Champagne Dreams

Pastels were not on my radar as a potential colourway. Ever. I did not think I would enjoy making pastel yarns. I did not think I had the colour restraint to make pastel yarns. And I did not think I would like the results. Then I went searching for inspiration for 2025’s Tour de France/Tour de Fleece colourway and it hit me like a bottle of champagne christening the side of a new ship. I needed to make a champagne colourway!

Last year, the tradition of finishing the Tour de France on the Champs-Élysées was interrupted by the Paris Olympics. This year, the Tour returns to its iconic finish for the 50th time and for the customary sip of bubbly on that final stage. Champagne and cobblestones were calling to me.

But making champagne, and any colourway, takes some time and experimentation. I’m happy to share my process with you.

Step 1. Choose some champagne colours to play with. You can absolutely make them up yourself but there are also many places to find colour formulae. They don’t usually translate directly to yarn for many reasons but they can be a good starting place. I often use the Ultimate 3-in-1 Colour Tool card index by Joen Wolfrom to find a CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) formula close to a colour I’m trying to make, then tweak it. The yellows I use, for example, are more highly saturated than my other dyes and I usually have to scale back on that colour. There are databases online as well that can be a good starting point, like this one, https://creativebooster.net/blogs/colors/shades-of-champagne-color. Fifty shades of champagne! That’s too many for me. I chose seven.

Step 2. Decide what DOS you want. Depth of Shade for pastels should be dilute but making a very pale colour requires tiny amounts of dye that I can’t reliably weigh in our studio. So I generally, but not always!, make concentrated solutions. I made 6 of my chosen champagne colours in a 0.5% DOS and one, Ivory, in a 0.25% DOS. I’ll share this last one as an example because it’s straight forward and my favourite. It practically glows on the merino yarn and fiber I’ve used!

The Ivory I’m using has the CMYK formula 0, 3, 7, 0. Each number corresponds to each colour; cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. So this is a simple colour of 3 parts magenta to 7 parts yellow. Since it is so simple, you could use any measure you want, 3/64 tsps to 7/64 tsps, for example, add water, and play with how much to use to get a shade of ivory that makes your heart happy. If you want to make a repeatable colour, record all your measurements and process carefully.

Step 3. Prepare your work station and your dye-dedicated equipment, gather your dyes and have amounts clearly written for you to reference, and don your safety gear (eye protection, gloves, and a good mask). For our Ivory champagne, I wanted a 0.25% Depth of Shade in 1000ml of water. If I was making a simpler 1% DOS, I would need 1 gram total per 100 ml of water. That would be 0.3 grams of Magenta dye powder and 0.7 grams of Yellow dye powder. I needed to quarter these amounts to get 0.25% and multiply by 10 since I was using 10 times the water. The result, 0.75 grams of Magenta and 1.75 grams of Yellow in 1000 ml of water.

I set a row of labeled sturdy jugs on my plastic-covered counter and began weighing one dye colour at a time for each champagne colour. This method really sped up the process.

Measuring all the yellow amounts first to streamline the process

Step 4. Add water, mix thoroughly, and test your results.

A drop of each colour, diluted and undiluted, in front of their concentrates.

Champagnes! Sadly, not the drinkable kind. Ivory on bottom left is already my favourite.

Step 5. Decide if you want to try any of your dyes on yarn or if you want to tweak some colours first. The colours were all beautiful so I wanted to try them all as is. While my bare yarn was soaking, I prepared the dye bath with an arbitrary 4 ml of dye concentrate. Swirling the dye bath around, the colour looked pale enough to make a very pastel yarn. I resisted the urge to add more dye, reminding myself I could always add some later. Less is more. Less is more. It was a slow process, dyeing one skein at a time, but so much fun!

The resuts! Seven skeins of champagne-ish colours.

Though each of these colours is unique, it’s hard to see that. And some of them are more champagne than others.

Step 6. Evaluate. First, the greys on the left. I don’t need two and I don’t know that they fit. One of the greys, which is more brown when concentrated, is used in our Champagne on the Champs-Élysées combed top. But the other grey I could play with and I did. I redyed that skein for a total of 100 ml of 0.5% DOS. LOVE IT! This is the stand alone cobblestone colour I was hoping for, ash brown with a purple undertone similar to the French porphyry used in Parisian cobblestones. (below, left)

The next two pinks might work but the one that leans purple needs … something. The three creams are too similar though and I don’t like the last one as much as the others. I decided to play a little more with the Ivory. I dyed a new skein of Ivory using only 2ml of 0.25% DOS this time. They’re both beautiful creams but I think the lighter one provides more contrast. (below, right)

Now that I’d narrowed the choices a bit more, I walked away, came back, took some photos, walked away again, …

Step 7. Evaluate again. Here’s where I landed, with two cream champagnes, two pink champages, and a cobblestone. I dropped one of the greys and one of creams. Five is a good number to move forward with, to perhaps play with a little more, and to test how well they scale and translate to other yarn weights and fibers. This colourway is not done but it’s getting much closer.

The favourites so far.

Conclusions: Pastels aren’t so bad after all. Some things I could have done differently? I might have made smaller dye volumes! That’s a bad habit of mine. I could have used mini skeins to test colours but, personally, that doesn’t give me the information I’m looking for. I might have selected different or fewer initial colours and tried different concentrations from the start. I’m happy with where this all landed though and I have some colours to play with and tweak a little more.

Post Script: Crocking! Noooo! The pots were cleaned but not well enough. Some hidden dye transferred to a batch of Champagne Gold. Scrubbing with Barkeeper’s Friend, an acidic powdered cleanser, revealed and realeased so much hidden crocked dye but this batch of yarn is probably ruined. Clean your pots well!