After searching near and far, playing with different colorway ideas, and looking at various photos for inspiration, I finally found my fade. It wasn’t where I expected it to be, either… it was in my stash! I had been so intent on dyeing a whole new palette in Annie Yarn that I had been missing the opportunity that was right in front of me — literally.

Last week I was staring at my stash, trying to put together some color combos that might start me in the right direction for my fade. But I was only grabbing Annie Yarn, and that wasn’t working. Sooooooo I started grabbing other brands and suddenly I had it!! It came alive! But I was still missing one colorway, so Jenn kindly gave me a small cake of leftover yarn she had. There. Done. And here’s the lineup…

So the bottom is where I’ll start, and I’ll end at the top. The colorways, in that order, are…

a: raspberry tea on annie sock

b: hermit crab on skinny bugga! sock

c: magnolia leaf on tosh sock

d: star anise on annie sock

e: spruce on annie sock

f: huntsman on destiny sock

g: gooseberries on destiny sock

What’s so cool is that each of those skeins has a backstory. So this shawl is going to be very special and rich in history.

The raspberry tea is leftover from a shawl Jenn knitted me as a gift. I don’t have a good photo of it cuz it’s hard to photograph.

The skein of hermit crab from cephalopod yarns is special because I got it on my first ever trip to Eat.Sleep.Knit. with a good friend. It was the very last skein they had since the dyer had to stop dyeing yarn. The gal at the shop pulled it out of a hidey spot just for me!

Now the magnolia leaf on tosh sock is a skein I’ve been saving since I got it at the very first yarn shop I discovered, which is what got me full into knitting in the first place! I got it in March 2012!!!! So yeah, time to use it.

The star anise I’m using is the VERY FIRST skein of that now-discontinued colorway I EVER DYED. It was when I first learned dyeing, and it was a one-up that I have never been able to replicate perfectly. Which is why I ended up discontinuing it. I’m hoping that, now that I’ve been dyeing yarn almost five years, I will soon be able to reformulate it and bring it back from the vault.

This skein of spruce is going to confuse you if you know my colorways because it doesn’t look like the photo of spruce in my colorway gallery. That’s because this was the original colorway. Again, it was an experimental skein from when I first started dyeing. And I used a method I can’t use in quantity. So I’ll have to see if I can figure out a new method that is easier but achieves the same result. The specialness of this skein comes from the fact that when I was dyeing it, my dad thought I was ruining it by pouring the brown in over the light blue yarn I’d just dyed. He couldn’t imagine how it would actually turn out okay. But when I pulled it out, he was impressed and told me he thought it looked like spruce.

This specific skein of huntsman has been in my stash for years. I dyed it a lighter colorway but was unhappy with it and overdyed it in what was originally going to be a one-up colorway. But when the gals in my ravelry group saw it, they begged me to create a repeatable colorway. So I did, and Huntsman is now one of my most popular colorways. The photos I got the other day didn’t turn out, so I’ll have to take new ones.

The last skein, however, did photograph well. It’s gooseberries, and when we wound it into a cake, this is what happened!! See the plaid effect? So cool..

Anyway, this skein is special because it was dyed by someone who used to be very close to me. I miss him, and this skein brings back good memories. It’ll be a good finish to my fade.

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