I started a new piece this week at my teacher's studio. It is big and more complicated than what I've done before and I spent 3 or 4 days working just on the color with his help. Yesterday I started the piece with a lovely purple "background" (if there is such a thing in a tapestry) and today I started putting in some colors that I thought were a reddish rust and brown (our words for color are horribly inadequate!). Turns out when you mix these colors and put them next to a deep purple, you get a rather orange effect. I'm withholding judgement on the whole thing... but if I decide I don't like it, the 48 inch square piece is going to seem really really LARGE!
One of the other apprentices in the studio today was working on a piece and she said, "I'm coming to a question" meaning she was going to need a little help soon. But I thought it was a great statement for how I feel lately. Or perhaps how I've felt for about the last year. I feel that I'm coming to a question and I don't know entirely what the question is and I only have hopes about what the answer might be. Still, "coming to a question" doesn't seem like a bad place to be right at the moment.
And back to the color musings--I realized that I have to dye more yarn for this piece. I changed my color scheme--and believe me it had to be done. If I didn't have such a great teacher and had run away with the scheme I originally proposed, the piece would be one big floor rug in a few months-- or a colorful dog bed liner of fairly expensive wool... so I changed (and fortunately simplified) the colors, but that meant that I was using fewer of the colors I had dyed and thus will not have enough of them. I love to dye and generally have been good at matching colors if I have to dye more, though I would prefer never to have two dye lots in a piece... especially because sometimes you can't see what weirdnesses that creates until the piece is done and on the wall. Anyway, the suggestion I got today was to dye more yarn immediately and mix the old lot with the new (I'm using singles, 3 ply) ASAP. Smart. Very smart. So it is back to the dye pots this weekend for me.