Sunday, April 19, 2009

Colorful Weekend

Look how lucky I am! My sister had her dyes out this weekend and did three balls of thread for me. These first two are 20 gram weight DMC size 80 that used to be white. Now they are shades of pink, purple, red and blue in one ball and a whole bunch of different greens in the other ball. I told her she had to name them. Uh-huh. Her names were redishpurplelbluepink and Irish Spring (because it looked like the bath soap of the same name). Those just aren't romantic enough, so the first is Sunset (yes, we have those with pink and purple and flaming red). The second is Desert Green, because it's not a bright spring green -- there's even something that looks a bit like fresh sagebrush to me. According to my sister, the green has kilt, new-emerald, bright green, Kelly green, and better-blue-green (thank you Dharma Trading for the dye names). They are all on the blue end of green, not the yellow, so I like them very much.
This second ball of thread is a DMC size 20 that used to be cream colored. It's now "Day and Night Rainbow". Okay, that will work. There are dark and light colors in it: from the dark end are lemon yellow, tangerine, fire red, imperial purple, Caribbean blue, and Kelly green, on the lighter end are paler versions of the orange and green, hot pink, wisteria and robin egg. It's very cheerful.

She dyes the thread just like she dyes everything else, so it goes from a cold rinse in the sink into a wash bag and into the washer for both a cold rinse and a hot dye-setting wash in Synthropol. After the wash it goes into the dryer. This is how it come out. Scary, huh? But it winds up really well for all the curls and squiggles. Isn't she clever and aren't I lucky?