's of wholesale.
This has meant we have had to stick to our rainbow range.
I spoke to one of our ladies at Ally Pally who commented that our colours have been a "samey" all year.
I understood exactly what she meant, our colour's have had the same names all year, although there has been a huge difference in shades due to the changes in the water, our water comes from a spring off the moor and the rainfall affects the minerals that are washed through the rocks.
For example last year it rained all summer and this year its been sunny and dry, so our colours have been different, the colours also change with the seasons.

We only use 5 dye plant's - Indigo, Fustic, Logwood, Cochineal and Madder, these are the dyes that work best for us, but they limit the colours we can achieve.
Mordants can also alter the dye colours, we also only use alum and cream of tartar which again limits our range.
Chemical dyers have a huge palette of colours to work with and so its a lot easier for them to come up with new colour combinations

Anyway Daisy and I had planned to spend a couple of weeks in the summer experimenting, but we were just too busy and it never happened.
While we were dyeing for Ally Pally I had a bit of a mental blip and dyed far too much Dazzling 4 ply blues, yellows and greens.
So last week we started over-dyeing and experimenting with it.

This is what we did last week........
They'll all be in tomorrow's update at 7 pm UK time, which you will find HERE
We dyeing the rest of my mental blip at the moment, so there will be more next week.
And the week after we'll be playing with white yarn, I can't wait.........