I needed to dye some orange wool to make a flower for a customer so if I am going to get the dye pot out I might as well do a bunch of dying. You can never have enough dyed wool. I dye on the side burner of my BBQ outside when the weather is above freezing. Now it’s not much above freezing, it was only about 10c/50f but that’s good enough for me.
I made a bunch of 100gram/3.5oz balls of merino top. I heat up the big dye pot of water with some vinegar. I Unwind a ball and soak it in warm slightly soapy water. I mix my dye and add it to the pot. I gently squeeze the water out of the soaked wool and pop it into the dye pot. I let it go from 20-40 min. If the waters clear I take it out early, if it’s not I leave it for the 40 min. While it’s cooking I start the next wool soaking and mix the dye. My water is very hard and it effects the dye process. I don’t think I have ever managed to get an even dye job. that is one of the reasons I usually recard most of my wool. Dyeing with rain water is on my list for this summer. My rain water comes of a metal roof so I don’t know how much difference it will make but its worth a try .
This is the result of Saturday and Sunday. The wind was not cooperating so excuse the sloppy display. I was just happy they stayed on the back of the chairs long enough to get a picture.
Here they all are in groups
I couldn’t get the colours one right no matter how I fiddled. There are 5 colours there. The middle 3 all look the same. Two are very close but one is purple and turquoise.
This one is pretty close to true.
This is very close to true. The pale green is from an MX or fibre reactive dye used as an acid dye. Its called sage leaf. The one next to it, fourth from the top is supposed to be olive drab but is more like sage leaf. The yellow and green one is the exhaust batch after the greens and I quite like it. I think I will recard it to blend the small spots of green in to it. The blue is the exhaust after the purples.
While these where in the pot I added some yarns too. These are all form when I was learning to spin. I didn’t like the colours.
This was a natural brown plied with a white. It went into the bright blue dye bath.
The purple one was white. The one on the right was natural grey plied with white. It went in the sage bath.. The one on the left was another brown and white and it went in the olive drab dye bath. You can see the purple and the gray have gone all curly with not being plied properly. They are not balanced yarns. I think they will be fine to use for decoration on felt. It will add interest.
The one on the right is a commercial ladder yarn that was a horrible pale green. I had no idea what it was made off except it wasn’t natural. I tossed it into the bright blue bath to see what would happen. It came out great. The top one went into one of the purple baths. It was a purple I mixed myself with turquoise and red. It spit into turquoise and purple. The others were ones that I bought mixed but they split too. One of them started out pink but I can’t figure out which one now.
All in all a good weekend I didn’t even felt them badly like I usually do.
