Sombre colours

I bought this fantastic linen yarn on a cone. It was quite fine and I usually like chunky yarns to knit.  But I love linen and this was a good price so I bought one kilo (about 2 ounds) in a natural white colour because I wanted to dye it and then knit a sweater.

I wanted sombre colours, grays, browns and some purple. My dye materials were Logwood which I had stashed away somewhere and i had tried to use in a soap once. It didn't work. At first there was this incredible purple colour in the soap, but it disappeared right before my eyes.

I also had some Alkanet root that I had bought off the internet and then I went and dug up the root of Meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria) that grows just about in every ditch one can find around here and dyed with that.

The result is what you see in the photo. At first the Logwood purple was just way too bright for my taste and clashed violently with the other muted shades. But Logwood is a fugitive dye and fades with time. It does so quite quickly, so the result was quite pleasing.

I used the yarn to knit a waterfall sweater from a pattern off the internet. That is a very comfortable sweater, but the fronts were a too large for my taste. But that doesn't matter because my daughter has borrowed the sweater and I'm not likely to see it ever again :).