With apologies to Maaike Charron for stealing her phrase!

I don’t have many fixed and fast rules about my studio space. My only real stipulations are that I like things to be left where I put them, I don’t appreciate other peoples’ crap being dumping on my studio flat spaces and using my good sewing scissors on anything that I have not specifically approved is punishable by death.

So really, I’m quite moderate. Unless I shut the door, family members are welcome to come and go as they choose. I reserve the right to boot anyone out who needs booting, of course, but it rarely comes to that.

I believe, however, that I will instate two new hard and fast regulations about studio usage:

1. Cats are not welcome when dyes are in use.

2. Dogs may come in when calm, but must leave projectiles behind.

It’s hard to entertain a border collie when you have purple fingers.

On other fronts, my test skeins of yarn were successful. I dyed some cashmere/merino using the same dye batches and colour combinations as I used for some of the fibres and got good results:

Forest colours
Silkmerino (70% superwash merino, 30% silk)

Oceanic colours (the colours in this photo are skewed – there’s teal/green in there, too)
Cashmerino (80% superwash merino, 10% Cashmere, 10% Nylon)

Red Wine and Chocolate
Cashmerino (80% superwash merino, 10% Cashmere, 10% Nylon)

I’m happy with the colours, but was reminded of the obvious when contemplating the results; yarn is denser than fibre and needs a greater dye concentration for richness of colour. Since I don’t want to use massive volumes of a watery dye, I need to mix the concentrations for greater intensity. What this means is that I should mix the basic dye concentrates to be quite strong, as if I were to use them for dyeing yarns and then dilute them for use with fibres.