Colourway inspiration March 07 2018, 0 Comments

As many of you will know, it took me ten years of practice to finally come up with range of repeatable colourways. And it gives me great pleasure to add an additional seven colourways to that range.

The one-off Limited Edition colourways will always be my go-to way of dyeing - almost as if each colourway is a little painting for you - but I'm also loving developing these recipes so that you can get your hands on the same colourway more than once.

Having a repeatable colourway range also allows us to show local yarn stores which colourways are available to buy and changing that up to keep it fresh is one of my greatest pleasures. Gradually, new staff are learning how to dye them.

Hope you like the new additions.

Antique Map came about when we had a little dyeing session with the new staff and I was showing them techniques. Was so happy with the result that it has become a permanent addition.

Salvage was the result of walking past industrial shipyards when we were over in Belfast at Christmas.

Snow Fields started off as a Limited Edition colourway which Bev of Booknits acquired for a design to tone in with Bucklebury, Highclere Castle and Inkpen, so I reverse engineered it and wrote down how I'd made it.

Bellini Olive came about as a paler version which should've been launched in the first batch of colourways, but I was never 100% happy with it. It needed a bit of something, so making it darker and imagining an olive in a cocktail glass was the way of getting the result I wanted (although I really don't think you'd have an olive garnishing a peach bellini!)

Rosewater Black was inspired by a club colourway. The range needed something with more red in it. I dye this colourway by leaving white areas, then adding yellow for the centre of the flowers, then purple for the petals. You can't see the "flowers" when it's finished, but that's where the inspiration comes from.

King Penguin emerged when I discovered how a new orange dye split out - just like a penguin's colouring. The inspiration also came from my Seven Swans colourway which I usually do around Christmas time.

And Drunk Bees. What can I say? A series of intense yellows, but they needed something else. I sprinkled on some of the darkest brown in clusters and one of the yellows splits into red, so it looked like the bees had been sipping at beer in a pub garden (I know this is usually the pesky wasps) and had be flying around crashing into each other! I did once have a Drunk Barbie colourway, so the name takes inspiration from this.

Not all of the colourways will always be available on all of the yarn bases, but we'll do our best to dye up as many of them as possible. We'll be bringing a range to Edinburgh Yarn Festival next week and then will dye up more for the shop.

You can see the full range of repeatable colourways here.