Here it is:
Approx DMC shades 208, 209 & 3807
Ok, so I promised you the tale behind the name a few weeks ago, as I was gently reminded by Karen in a comment recently.
Back in June a large group of stitchers, myself included, all got together for a stitchy weekend at some holiday cottages in Derbyshire (we'd booked the whole place). In the run up to the weekend people were offering to teach people various things and I offered to run a dyeing class for anyone who wanted to have a go.
Several people were interested, so along with all my stock (well I couldn't turn down a captive audience, could I!) I packed up all my dyeing paraphernalia.
We had a glorious weekend and early Sunday afternoon I set up a dyeing area in the small garden between the cottages, and those who wanted to play gathered around for the demo.
I started with dyeing threads, because these take the least amount of room, and once they're in the pots of dye they can be moved anywhere there's a flat surface. Next I moved on to fabric immersion dyeing, where the fabric is immersed either partially or totally in a pot of dye, usually scrunched up. These can also be moved away once they're soaking. Finally we laid out some fabrics for sponge dyeing, which one of the ladies described as 'like being back at nursery school again' as she wielded a dye laiden sponge in a rather alarming manner.
The result of all this inspired dyeing were some wonderful colour schemes, and I decided that several of them would do nicely as future colours for my collection. In honour of the ladies that had created them, I asked them to come up with the names for the colours.
One of these ladies is Joy, who is a frank speaking lady with a big personality (she's a love, and I'm pretty sure she'll read this and be in bits at me calling her a lady), and earlier in the weekend, during a rather mad conversation, I'd said to her; "You know, you're just basically bonkers!". Much hilarity ensued, and the nickname stuck.
The colour you see above was created by Joy in one of those happy accident moments. The fabric was originally dyed with a new colour, one that I'd not had chance to try out before that weekend, called Vivid Violet. It actually came out a very bright pinky purple, and Joy is not a fan of pink. So in an attempt to alter the colour to something more purple, we dyed it again, this time with a dark blue/purple dye and this was the result.
When I asked Joy to name this colour she had a bit of a dilemma. You see she already has a colour named after her, Buttercup Joy, created in response to her request for just such a colour. She'd also already named one of the other colours she created that weekend (she was quite prolific in her dyeing) after her daughter, so she was now a bit stuck for names.
Then in a flash of inspiration she said, "You can name it for me after all, just call it Basically Bonkers!"
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