Grease Dyeing Part 1

My TDF team put forth some challenges for the Tour. One of this week's was dyeing in the grease. So far it's pretty similar to regular dyeing, but we'll see how the wool comes out at the end. Here's some photos of the process so far.

 While I still have plenty of blue and green left to work with, I figured I'd try for orange, but not directly. I was hoping for a bit of variegation.  Since I have found that it is much harder to add enough yellow to red in order to make orange, I started with the yellow.

 I added a bit of red to fairly spaced out areas, hoping that these areas would stay fairly red, while it would spread to orange everywhere else. This was not the case. Once the red diffused through the water, the wool was just looking pink, so I added more yellow. I ended up with more dye than wool, so I added more wool. That's the nicest part of grease dyeing so far. While I did soak the first set of wool, I just grabbed more wool out of my bag and stuffed it in.

Turns out the dye had been orange at this point, but the first set of wool seemed saturated, so now the new wool gets to soak up the orange. We'll see how it goes when it dries...

• Will there be yellow?
• Will the first wool just be pink?
• Will the orange be variegated since it went in dry?
• How will the wool come out with all the grease, dirt, and veg that didn't get removed in the first wash?

I guess we'll see in a few days.

I broke down and just bought a new one...

A new card reader, so here is the back log of pictures that were promised, what in January. Though I have to admit, once I lost the card reader, I didn't really keep up with the pictures, so I still won't be caught up after this...sorry.

Here is an old(er) picture of the wedding blanket. I'm much farther now. This was about 40 or so rows in, now I'm at about 115 rows. It's starting to look really good, though some of my knit/purl transitions are a bit loose. I'm also a few days behind, but hopefully I can catch up by next week.

 Here is some merino and...um... firestar (?) that I got a few months ago in the fiber club.

I decided to use my hand combs to blend them.

And then I spun them. I did get it all spun and knit a little hat for my daughter. It's pretty cute, but .5 ounce of firestar is too much to blend into 3 ounces of merino and it no longer has the hand it should...lesson learned, but the blending itself wasn't too hard.

 

Yes, that says cashmere. It also says .5 ounces. Not sure what is going to happen with it, but it is amazingly soft! Possibly soft enough for me to break down and buy some myself.

 This is some dyed...merino I think. I got about 6 ounces. Luckily for me Tiny loves it; now I just need to get it spun. It would be a good wool to continue to work on the woolen yarn.

 Speaking of woolen, I decided to try some very bulky woolen with my stashed and additional fawn Shetland, totaling 8 ounces. It's been working pretty well, but it is no where near my worsted standards. More practice needed.

I tried some more dyeing. I like how this came out, and it should work out pretty well for a certain colored knitting technique. Now I just need to finish the blanket so I have time to knit it.

So those are all the old photos I have. Now I just need to take pictures of all the new stuff I've done since then, get posts up about those, and oh yeah, find my charger for the camera battery...Can I just blame the dog?

No more excuses and a disappearing cat

Ok, so I found a way to get some photos. Before the cat comes and goes here's a quick peak at a rug I have been making sow but steady progress with.

 I have a friend who is teaching a class to his guild on fractal spinning. He wanted some specifically dyed yarn to help see the stripes a bit easier. I'm still a pretty new dyer, so I did a bit of practicing. I went to my fiber stash and grabbed some Dorset and Whitefaced Woodland and began to dye. So then I have 8 or so ounces of this very oddly dyed wool (some sections came out better than others, and I used different colors on some parts because I got bored and wanted to see what all the colors I got for Christmas looked like).
Well, I am also in the process of using all of my long wool to make a rug to go in my slab basement with ceramic tiles set directly onto the concrete. I figured that this was as good a place as any to use all my test wools.
Over the course of about 4 hours I spun and plied the 8 ounces (it's not even close to fair quality and a bit thicker than normal). Then I joined it to the rug. Pacman was quite pleased.
I'm actually quite happy with the overall look of the yarn. Especially that fact that I paid absolutely no attention to any of the colors while I was spinning. 

A few days later, I decided I needed to comb some more of my friend's wool. I'm getting a new puppy soon (yeah, there might be another pause in the posts) and decided that the wastes from my combing would make a good bed, so I stuck them in an old pillow case. My cats felt it very important to test this new bed. They approved. This one liked it so much, she didn't even care that I had more that could go into the pillow case/bed.

 This was the final result of my combing. I know you're supposed to draft the fibers off the comb, but I wanted to see what would happen if I didn't. And yes, my cat is still under the wool in that last picture.

Braid Dying

Today we're going to go back in time a bit and go over how I dyed that yellow alpaca that did so well at the fair.

I figured it was only 3.5 ounces, so if there was ever a good time to experiment with alpaca this was it. I was going for a variegated yellow-orange fiber. I knew I wanted the whole thing to be on a base of yellow, so I just threw the braid into my crock pot and then added the dye.

It probably would have helped quite a bit if I had soaked it first, but it came out basically orange on the surface.
I washed it, let it dry- while still in the braid. After it was dried I pulled out the braid and decided that there was more white than I wanted. So I braided it again, which left different sections exposed, as you can see below.

It went back into the crock pot, washed, dried, and spun into this!

 

It didn't end up quite as variegated as I had hoped originally, but there is still some white and a bit of orange in there too. It probably won't become a standard method for dying, but it was fun to try.

African Bee Eater

 

There is a bird called the African Bee Eater. It has plumage ranging through the teals and oranges. This is my attempt to recreate those colors.

 

 

So my attempt was not entirely successful, but I do like the colors I ended up with. I had tried to allow the colors to wick up the yarn, but that didn't work out so well.

 I had tested the colors with a t-shirt using this method and got some great results, but the yarn just didn't take up the color the way I wanted it to. It was also dry; I'm sure that had a lot to do with it.

 

In the end I pulled the yarn out and used the regular syringe method of yarn painting, and I am quite pleased with the result.

 

It was only a mini skein, so I am using it to make some accessories for my daughter and maybe her toys. I'll let you know how they turn out.

Uroboro

 

So this is what I did this weekend. I had ordered some white wool, dyed it, and then knit the Uroboro pattern from Malabrigo Book 4.

 

The colors didn't come out well in the photo. They're a nice mix of red violet, light teal, and light blue.

 

I used regular food coloring and Wilton's cake dye in Delphinium Blue and Christmas Red. Clearly I hand painted it, but I used mostly vertical sections of color. It made for very short random repeats, but I did like the overall effect.

 

The pattern was very easy. It only took about three hours or so. The trickiest part was doing the cabling. The cabling wasn't hard, but I did it without a needle.

 

Once I weave in ends, I'll try and get a better shot or two.

Tablet Dyeing

Ok, here we go!

Last Easter, when everything was on sale, I grabbed about 5 boxes of tablet egg dye. I had some preliminary dyeing on my Cotswald and liked the results, for the most part.

So a few weeks ago, I was thinking about how to create an original and unique color way and my stash of dye tablets popped into my head.

Here was the idea: Ball or cake the yarn and slip tablets into it along the way. Heat up just water and vinegar and hope it soaked all the way through. Wait to see what would happen.

Questions: Would the vinegar soak all the way into the ball? Would there be giant white spots inside, on the left, right, etc.? Would the dye reach the outside of the ball and dye all the yarn? Would there just be too much dye leaving you with a strange combination and not sections of colors?  How long would these sections be?  How long would I have to leave it in the bath? Would I end up with a felted ball?

I had no idea.

Here's what I did:

I gathered all my supplies: my pot, my dye (I used 2 tables of each color I wanted to use), my yarn (some unknown yardage of Bella singles), and some vinegar.

I balled up the yarn slipping tablets in along the way.

I heated up my water and vinegar and slipped in the ball.

I let it roll around in there for quite a while. I think I had heat on it for about 40 minutes to an hour and then let it sit with the lid on for another three hours while my daughter and I went to visit a friend. Then I pulled the ball out of a sea of blue and put it in a small bowl to finish cooling (yes it was still a bit warm, but really I just didn't want blue fingers), and then let the ball sit overnight in cool water. I woke up to a lighter sea of blue in my fiber bowl, drained that, rinsed the ball again, drained, unwound the  ball and rinsed the yarn. I just let it sit, no squishing or squeezing since the yarn wasn't organized in any way and I didn't want a tangled mess.

 A few more rinses, then onto the Niddy Noddy for skeining and drying.

Answers:
Would the vinegar soak all the way into the ball? 
Yes. I was concerned I would have bits of my tablets still in the ball as I unwound it, but I didn't.

Would there be giant white spots inside, on the left, right, etc.? 
Sort of. There were white spots, but not huge ones. I did use way too much dye, that may have played a factor, or it could have just been that the tablets were inside, more experiments will be needed to find a conclusive result.

Would the dye reach the outside of the ball and dye all the yarn? 
Yes. It was so fun to watch as the vinegar soaked in to the top few tablets and I could see the bubbles coming out. The sea of blue was conclusive with regards to the dye reaching the outside though.

Would there just be too much dye leaving you with a strange combination and not sections of colors?
Sort of. I did get a nice mix on the outside and first few layers of the ball (this is one technique where color theory plays a bit role), but on the inside I did get good sections of color.

  How long would these sections be? 
Varied. Of course the outer sections of the combined color were longer, but once inside the ball, the sections got quite small. It would be interesting to see how the section length would vary with a larger ball, a cake, and more deliberate tablet placement.
 
 How long would I have to leave it in the bath? 
I don't know how long I needed to leave it in the bath, but I left it in there for about 4 hours, and that worked out fine.

Would I end up with a felted ball?
No. This will, of course, change with the heat and type of wool you use, but everything stayed separate this time around.

To Dye or Not To Dye

So I'm back to spinning my lovely silver/grey alpaca for the Kaleidoscope Cardi. The question is, do I leave it the natural silver color, or dye it? The natural color is quite lovely and does have a bit of a sheen to it, but there is always the infinite allure of dying.

Wheel set in the living room with alpaca in progress.

On the bobbin and some knitting au natural.

Keep in mind I have no idea what color I would dye it, and the silver/grey/flecks of black and brown would go well with just about anything I could wear.
Also, my fantastic M-I-L got me some really nice white alpaca, and I know her intentions are for me to dye it.
Plus dying the silver would mean another step.
But I want to hear what anyone out there has to say, although I can't promise to bind my self to any results.

More Dying with RIT Black

 I did a dying experiment this week. I grabbed a skein of what was supposed to be a novelty ply (pigtail yarn...yeah not going to talk about that) and decided to go for it.

Novelty yarn, not Bella Wool

I had a plan to spin the rest of the Bella Wool and get a gradient effect from breaking dye, like when you would draw a sharpie line of a paper towel and put the tip in water at school. So step one would be spinning the yarn, step two would be knitting the hat/scarf/whatever, and step three would be dying, but I decided to sort of skip ahead to make sure my plan would work. It's a good thing I did.

 The only black dye I have is RIT, but I had seen all this stuff online about how people tried to dye with it and got purple instead, so I figured there was potential for breaking. Above is a shot of a few drops in the water. You can see the purple tint to it. But I wasn't sure if it would be enough dye, so I added more, apparently too much. By the time I put in the yarn (yes it was dry) you can see the solid black below.

 I only left it in a few minutes so I wouldn't over dye the wool, but again I was a bit off in my calculations, or maybe there was just way too much dye in the dye bath because this is what I got out.

Clearly, it's not broken, but by leaving it skeined I did get some interesting tonal variations. Those probably would have been greater if I had left it in the bath longer, but over all the effect isn't bad, just not what I was looking for. Oh well, at least I know that this isn't the way to break RIT.

Red and Yellow make...Raspberry Lemonaide

I love Bella the Sheep. She has such nice wool. I need to get a picture of her...

Bella Wool in Raspberry Lemonaide

Now that I have no other fiber to play with, and I realized I only have about two months until I move back to Bella's neck of the woods and four until Christmas, I decided I really need to get going on my gifts to Bella's owners.

Bella was saved from the butcher by a former student of mine. She pleaded with her parents to keep Bella as she was a favorite sheep. I'm not sure how much time the now 11 year old girl spends with Bella, but it worked out well for me.

Drying in the shower. I guess it does read a bit orange.

As I said in a previous post, I was given Bella's fleece, and the mom was just happy to give it to someone who could use it, but I figure that if I didn't pay for it, I should at least make something for the girl who kept this sheep with the lovely wool from becoming lamb chops...and something for her older sister who was also a student of mine.

It all started with some previous experimenting with Kool-Aide dying that you can read here. Then as I started combing out the dyed locks, I realized they weren't as red as I had hoped they would be, there were red sections, but also all shades of pink. Since it wasn't what I had planned, I thought I would try something completely different.

I wanted to know how the yarn would read if I plied the red/pink singles with another color, in our case yellow. Would it come out orange as the colors wrapped around each other so much and so tightly that they blended from afar? Would they keep their individualism and produce a tweed kind of look? It was an interesting question, so I went for it. I used the same method to dye some locks yellow, spun everything up and started plying.

Close up of the lovely Barber Poles

The result was a bit mixed. At first I thought it was just a tweed look, albeit a nice one as the pinks and yellows made a nice summery combination, but as I moved farther away and looked at it, it does have a bit of an orange haze. Go figure.

I'm calling this yarn Raspberry Lemonade and plan to use it for stripes and maybe some flower accents for a couple of hats for the girls. It's only about 120 yards in a fingering/sock weight, so there is no way that it will be enough to make much of anything on its own, though I could check Ravelry...well lots of baby items, or I could make one glove or something, but I think I will stick with the hat plan.

Raspberry Lemonaide skeined

Dying Experiment

For my last four ounces of Cotswold, I wanted to try something different. I had liked the way the center-pull ball plying worked, and had done some interesting dying with a bit of my Bella Wool, and wanted to try combining the two.

In the Blue

With the Bella Wool, I spun the yarn, skeined it, and dyed it wrapped as a skein. I got some interesting results. The outside of the skein was covered nicely with the green, but when I opened it, I saw some interesting pockets of white where my tight twisting had kept the dye from reaching. It created a nice tonal effect that I liked and wanted to try again.

Second Blue Dying

With the Cotswold, I had a plan, or at least an idea of what I wanted to do. I realized that as you wind the yarn around the spindle of your spindle, you are creating a center-pull ball. Once I was done with my singles, I just slipped the whole cone off my spindle and soaked it for a while to help the dye penetrate farther.

The overall goal was to get a three color yarn dyed with two colors, you know because blue and red make purple. I decided that I wanted to use what I had done with my green Bella Wool and use those blank spots to reserve space for to second color. So I stuck my cone of singles into a pot of blue.

Final Blue Coloring

I figured that the dye wouldn't reach all the way to the middle, but since the center had been around the spindle there would be some coloring there as well as from the outside. As I started plying I found this was not the case (by the way, don't ever ply wet yarn; I was a bit too anxious to get this project done and tried it...it ate the finish my spindle). The outside and the tips dyed nicely, but the inside was just too dense (maybe next time I'll wind it around something thicker first and then dye it). So as I was plying, I decided to put the yarn back in the dye as the initial dying hadn't exhausted the bath. This gave me blue throughout the remainder of my yarn as the cone was much smaller and less dense due to plying from the center as well.

Skeined for Red Dying

In the Red, I did turn it over half way through

Once this was complete and the yarn all plied, I moved onto the red. Here I did exactly what I had done with the Bella Wool. I wound a skein and put it in the dye. But I forgot that with the Bella Wool, I had about 50 yards and now I had over 100. The outside dyed beautifully and did just what I wanted, but the inside was virtually untouched by the red...I could have re-twisted it and tried again, but honestly, it was around 11:00 and I was ready to be done with it all.  Plus I did want to preserve some of the plain blue.

Final Color, this skein doesn't photograph well...

Who knows, maybe I will redye the red before I use it, but as it is now, I have blue-red-purple-natural (there were some spots that just never got dyed, and I'm ok with that) through the outer half or so of the yarn and the inside is just blue and natural. Though I am still debating if I don't want to just wait and see how it knits as you can always dye knit fabric as well as yarn, but I can't fight the feeling that if I made a scarf or something (not what this yarn is intended for, but you get the idea) that it would end up half red and half natural...We'll see I guess. I'm not ready to use this yarn yet, so I have some time to think about it.

Trying Something New

This last week I finished spinning my BFL top and the socks I made for my friend, leaving me with quite a bit of crafting time open. So like any good crafter, I filled the time I had been using to work on those two projects with 5 more.

Most of them are just knitting, and I will post photos when they start to look like something other than a cast-on, but I did try some dyeing and started spinning some of my hand processed Bella Wool (so called because that is the name of the Cotswold/Border Leicester sheep it came from).

 I started by pulling about 50 grams of locks, and letting them soak for a few minutes in warm water. Then in a microwave safe bowl, I mixed a packet of Black Cherry Kool-Aid. I put the wool in and let it sit for a few minutes before I put it all in the microwave. The result was something that would work very well for Halloween or a horror movie.

I set the microwave on 50% power and ran it in 3 minute bursts.I didn't want to go too long or too hot because I couldn't control the temperature in the microwave like I could on the stove and I didn't want it to start boiling and felt the yarn.

I checked it every 3 minutes to make sure nothing was boiling and everything was working out.  Once the "dye" was exhausted from the water, I took it all out of the microwave and let the wool cool in the bowl, as the shock of going from hot dyeing water to cold rinse water will felt wool too.




After the water had cooled, I rinsed the locks in cool water, letting them soak a few minutes. Next I washed the water just using dish soap to get any extra dye out. I guess I must have really done a pretty good job of heating it because I didn't have any dye wash out leaving pink water.




I needed a place for my locks to dry. At first I tried just laying them across the rim of my bowl, but I saw very quickly that there wasn't enough room. So I went and got my ironing board and pulled the fabric off and set it underneath to catch any drips that might come out while drying. It worked quite nicely and everything was dry by morning, leaving me with some nicely dyed locks ready to be combed and spun, but that's another story...