Wallachia

Okay, so here's one for me! I wanted to try out a new base yarn of 70% Merino Wool and 30% Silk to compare textures. The other night I was watching the show "Cities of the Underworld," and they aired an episode on Wallachia. Wallachia is where Prince Vlad the Impaler made his home. This is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

Vladislav II (c. 1390--December 1447), known as Vlad Dracul ("Vlad the Dragon"), was a voivode (duke) of Wallachia. He reigned from 1436 to 1442, and again from 1443 to 1447. He was the father of ...Vlad Tepes.... All four of his sons at one time or the other would rule Wallachia. Vlad Tepes would go on to become one of the most notorious rulers in history, and the inspiration for the novel "Dracula," by Bram Stoker. 

So this colorway was inspired by the landscape and lore of the Dracula legend. I originally envisioned an earthy brown colorway with hints and flecks of blood red to only suggest the region's gruesome past, but the end result was a pleasant surprise. When I went to heat set the dye, the red "bled" over the yarn and created an entirely new color scheme. The final product is 462 yards of deep rich tones in varying shades of red and dark brown. 

One might say that this colorway is more of a depiction of a post-massacre Wallachia at the height of Tepes' rule, as opposed to the current, subtle, mountain terrain with a secret and vicious past...