This colorway was born of poor multi-tasking. The day I dyed this I was really pushing to accomplish a lot of work and had multiple techniques going on all at the same time in my kitchen. There were two pots on my stove-top working kettle dye yarns, two roasting pans on my counter ready for some regional dyeing and I had my airbrush set up on a table for sock blanks. There were timers ticking, microwaves beeping, steam rising... in short, dyer chaos, and a lot of fun!
I had just mixed up four dyes - three were meant for my roasting pans, and the dark teal you see in the skein photo above to go into a kettle dye for a tonal yarn. I got my dyes confused, grabbed the dark teal and poured it in into the end of the roasting pan directly onto yarn, instead of into the kettle it was meant for. I realized my error at once.
Yes, I gasped. Suddenly there was dark teal all over one end of yarn meant for other colors, and no plans to make anything like this. What to do? Improvise of course! I set the teal in my stove, then picked two other colors and scribbled them onto the remaining white end. I chose a chartreuse and a periwinkle. Again, things didn't go quite as I imagined, and the chartreuse struck brighter and harsher than the more subtle tones I had anticipated. All the colors applied were still within the same color family, just with more contrast than I'd intended.
Washed and dried, I found I LOVED this "mistake" but found myself at a loss for a clever name. I twisted up a skein and ran out to my husband working on his motorcycle in the garage.
"What does this remind you of?" I yelled over the Ramones din from his beat up shop radio.
He's grown used to these bizarre interruptions from me. "Looks like alien blood."
Perfect! He got a kiss, I got a new colorway in my catalog, and you got "Bleeding Aliens!"
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