Colour Alchemy - The Blog

January has gone and almost half of February and I haven’t had a chance to add any blog posts. One of these days I’ll do it weekly!

More Makings for January – I made a new website for my husband! Website design has never been on my life list but he was hanging photos at our local Starbucks in Banff for an unofficial show and he needed a site, and FergusonPhotos.com was born.

So for one of my January “Makings”I spent two weeks on a website. Barry has now taken over and posting new photos once a week. Drop by the site and check out his PhotoBlog.

My other long term project has been a felted rug with Nicole at Festive Fibers. I blogged about her in my last post. I’m close to finishing my rug design and will do a nice long post on development and process. I have to be ready to go by Monday when I will finally be wet felting it.

Here’s where its at now:

Poppy Rug

I will be spreading the poppies out, adding in depth with vague flowers and greenery at the bottom third of the rug to make it look more like a field and playing with the design. Right now it looks like I have three vases of poppies and a stilted design. I do like how the flowers turned out. I have feedback from my instructor and I will be working on the petal layers to make sure they don’t disappear in the background.

Talented designer Kristen Hanley Cardozo, known by her alias, Knitting Kninja, originally designed “Rosa” with a skein of Bow Falls Fingering in “The Perfect Red”. I made mine with Bow Falls Fingering in Bark. You can see the original in “The Perfect Red” by clicking on the “Rosa” link above.

Kristen is planning on releasing an e-book of new patterns in the new year and is working on a new version of Rosa, maybe a little larger, a bit frillier, a bit more of the excitement all her patterns generate. The photo that caught her colour imagination, for a new version of Rosa, is by Naturegrl164 (on Flckr). A mason jar full of “Teasing Georgia” roses.

Naturegrl64

Kristen sent me this photo and asked if there was anything I could dye that would capture these roses. I have to admit at first I was stumped. My gut reaction? “I can’t dye pastels. I always screw them up!” Followed by panic. I never admitted the panic to Kristen of course.

I had some large store orders to fill and I kept procrastinating. When I’d finally completed all my orders I had to face the pastel roses again. I plugged my ears with earbuds and put on a new audio book, primarily to distract me from the fear I couldn’t do it. It worked and while I was emotionally committed to the characters in the book, the colour magic happened and suddenly I knew exactly what dye brand, what yellow and what pink to use to dye a vase of yellow roses.

I started very light and once the first one looked promising (starting from right in photo) I became bolder. I dyed two skeins of the middle colour and then kept going darker until the yellow was intense and bright.

My final choice are the middle colours, “Beehive Gold”. I sent Kristen four of the skeins and I can’t wait to see what magic she creates in the new year.