Turning down the next row
Monday, January 9, 2012 at 06:42PM 
So my Palette Constellation is a BIG rug, although Alexander has grown taller than it is high. At least it is the biggest rug I have ever tried to hook. It is going to end up about 9 feet long and 4 feet wide.
I am measuring my progress by the rows I finish and I am now working down the 8th row. That means that I am almost 3/4ths finished. What holds up the show is when I come upon a color that I don't have dyed in my stash anymore. So I dyed a couple of colors last night and will work on a few more in between other commitments this week.
On the dyeing front, I have started to dye up a second palette which I am going to be using as my Starter Palette for my dye classes. The recipes will integrate into my primary palette, so that means I am creating a subsidiary palette that will give me another full range of colors to complement the 67 I already have. These are the basic Starter recipes that I included in the Revised Edition of my book, The Wool Palette. I have quite a bit of yardage of the Starter Palette to prepare for my Sauder dye class this August, so I am starting on it already with a yard of 201, my Starter Red. I liked how it turned out; just took it out of the pot so will post pictures another day.
Just for the record. It is fascinating hooking the Palette Constellation rug because I am getting to double check all my colors. When I see something off in the progression of color, I am going back and redyeing to see if something was off the first time around. What I am finding is that when the dry dyes go into solution, that blue dyes are unstable. If they sit in solution much longer than a week (and then they need to be refrigerated) they turn gray. When you go to use the old solution, the blue dye has turned into something else. So this means that any recipe that uses a blue dye of any sort is vulnerable. I have not found this to be the case with any other color which all seem to last quite a long time (not refrigerated) in stable solution.