Variegated wool dyeing

After having such success with the plain dyes, I've done some variegated dyeing with two or more colours on the same skein. There are a number of ways to do this but the easiest for me is to do a hot dye - where you bring the wool and water up to boiling then add the dye. It means that it strikes immediately, and if you add one colour to one side of the saucepan and another colour to the other than you get a variegated effect without too much blending.

I thought I'd start with ones next to each other on the colour wheel, so that if the dyes blended a lot it would be tonal (good) rather than sludge (bad). I did yellow and red. Here is the pan just after I added the dyes. It doesn't look very fancy at this stage. The red looks a bit crime scene.

Here are the skeins when I hung them up to dry. This photo makes it look like mostly red, but it actually has a lot of orange. One of them has a bit of brown in it as well (I was doing browns at the same time).

And here are some of the finished balls. It looks much better when it's wound up on a ball! There is yellow and orange and pink. I am adjusting to the idea of repeats, and what it means to have colours next to each other or widely separated. It is quite different for weaving than knitting - it might be better actually to have splotchy dots of colour in the saucepan rather than great swathes. I am not sure if that would work though, it might be a bit blendy. I will experiment further! The pale apricot one below is just using a single colour but deliberately with quite a lot of white space.