Dyeing Wool for The Sweater II

Last week I had mentioned The Sweater II that was in the planning stages. I had actually done quite a bit on getting started once I realized the mistake with The Sweater (I). The weekend before this last, I went through my fiber stash and found all kinds of wool and alpaca that were possibilities for use in this new project, as I had decided to set myself the challenge of using fiber I already had rather than buying more. Also, to increase the challenge I chose a specific color theme using Deb Menz's book, "Color in Spinning."

I chose to use one of her described methods of using the color wheel and combining different colors to get an overall desired effect. The method I chose was the split complementary which is using a color (red in this case) and the two color groups on either side of it's opposite (complementary) color which is green. This means using red, blue, blue-green, yellow and yellow-green, but not green itself. By being selective on how much of each color you use, you pick the overall color of the blend. In this case, I hope the overall color will turn out to be a dark foresty green with hints of red, and yellow-green.

To start with I used the leftover dark brown merino roving (not shown here) from The Sweater (I) project which I chose to over dye with blue in the hopes of getting a dark, dirty hue of blue. Notice on the color wheel you can use any hue in the same color family. I also had 4 4oz balls of a white merino, rambouillet and alpaca blend which I chose to dye yellow-green and yellow. The blue shown below is a ball of merino that was given to us in a spinning class that I attended at the Greater Los Angeles Spinning Guild last year. The green wool of unknown type pictured below is also from the same class. I also had some leftover gray alpaca from The Sweater (I) project which I chose to over dye with red and some scrap white corriedale wool which I also dyed red to get two hues of red.
I used three colors of Jacquard Acid dyes to blend and get the colors I needed. Red was used as is, and blue was used as is, but to get the yellow green I used about 8-10 parts yellow to one part blue. Now that I tried these dyes, I would have to say I prefer Cushing dyes over Jacquard's for desired color effect (not saying they are better in the color or light-fast category as I haven't really compared these qualities.

Here are the balls of fiber drying on the deck in the hot humid great outdoors. They dried much better once I brought them into the air conditioning! The upper left dark mess is the dark red alpaca and the upper right mess is the dark blue/gray merino. I am skeptical as to whether or not this is going to give the dark foresty green I hope for. Paul is skeptical about all the yellow-green which he says is a bit to girly. I am showing more confidence to him than I feel that it will all work out alright in the end!