Well then, for project two, our assignment was to create three pieces of art using ANY medium our hearts so desired. The only real criteria was that we had color schemes of sorts to stick to. The first piece would be highly saturated colors and their tints. Simply put, you could only use colors in their purest forms, plus the different tints they have when white is added. The second piece was to be done in tones and shades. Here you want to have impure colors, which you get when you mix a hue and its complement. In other words, if I have a bright, pure red and I add its complement - green - I get a red tone. It becomes 'muddier' in a sense. And then to get shades you add black to that tone. The last piece would actually get its colors from an inspirational painting, something from before the 1960's. My painting, here, is Ladies in the Rain. I used the different blues and tans, with the tiny hint of pink that is found if you look closely at the painting.
Now, being that we were given the freedom to choose any medium known to man, I decided why not knit? So I made three different hats, each with hand dyed yarn. I wanted to make them each special, with rather original designs relative to what the color scheme was.
And this is what I came up with!
To the far left is my saturated color scheme, and I decided to go with something very youthful and silly to reflect the bright colors. In the middle is my Ladies in the Rain pattern, where I wanted to keep it sophisticated and romantic, so I made a beret of sorts. And on the right is my tones hat, which I kept a little silly, but slightly more plain than the other two.
In case you are curious as to my methods of madness, I shall fill you in!
So the first thing I did was go out and get myself some 100% cotton yarn. Acrylics won't do because they don't absorb dye, so only the most unnecessarily expensive yarn from a hipster retailer would do. Or any pure cotton yarn. Actually, wool will work as well (that was some exciting alliteration, no?) Anything natural. Just no acrylic or polyester type of things.
As you can see, I put each color in its own clear plastic cup, and I proceeded to label each cup with the name of the color inside. This was especially handy in distinguishing between things like orange and yellow, or the lovely denim blue, royal blue, and navy blue. Yes, that was really a thing.
The next step was to follow the instructions which were inconveniently printed on the inside of the box... But I altered them a little, pouring about half of the dye powder into less than a cup full of hot water. This was my first dye project, so work with me.
The next step was to get the yarn into a state where it could be dyed. I simply took my folding step ladder and wrapped the yarn under the top step until I liked the size of it, then folded the ladder and pulled off my yarn. I used some thick sewing thread and tied the yarn in sections so it wouldn't fall apart, and laid my big loops out on the floor, on top of a piece of plastic so as not to dye the linoleum tiles. Note that the loops in the photo below are all one skein of yarn, so they're attached to each other by a strand running between them.
Then I took the whole loops, one at a time, and soaked them in a bowl of room temperature water help them absorb the dye properly. The last thing I did was pick up sections of each loop and, again, one section at a time, dipped it into a cup of dye for a few minutes (not nearly as long as I ought have, but it worked) and then squeezed it out before laying it back down and moving on to the next piece. When a whole yarn loop was sufficiently dyed, I took it to the sink and ran it under the water until it was almost clear - I say almost because I'm an impatient procrastinator who was working on a very short time schedule. The only thing left to do was leave it on a drying rack over night and then knit the heck out of it! As for the patterns, I genuinely googled knit hat patterns and combined a little of everything. Don't ask me how I did any of them because it was a nightmare I don't care to remember.
Oh, I almost forgot! It should be noted that for the beret, I knit it first and then took one of those sponge brush things -you know, the kind with the black pentagonal sponge head on top of a wood dowel- and sort of painted the dye onto the hat.
I hope you enjoyed my lengthy tutorial! Let me know what you come up with.
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