Subtle

tubes of pale grey I want to use up

dye lot difference - yes that change from very pale to darker is a dye lot difference

Anyone who has worked with yarn is (or should be) aware of a thing called 'dye lot difference'.

Not even industry gets it perfect every time and people are always advised to buy sufficient yarn of the same dye lot to complete their project.

Which is all well and good if you only ever buy enough yarn for one project.

Having been a production weaver for 40+ years, I have accumulated a rather large yarn stash.  As I seldom ever made just one of anything, my stash eventually grew to have multiple dye lots of the 'same' colour.

I'm pretty good at differentiating colour but on this grey even my eye was fooled.  I thought I had sorted the tubes into their different dye lots, checked over several days, in different light conditions.  And yet.  And yet.  When I began weaving with the grey there was a distinct difference in value which had not been detectable in the tube, but became abundantly clear as soon as I started weaving with it.

What to do?

Many people consider a sudden change in colour to be a flaw and frankly?  If I were planning on submitting this tea towel to an exhibition I would not.  Because it is obviously a difference in colour.

However.  It's a tea towel.  The slight difference in colour might not even show on the other side (which is the 'right' side) and if it does?  It will be very slight.  So slight that many people won't even notice.

Recently someone posted a rainbow spectrum on Facebook saying if you could distinguish more than 34 different stripes of colour you had very good colour vision.  I could see 35.

Yesterday a friend came to visit (and I wound up putting her to work trimming shawl fringe - gotta love friends who will pitch in to help!!!) and we talked about how people see different colours, can distinguish many - or fewer - different values/shades.

Ultimately my goal at this point in time is to use up as much of my stash as I can.  How much do I, or should I, care about such things which are considered 'flaws' by some while not actually interfering with the ability of the cloth to do its job?

Now that weaving is my hobby, I find that I don't much care.  If the difference is really obvious, that towel will be set aside and given away.

I look around and see all the people who cannot bear to be 'wrong' or make something that isn't 'perfect'.  And I wonder if humanity would be a bit better off if we could be satisfied with 'good'.  Or be willing to embrace that we are all imperfect in some way, that most of us are doing the best we can in the circumstance, and that a few scars, wrinkles, or subtle dye lot differences don't diminish our inherent qualities or usefulness.

Life is not black and white, but subtle shades of grey...

Currently reading The Redeemed by M. R. Hall