Age and colors and things

I'm starting to feel old. Most days, hard to believe that I'm 40something. Doesn't even feel real. But then I find myself in the company of younger knitters, while looking at blogs or forums or whatever, and I reckon I'm showing my age. I do not like the hand dyed, striped or varigated multi-bright-colored wool. There, I said it. A confession indeed. Okay, it's not that I don't like any of it for it's asthetic value, some of it is quite stunning. And I might even use some someday to make things for the granddaughter or younger females in my family. I have found a few patterns that look nice with it, but most of it would look downright silly on me. I will concede that perhaps it is as much taste as age, but then I do fall back to remembering wearing outlandish bright colored toe socks in the 70's when I was a teen, and I start thinking it's age again.

But when I look for hand dyed wool, it's practically ALL I can find, which is annoying. Even on the racks in the LYS, in some types of wool it is all that I can find. I've knitted a couple of items for the babies in varigated wools (though not hand painted). One, the set for my grandaughter featured in a previous blog, had a good result, but the different colored sections were only a couple inches long each. When those sections get longer, I have great difficulty with the pooling, or in the case of a jumper I tried to make, matching sleeves.

I have my spinning wheel now, so I suppose (once I figure out how) I can start spinning solid colours, or at least toned down muted shades. Actually, I hear that natural dyes made from plants and such give great "earth tones", which suits me very well, so when I actually get to the stage of dying some wool, I might try that. But there have to be people out there in the dying world who feel as I do. I just haven't found them yet.