I wouldn’t say my house is cluttered., Or that I have a bunch of collectibles packed away. But I have to admit I am a collector. Of colors. Of yarn. And I’m trying to be more discerning in what I buy yarn wise, but I am out of space in my yarn room. And I have thought that maybe I should have a palette….like a certain gold…( okay, I do collect a certain gold…Malabrigo makes a lovely one which is my go to when mixing a striped warp of zephyr…zephyr doesn’t come in that shade and it’s the perfect gold. And then my friend Gabe gave me a huge hank of also the exact right gold and the exact right orange…. so I have a back up hank.

Anyway, I pulled down my box of alpaca/ silk by webs. Some of it is a few years old, because I thought…a few years ago…I’d better buy one of each color because honestly, and you know this, those little color cards are hard to pick from. And dye lots vary. And maybe it would be really smart to have one of each color!

Well it’s not smart! And here is my box of hard to use colors…you know they are hard to use because I haven’t used them. So I thought I’d better sort thru them because maybe not all of them are irredeemable. So here are the good colors…and yep I love that blue! And I wish I had more of that navy. And that light blue can come in handy sometimes. … and I need to keep all the greens because a friend just asked me why I never weave green scarfs…

But ugh, rust? And dark gray that is just really dark? And light rust that isn’t really orange ( because look above to what a really good orange looks like)…and this is a tuff plum…kinda brown when it’s dim. And I don’t know how to use that killer red…

So I pulled out all the colors that were making me worried and looked at them whenever I passed by for the next few days. And I thought I could do a Chicago windows scarf with the rust and put in tiny yellow stripes and use some of the other colors too….like the beige….why did I buy beige? But then I stumbled across a Youtube video by Jane Stafford…I belong to her online class but I’m about two years behind in watching…I’d better do that too…and she was weaving a towel in block twill and I thought…hmmm. I could do something like that….

So this is what I came up with

The warp is dark purple on the edges, russet, then gold, light orange, gold, russet then dark purple in the middle…and then reverse.

And for the weft I can use any of the rest of the colors however I like. I will probably do an 8 inch sample of colors at the very start so I can see which colors I like. So that’s my game plan for the coming week. I should have my 8 harness macomber warped this weekend so I can show you what it looks like next week!

But then my husband walked by and heard me muttering about hard to use colors and said “Hey, I like those colors!” Hmmm, go figure! So then I came up with this…and since he has worn one of his scarfs till it’s ratty, and he is not a fan of purple, no matter how dark and manly I think it is….I came up with this…

So I am probably doing this first and I will see if this uses up any of these colors!

I’m still weaving my chenille cowls. I got sidetracked dyeing fiber and spinning some yarn.

Meanwhile…this is what is in my dyeing pot right now….

Hope everyone is staying safe and staying healthy!