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01/18/2006

manhattan

Last week, I turned off the lights in my room to watch the movie Manhattan with a friend. My room lets out onto a little terrace, so I have a huge double-door window. Looking out, I noticed that at night, the city isn't the colors I expect - a black, or dark blue sky, with dark brown/black buildings. The sky was a deep pinkish mauveish purpley color, and the buildings were a pretty chocolate brown. With the lights on in certain windows glowing yellow, and random white lights coming from the tops of tall buildings and buildings in the distance, I thought it made for a very beautiful palette. I worked it out on the paint program on my computer and came up with this:

Then this weekend I went home and raided Pathmark for a ton of new packages of kool-aid.

28 packets, with many duplicates of blues and grape since I could see myself using those a lot. I'm only sad I totally forgot to get some orange. And I wish they had more greens.

So yesterday I had a free afternoon (since I'm on break from teaching and classes till 4:30 this afternoon) and decided to try to dye some roving in these colors. It was a big challenge - those colors, minus the yellow, are decidedly NOT bright, and kool-aid is decidedly...neon. I played around, trying to figure out the difference between the grape I had in the fridge since last time I dyed roving, and the mauve color I was trying to reproduce. They really looked the same in the little cups I had them in. It's also hard to tell how dark or how bright a color will come out - my grape stock looks like a bright, deep purple, and has since I first made it and it had much more grape in it, but poured on the roving it comes out a very light, gray purple. I also was too excited to wait to try Ice Blue, and made some light blue to add to the set. I'm pretty satisfied with the brown I came up with - it's a warm brown, but NOT bright. Here's what I had, dried and ready to be spun, this morning:

In hindsight, the colors could have been a lot brighter. They're looking very pastel as I'm spinning them up. I've been working on the technique of spinning that's not spinning from the fold, since it makes the different colors stand out from each other more. I don't love this technique; the other was much easier for me. I don't know if practice will solve that. Pre-drafting helps a lot, though. And is actually super fun.

I hope to finish spinning this roving in the next few days. I'm really getting to the end of my white roving supply. Perhaps an order to webs is in order? I'm trying to hold off on more purchases for now, since I might not have time for this stuff with classes and student teaching starting this week. I'm nervous about being so busy again - I've gotten quite used to going to the gym in the morning and doing absolutely nothing else all day. On Thursday I actually have to be somewhere at 7:45. 7:45! I hope that's not going to be a daily sort of thing (my schedule has yet to be worked out).

Ooh, and with my knitting. I have to put the IK Ballet Wrap Cardigan on hold. Something about working on it hurts my arms - I think it's the needles. I'm going to see about borrowing needles from someone, or maybe just buying new 10 1/2s. I don't know what needles would hurt less though...and maybe it's just that the needles are so big? If that's the case, it doesn't bode well for me working next on Teva Durham's Lace Leaf Pullover.

09:15 Posted in dyeing, purple wrap cardigan, spinning | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this