Favs

Early-Morning-Basement pictures; they look so blue, but I concentrated on the colors of the yarns, so please excuse me/them.

Read before you become unduly impressed. Mama bought four (or five?) colors of tweedy wool some years ago. They labels read A: Charcoal, B: Light Gray, C: Mid Gray or Light Beige, D: Brown. They are somewhat rough to the touch, so I was thinking of vest or skirt fabric. There was a wee problem: there were two balls of each color and four of C, two of which had said Mid Gray and two other Light Beige, except we couldn't tell them apart. For two weeks, we had them at different parts of the house and looked at them at different times of the day, but neither Ben nor I could tell the difference. Ben though they got slightly different (in their minds) colors in different dye lots so they called them different names, but these yarns come from a huge mill in Japan, so I would have thought they would have better quality control. Who knows.

A is a lovely dark charcoal gray, without the hint of pink/red I see in this photo, whereas D is a delicious hot-choc without the sickly green; B to C look pretty accurate on my screen. Lower case letters indicate yarns I dyed, the original being the counterpart in Capitals.

The interesting thing is, sometimes the walnut solution took on a hint of green when I dyed gray yarns, but not always. In some cases it worked, in case of b, it became a sickly unattractive mess, almost military. After tentative washing and squeezing, the yarn's texture improved; they are probably nice enough for outdoorsy wraps, for example, (think Helen Mirren walking the dogs as The Queen;) or something folksy in a log-cabin cabin, not the structure necessarily.

My fav, I think. Again the photograph looks a little sickly, but the yarn colors on my screen look close, the original gray color at far right. In the evening, under the right light, this color can look like dark mid-silver, a sedate, non-abrasive, mature color, if slightly darker, it is called "oxidized silver" in Japan. In daylight, it is pale and pinky and tries too hard to be a grownup color. Again, I have no idea how I got grays in some cases, but they most definitely have green hues. The second greeny-gray, Medusa, I realized is sometimes referred to in Japanese as "sewage rat gray"!! Towards the brown/red end, the balls are yummy tea-with-milk browns, with the red hue being more noticeable.

Now that I have this many, I have to think carefully so I can make the most of the variety.

I started to discard the remaining solutions, but it still felt ever so slightly muddy, so I put it back in the urn. I might try smaller skeins of the second yarn. Or undyed skinny merinos.