Colour blah, blah, blah.....

As you might of noticed by now most of my blankets contain most of the rainbow colours, I've always loved the "rainbow" and struggle to design anything that doesn't contain most of the colours.
All my best selling blankets are rainbow over doses.

Colour is my "thing" and the main reason I took up dyeing, I loved the idea of making my own colours and even though dyeing for NDS has become a never ending routine of dyeing the same colours over and over again I don't want to give up making my own colour, hence the reason for my Etsy shop (lots more about that at later time)

When I was a small child my Grandad worked as an upholsterer, his attic was his workshop, he had sewing machines, huge bolts of fabric and coloured tacks in boxes I loved being allowed to sit in his workshop while he worked and remember playing with the coloured tacks for hours.
I've always been really excited seeing coloured pencils and paints arranged in art shops and at one point collected home decorating paint charts just so I could look at the colours (Dulux did some particularly good charts for their "Mixed to Order" range.
NDS has given me the chance to make rainbows and pick (steal) colours out of the stock because I like them.

Since we announced the mothballing of NDS one of the questions I have been asked repeatedly asked is "how am I going to be able to make your blankets without NDS yarn?"

So I decided I needed to add a "How to choose colour" page to my blog and started writing a new page, unfortunately or rather luckily for you I had to do a lot of dyeing last week and so didn't finish the page.

Over the weekend I realised that my writing had become very very confusing and that by the end of it you would be far more confused than when you started reading it.

So I need to go back to the drawing board and start all over again, I decided to post it here before I deleted it just in case it was any use.

So it here is.....

"The simple answer is collect Rainbow's.
I don't mean variegated rainbow skeins, I mean collect a rainbow palette of solid or semi solid colours.

I have found the best way to collect a rainbow palette is as follows....

1 - Sort your existing yarn in to yarn weight's for example 4 ply/Fingering, Sport, DK, Worsted, Aran etc
As long as the yarn is all the same metreage it can be used together in the same project.
For example I normally use 4 Ply (400 metre per 100 gms ) and  DK (200/210 metres per 100 gms), recently I have started a Sport/DK (250/260 metre per 100 gms) Collection.
So I have 3 yarn weight collections.

2 - For each yarn weight collection - take out all the variegateds and put them to one side, they don't really belong in a rainbow, but you can normally find a place for them somewhere in your pallette.

3 - Now take one skein out of each batch you have - you might have a whole jumper's worth of yarn in the same colour, but you only need one skein to organize your rainbow.
And separate the skeins out into single rainbow colour collections, for example a red collections, a orange collections etc.

My collections are as follows

Lavender Purple
Violet Purple
Raspberry  Pink
Sugar Pink
Soft Red
Burnt Orange
Yellow/Gold
Lime Green
Apple Green
Turquoise
Mid Blue
Indigo Blue

 The photo below is one my NDS rainbow photo's."

Incidentally I also realised that I need a whole new set of photographs, and have started to experiment with some crochet based layouts, several of which are going to take a bit of work to construct, so watch this space for them.

Please note the inclusion of turquoise in the photo below, I love turquoise and have always been sad that I have never managed to come close to dyeing it with natural dyes.

And don't forget to watch this space for my new re-write of my colour page, which I promise will have less blah, blah, blah confusion :-)