I still can’t talk about the secret roving, but I thought I’d show you the other two colorways that I dyed along with it. I’ve been enjoying using photos as a jumping-off place for my dyeing, and so both of these colors began as photos.

A week or so ago, Branden sent me a link to this fabulous photo of some very colorful ducks sitting on a log:

The photo was taken by Alan Shapiro, and he has lots of other great photos on his website; check it out, if you get a chance. The people photos are particularly striking; there’s one of an old lady that I love – she is just the essence of an Italian grandmother on a mischievous day.

When Branden sent the photo, he naturally expected that I would be interested in the ducks, but all I could see was that water. Look at those greens! There’s even yellow in there, when the sun hits it just right. Not at all what I’d expect from water, but I fell very much in love with the colors. Here they are on Polwarth:

The final yarn ended up a little heavy on the yellow; I was worried about bleeding between the colors, and so left wide open swaths of yellow. The shading is beautiful; I love the way the different greens mix on the fiber, fading from deep spruce all the way down to sunshiny yellows.

There’s just something about greens that is catching my eye at the moment. I’ve recently discovered Pinterest, and have started a collection of photos for color inspiration. This one just jumped out of the collection the other day:

It’s from National Geographic, and it’s a photo of a sea anenome. Aren’t those colors amazing? Look at all the shades of green and blue in there. And then there’s just a tiny touch of brown in that center region and the stripes that radiate out from the core. Funnily enough, the greens are almost the same as the ones that I used in the Duck Water fiber, just diluted down with only a few strong highlights.

I wanted to encourage mixing of the colors in the final yarn, so I used small patches of color rather than large sections. It should make for a shaded, blended effect, with just a few dark flashes here and there.
I love how these came out, and I’m definitely planning to continue drawing inspiration from photos. It leads to so many unexpected color combinations, making a much more interesting fiber than I’d come up with all on my own. (It also helps to get over that blank page syndrome where the potential of the white fiber makes it hard to apply that first little bit of dye.)
I’m also fascinated by how different the final fiber can be, working from one set of base colors and just varying the strength and proportion of the dyes used. Since they come from the same color family, these fibers would work beautifully together, but drawn from different sources they can also stand on their own.
So there you have it. Two of the first fibers dyed in the new studio. They’re over on Etsy now, and will be joined soon by a third, once a certain someone gets her surprise package. The third is yet another variation on these same basic colors; I can’t wait to show you more!