Crazy pretty dapple wools

I have been dyeing up some special orders this weekend, and some of the prettiest dapple wools have come out of my pots and jars.  This is the first time I have dapple-dyed Highland Lilac 133. This fat quarter turned out to be a wonderful array of plums, fairy blues, and warm pinks. 

What would you hook with this?

Dapple dye art?

I have to admit that these dapple dyes I've been creating are so beautiful that I have a terrible time tearing them up and then stripping them for use in rugs. It seems to me that they are pieces of art themselves. The question is, how to show them off as such. Any ideas? Check out these two pieces that came out of my dye pot this morning (Jack Horner Plum 111).

Created a new neutral

This weekend, I mixed my 9=BLUE and 3=ORANGE and got another wonderful neutral which I'm calling 'Milk Weed'. The bottom wool strip pictured is the result of my dapple dye procedure.

Dapple dyeing

This week during the evenings I have been playing with spot dyeing. I'm trying to create a spot dye process that is not haphazard. I am the type of person who hates not knowing how something is going to turn out. I have had terrible luck in the past with spot dyeing, ruining more wool than not. Either the mixture of color ends up with mud or colors I don't like and won't ever use in my rugs, or the pattern is splotched in a way that won't cut and hook into nice shadows in my florals or backgrounds. I also hate not being able to duplicate a spot dye I have made and actually like.

So I have been experimenting and making mistakes, and one mistake I made created some wool I ended up loving. So I have been working on using the mistake to further refine a technique. Once I get it down really well, I'll post the technique in case you want to give it a try. But the long and short of it is that I am only using one color dye (so I don't get mud) and I am using measured amounts of wool and dye (so I can reproduce the wool) and I am using a quart mason jar (so it is easy and the wool will always have the same spot dye look).

The spot dye is a little different in its look. It reminds me of marble or a dark dappled rump of a horse. Since "marbleized wool" is already a technique recognized by hookers as using three different colored wools, rolling them in a sausage, tying them, and processing in a stew pot, I am not going to use that term.

So "dappled dyeing" will be its name.