Fall is my absolutely favorite season. I love the weather. I love the colors.

Red and orange have been slowly making their way into my color palette lately, and I’ve been thinking of knitting a fall colors sweater. It’s been percolating in the background for quite a while now, but I’ve never quite gotten around to it. A few weeks ago, I finally decided that I want something a little on the light side, and lacy.

Last weekend, I indulged in some dyeing time for myself, and came up with 12 oz oz of Finn in vibrant fall tones.

I wanted to calm the colors to meet the earth tones (to make it wearable for me), and I wanted to end up with fairly subtle shading in the final yarn, so that I can knit lace. I also wanted to keep all the variety and purity of color that goes with the season.

That’s a bit of a tall order.

I ended up dyeing two separate colorways, one for each ply. I’ve been thinking of experimenting with spinning mixed-ply yarns, and this seemed like a good opportunity. I dyed one colorway with the browns and olive greens, leaning all the way down to gold.

And one with the bold reds and oranges, to keep them from mixing with the brown and muddying.

The color segments are relatively large, so there should be fairly long stretches of a single color that then gradually fade into the next with spinning. I’m hoping that the brown ply will ground the reds when they’re plied together, and that having two separately varying plies (with relatively similar color values within each one) will limit the amount of variegation I get in the final yarn.

I’m not sure that any of that will come out as I’m hoping it will, but so far I really like the looks of the two colorways wound together.