Dyeing is always nothing short of a miracle to me. Taking a handful of leaves freshly picked from the hillside – as we did yesterday with ch’illca, which we use for the green colour in our products – putting them into a boiling pot of water followed by carefully wound skeins of yarn, and moments later watching that yarn take on the hue of the leaves is simply amazing.
Dyeing with natural dyes is as much art as it is science, and we continually tested the yarn to see how well it matched the shade we were aiming for, making slight adjustments as necessary. Our fingers were dyed almost just as brightly as the yarn by the end of the day from handling the yarn before it was rinsed!
We only dyed four shades but with over 15 skeins and two different fibre types, keeping track of what’s what is important! That’s why Lourdes and I carefully labelled each and every skein with the fibre type and shade so that we could keep track during the entire dyeing process.
In all, it was a wonderful morning spent in the high Andes, working hard alongside Angela to get just the right colour for each of our beautiful Threads of Peru products.