Way back in late January I seized the opportunity to volunteer with the set-up of Kew’s Tropical Extravaganza, which finished recently. This mostly involved being surrounded by orchids.

And I do mean surrounded.

Seriously, I couldn’t have been happier. Look at all the colours!

Most of what I did was watering and installing hanging wires on all (yes, all: I handled just about every orchid in the photo above) of the orchid pots, and in a later session, wrapping them up in fresh moss to hide the pots and to help keep the plants moist and looking good on the displays. I didn’t get to see the actual exhibition myself until the final week, but during one of my volunteer Saturdays I got to hang out with the afternoon’s nominated orchid expert and learned plenty abour orchids.

So I brought one home.

It’s a Phalaenopsis, probably the most popular kind of orchid as they flower for ages and come in a ridiculously huge range of colours, marking, shapes and sizes. They’re also apparently one of the easiest to care for, which is good news for me.

I fell in love with this particular one back when I was helping with the sorting and mossing of the plants, and was pretty determined to bring this one home. I have no idea what the cultivated name is. The nearest I could work it out to be via pictures would make it a ‘Yellow Beauty’ or ‘Tropical Sunset’, but I’m leaning towards the former. It’s the peachy tones and the deep pink markings against the polished deep brown stems that struck me as particularly beautiful. There were at least four or five other cultivars I could’ve chosen, but this was the one for me.

After such an extravaganza of tropical colour, and what with spring on the way, my mind never really strayed very far from thoughts about plants, and about colour. (With the occasional interruption of Six Nations Rugby, but you probably already guessed that). So in a way, I wasn’t sure what I expected to happen when I signed up for one of Alice‘s dye workshops, now that Socktopus has its own studio space.

I don’t think I was expecting to enjoy it as much as I did, or to come home with these:

Yeah, I dyed these.

We did two types of dyeing: handpainting and stovepot dyeing. The green and orange yarns in the photo are both pot-dyed, while the last one is handpainted and will probably stripe in one fashion or another.

I loved every bit of it. I needed very little persuasion to do a third skein after the handpainting and the green skein, and I even had an idea of what I wanted to achieve. The nice surprise was, the orange kind of wasn’t what I had in mind. But I worked with it and played with it and ended up with probably my favourite of my three attempts. I think the best mindblowing discovery was how I got the green and orange yarns by starting with yellow.

That’s some mad science right there.

So now I look at my orchid, with its peaches and deep pinks and glossy browns, and I wonder how long I can wait before I end up with a small collection of dyes, some cling film and a bunch of plastic cups in order to imitate nature. I wonder if I can stand to wait for another project idea to get underway so that I can reclaim some storage space for a dyepot and some citric acid and a few other bits and bobs.

No, I don’t need more yarn. I really don’t.

But the colours. The colours, I do need. We all need colours.