Adventures in Dyeing - Part 3

It's a gorgeous summer afternoon (for a Victoria Day) and rather than do myself in under the hot, hot sun gardening, I decided to do a little more dyeing.

I hope that this is a better documentation than  in Adventures in Dyeing Part 2.  I hope to be able to eventually find the technique that works best for me.  I'm not sold on this one; I hand-painted the yarn this time using squeeze bottles and the Wilton Dyes.

1. Prep the Yarn

I pre-soaked (or wetted) the yarn in a solution that's 1:3 vinegar:water for an hour or so.  Then after wringing it gently, I laid it out on a plastic sheet (garbage bag). Today I used 2 skeins of Knit Picks Bare Wool Bulky (top image), a skein of Briggs & Little Sport Natural, and a skein of Briggs & Little Heritage Sheeps Grey (image below, top and bottom).

2. Prep the dyes

The great thing about using the squeeze bottles is that they are marked with measurements. The bottles take 8oz of liquid, so I filled each to 2 1/2oz vinegar, then added about 1/2tsp of the Wilton gel and stirred to start to dissolve it. (This was not 100% successful, not all of the gel dissolved in the vinegar and some still came out in globs. Next time, I'll dissolve the gel in warm water and then add the vinegar).  I then filled the bottle with water, screwed on the lid and shook to mix the dye. Note: squeeze bottles from the Dollarama don't seal too well, so dye leaked out.  I'll have to pick up a better set.

3. Paint the yarn

Using the squeeze bottles, I painted stripes on the yarn, overlapping colours where I saw fit.  

For the bulky, I painted one end with Red Red, and the other with Lemon Yellow.  I blended the 2 in the middle by overlapping the colours, but with a slightly watered down red.

The Sport (top) and Heritage (bottom) both have a combination of the Lemon Yellow, Sky Blue and Black.  The really cool thing about the Black dye is that it's not black at all.  Even as the dye hits the wool, both purple and green are evident!

4. Blend the Dye

To blend the colours into all strands of the yarn, I gently squeezed the yarn, making the painted stripes blend together, softening the effect.

5. Set the dye

I carefully lifted the skeins and gently wrung them out before placing the yarn (lightest side up) into Pyrex bowls for steaming in the microwave.  Unfortunately, I wasn't as careful as I thought and some of the green pooled on the plastic, affecting the yellow of the bulky yarn.

To steam, I microwaved each bowl of yarn on high for 2 minutes, then let them rest for 2 minutes and repeated this a total of 3 times until he water ran clear when the yarn was lifted out of the bowl.  (When you do this, don't forget to put a plate or loose fitting lid on top to trap the steam, while still letting some escape.)

6. Finish the yarn

Once the colour is set, I let the skeins cool down on the deck in their bowls. To finish things off, I rinsed the yarn under lukewarm water and then soaked it for about 10 minutes in Soak.  A quick wringing and spin in the salad spinner and it was ready to hang to dry on the deck.

I'm pretty pleased with how the yellow/blue/black dye combos worked out.  I expected to get a purple and green result from the black dye, but didn't expect that the blue would disappear into it and the yellow to result in so much green.  

As for the red/yellow, I expected a little more red or orange from the dye and a lot less pink.  The blend between the 2 colours was mostly successful, but I'm not keen on the orangey-pink colour in the final product.  I think I will either over dye the whole thing in yellow or a different shade of red. The fun is in the experimentation and the unexpected results.  The accidental pooling of green that crept onto the yellow/red actually had a nice result, adding a little more interest to the boring old orangey-pink!

Adventures in Dyeing Part 2

The sun is shining, the birds are singing and after a few miserable weather days, Spring is back!

Today, I thought would be the perfect day for some dyeing; this time with Wilton Food Colouring gel and more of the Knit Picks Bare Wool (this time in fingerling weight). I also tossed in some Wool-Ease, just to see how it would take the dye with only 10% wool.

Unfortunately, I didn't document the process (photos and measurements) as much as I did with the turmeric dye a few weeks ago, but I've made good progress today and I at least have something to show for my efforts.

I first tried dyeing with Wilton a few summers ago when I was dyeing with Kool-Aid.  I had more yarn than drink crystals, so I dyed my last 2 hanks with some  Delphinium Wilton colouring and a little vinegar as the acid to set the colour.  The result was surprisingly good.  I had honestly not expected to see a decent result as I hadn't done any research on using food colouring to dye yet. I actually preferred the final product to the It's amazing how sometimes the offshoot of your main project can wield better results!


Fast forward 2 years, a bit more research, and a lot more ambition.

As intriguing the concept of using Kool-Aid as a dye is, it has it's limitations (and for me, I'll be honest, a wee bit of a gross out factor).  I've read a number of blog entries and articles that I've found via Pinterest (here's my Handspun and Dyed board) and I've poured through my copy of Gail Callahan's Hand Dyeing Yarn and Fleece many times to understand the fundamentals of dyeing yarn (so I guess I won't be using the leftover tie-dye kit dyes on wool after all).  I believe that I have a grasp of what I need to do, now the fun part will be to see if it fits with what I want to do!

And here is what I wanted to do: create 2 hanks of yarn with yellow blending into blue.  The yellow and sky blue are a lovely complement to one another.

After "wetting" the yarn  in a water/diluted vinegar bath, I laid the hanks out side by side on a plastic garbage bag.  I mixed about 1/2tsp of the yellow colouring gel into about 1 1/2C water and 1/2C vinegar and did the same with about 1/4tsp of blue.  I poured the yellow slowly over the top third of the hanks, gently squeezing as I went to saturate the fibres. I then did the same thing with the ble at the opposite end of the hanks.  I then gently squeezed the hanks from the outside in to blend the blue and yellow together in the centre as green.  I did the same with the left over dyes to my experimental sample of the Wool-Ease sportweight (as you can see below).

Following the formula of 2 minutes on, 2 minutes off repeated, I steamed the yarn in the microwave (yay for food safe colouring!)  And now I'm just waiting for the yarn to cool down to room temperature so that I don't shock it when I rinse it.  So far I'm pretty happy with the results.  The dye bath has run clear and the colours are gorgeous.

This project seemed like a cake walk compared to the turmeric/beet dye.  I can't wait to try another technique soon.  I'm thinking dip dyeing.  Stay tuned....

... And here is the result:  after a rinse and wash with Soak, it's so beautiful.

Adventures in Dyeing - Part 1

Two summers ago, I had some success dyeing wool with Kool-Aid and Wilton food colouring.  I wasn't too impressed with the results from the Kool-Aid (and BTW I will NEVER let my kids drink that dye source ever again), but the results from the Wilton gel dye were pretty impressive.  I needed to use quite a lot of the drink mix to get an intense colour and I just could not stand the fake, fruity smell.

Grape/Lime Kool-Aid

Grape/Strawberry Kool-Aid

Wilton Blue/Purple gel dye

I've been pretty fascinated with the concept of dyeing my own fibre ever since, but have been a nervous about experimenting with the process beyond popping a bowl of dye and yarn in the microwave.

I've finally built up the nerve to start experimenting with colour and have stockpiled about a dozen or so hanks of bare wool from Knit Picks.  My initial plan was to dye the yarn in the heat of the summer in the back yard using a variety of colour sources: plants, veggies from the garden, food colouring, and eventually commercially prepared dyes.   But we've had a really long winter here in Eastern Ontario and with the temperature hovering about 4 degrees above 0C today, the warm, sunny days of summer seem really far off and, well, I can be a pretty impatient person when it comes to wanting to try something (especially when it comes to crafting!)

So, today, I am trying my hand at dyeing some yarn with beets and tumeric, hoping for a peachy colour when all is said and done.  The beets should provide a pink base and the tumeric will (hopefully) add a tinge of gentle orangey-yellow.  As I said, I like to experiment.

I took a 2lb bag of beets, removed the root base and quartered them.  I covered them with just enough water and brought the stainless steel pot to a rolling boil.  They are presently simmering away on the stove in a stainless steel pot with about 1Tbsp of tumeric.  The smell is so earthy and much more bearable than the Kool-Aid.  I'll need to let that simmer away for a while before straining and adding the wool.  In the meanwhile, I'm going to soak the wool for a couple of hours (and decide which weight to use).  The wool needs to be completely wet and saturated before it can take the dye.

Later...

Using Earth Guild's general rules for mordanting as a guideline, I prepared an alum and cream of tartar mordant for the wool. I decided that I would use 2 hanks of Bare Wool of the Andes Worsted Weight from KnitPicks, and soaked them in water ("wetting" the wool).

As the guideline on Earth Guild's website is for dyeing 1lb of wool, I adjusted the mordant recipe as follows.

Earth Guild:  16oz fibre (dry) : 3oz alum : 1 oz cream of tartar

Me:  200g fibre : 37.5g alum : 12.5g cream of tartar

(At this point I was grateful for my mad math skills and my digital scale.)

After removing the beets from the pot, I added the mordant and stirred to dissolve it.  I then allowed the pot to cool down to room temperature as not to shock the wool (I do not want felted fibre!)  

I also dipped a square of paper towel into the dyepot to test the colour.  Pinky-orange as expected.

The wetted wool was added and the pot was then brought back up to a simmer.  My intention was to allow it to simmer for an hour, but life and chores got in the way and I left it for about 1h20m.  No harm, no foul, right?

The dyepot was then removed from the heat source and I put a lid on it.  The colour at this point was more pinky red than anything else.

Out of the dye bath, however, it was showing hints of yellow.

After letting the yarn cool and soak in the pot over night, I was surprised to see much more yellow than pink in the pot.

And the liquid was not a clear as I expected.  Hmm.  All the info I read had stated that the all of the dye should be absorbed into the fibre and the remaining liquid should run clear.  Hmm.  I know that with some acid dyes (eg. food colouring) vinegar and another 30 mins of  heat could take care of this problem, but as I hadn't read anything about mixing vinegar with alum, that was not an experiment I wanted to do.  So after dumping the remaining dye outside on the driveway (we're on a septic tank, so I didn't want to send any leftover mordant down the drain). 

As I rinsed the yarn, it seemed to lose all of its pink from the beets and only the yellow remains.  So what went wrong?

I can only guess that I either didn't use enough alum in the mix for the mordant, that the mordant reacted with the turmeric before the beets, or that there was a conflict of sorts between the beet colorant and the colour in the turmeric.  I suppose that I really should have started out with only one colour source as my first attempt at natural dyeing.  Live and learn, right?  (If you have any idea why the beet colour didn't take, please comment!)

The yarn is now out on the deck drying.  I'm actually really pleased with the final colour.  It's consistent in tone and I have no other yarn in my stash remotely close in colour or tone.  I'm not sure how colour-fast it is, so the next step will be to wash it with Soak and see how much more dye comes out of it before I knit it up.  I'm going to earmark it for a shawl to showcase the colour.