I’m regularly asked to make hats or other items for
re-enactment groups needing a specific match to a style or shade associated
with their particular impression, and I’m always happy to help where I can. Usually,
this is just a case of crunching a few numbers to create a pattern for them,
swatching a few yarns to check texture and shade, and away we go. Even with
these extra stages, I pride myself on being one of the fastest commission
knitters on the historic circuit, and I can usually fill custom orders within a
few weeks at the most. Once in a while though, it turns into rather more of a
textile adventure than either myself or the client anticipated.
A year or so back I was approached by a Canadian Voltigeurs
regiment needing a Kilmarnock style bonnet in a specific shade of very deep
Rifle Green to match their uniforms. Structurally, not a problem, I already
make a couple of variations on a Kilmarnock and it was a fairly simple matter
to recalculate the numbers needed to match their proportions. Finding the right
shade of Rifle Green yarn though, that was going to be a bit trickier.
I started off thinking I’d just dye the yarn as I went to the
right shade or the finished hat after fulling, I’m a competent dyer and regularly
do custom colour-ways, so I wasn’t expecting too much difficulty. Indeed, the sample
hat I did them went really rather well, I’d been supplied with a fabric swatch,
and after a couple of false starts including one really bizarre experiment
where combining all the ‘usual’ components of deep olive green ended up with a
strange muddy pink shade (I have no idea what I did wrong, and probably best if
we never mention that particular hat again), I had a hat we were both happy
with and a set of notes on re-creating the shade in case there were any future
orders.
Roll on a few months, and the group were kind enough to
commission a second batch of hats. Confident that I’d cracked the dye ‘code’
for this, I merrily knitted up, fulled, and dyed the bonnets. And got the
colour wrong. Not hugely wrong, just too ‘brown’ for this particular order. Ok,
chalk that one up to experience, adjust the dye notes, and redo them. This
batch came out too ‘green’. The dye gremlins appear to have moved in on this
one, and whatever I did came out just a whisker off the required shade. In the meantime,
I was starting to stockpile some perfectly nice hats, but just not quite in the
shades needed for this client. Fortunately, they are a lovely regiment and were
being terribly patient with me whilst I gnashed my teeth and fretted about
where the dye was going astray.
Here’s a few of the reject hats, all in an unfinished state.
They will all eventually get finished and will probably find nice homes with
re-enactors with slightly different shades of uniform, but that didn’t help
here at this moment in time. The sample swatch is in the middle, it’s not easy
to photograph the full range of colour differences but trust me, these hats
aren’t nearly close enough.
I decided at this point that I really ought to have a good
look at the commercially available yarns, maybe I just hadn’t spotted a perfect
off the peg, repeatable yarn. With the wonders of internet shopping, it wasn’t
even a problem if I had to order from abroad. So I made a vast pot of tea, and
settled down to trawl the net for anything vaguely corresponding to very deep
dark olive green.
Like many historic shades, it doesn’t seem to be possible to
find exactly the shade I wanted in any of the brands of yarn that are known to
full well. Added to that, historic style hats need a very specific type of yarn
to be really successful. Some of the best known ‘felting wools’ out there are
merino or similar, and which they make wonderful modern items, they have slightly
too soft a drape and structure to hold up really well in historic hatting. Even so, after a couple of evening’s yarn browsing,
I indulged in some shopping therapy and ordered in all the yarns that looked
even remotely close on the computer monitor.
Here’s just a few of them and some of my own yarn
experiments. All very different to each other aren’t they!
I set up sample swatches for the most promising, thinking
that if the textures were good, then they might be good candidates for minor
overdyeing to perfect the shades. Sadly, as I’d feared, the closest colour
matches were too soft in texture to take the abuse I give them during fulling,
and I wasn’t happy with the finish for my purposes in this project. I think I probably had twice this amount of dark green yarn at the height of the experimenting!
At this point, I felt the project was running embarrassingly
late, so I called in the cavalry in the form of the very talented dyer
Freyalyn, who has an excellent reputation for dyeing luscious fibre and yarn,
and most important of all, is possibly even more obsessed with all the various
shades of green than I am, and who I knew would understand exactly what we were
trying to achieve. I felt very slightly comforted that she also found this
shade a bit more complicated to achieve than expected, but she did it! Hooray
for Freyalyn!
I’m currently just finishing off the hats, and I think we
may just about be there this time. I’m actually starting to pester a few of my
favourite yarn suppliers to ask if they might consider adding this shade to
their range, after all, it’s a wearable, smart, useful shade, it’s just not
currently out there, and I’d love to be able to bypass all the dyeing angst
next time, and even more importantly, point other regiments and knitters at a
good off the peg source, as I’m certain I’m not the only historic hat knitter
out there getting asked for this form of Rifle Green bonnet.
All being well, I'll update this with a picture of the finished hats in a few days. For the moment, I'm turning my attention to a specific shade of bluey-grey needed for some forage caps. Guess what? This one also doesnt exist off the peg easily- thogh I'm testing a possible repeatable yarn and keeping my fingers crossed!
