KnitMe

Dyepot Adventure

I did play in the dyepot on Friday. I also discovered that when you have pots of fiber simmering on the stove all day long, your house gets really warm. It was good for my sinuses. The result, from a finished-product point of view is in my opinion mixed.

I started with this. About 18 ounces of white rambouillet fleece that had already been scoured.

I have two pots now, this was my setup.

The one on the right is a speckleware roaster I ran across at the thrift shop for $4. It was so long that it had to have two flames under it. Oddly, it didn't hold an appreciably larger amount of fiber than the old soup pot, maybe because it's shallow.

My plan was to dye about half the fleece burgundy, and divide the remaining half between violet, sky blue, and woodrose (these are Cushing acid dye color names).

In a panic about how long it was going to take to do this if I had to let every color cool in the pot before rinsing, I appealed to my fiber list, and Lisa suggested dumping out the fiber to cool in something else. Fortunately I had a large strainer that came with the soup pot, that filled the bill. It also enabled me to carry the damp fleece to the washing machine (after it had dripped itself out), and rinse and spin it out there, so it would dry faster.

I discovered that with the violet, the blue was left in the bath after the fleece had taken up as much color as it could. The water was quite blue when I finally gave up and poured it out. I suppose that means I used too much dye powder for the amount of fleece I had.

Even before I started trying to test this stuff out, I decided I'd made a little too much burgundy, and also that this shade of burgundy was too brown. If I were doing it again I'd try for something more purply, more of a cranberry shade. Oh well.

I couldn't resist taking a shot at combing some up.

Yes I terribly overloaded my comb. But I put on the burgundy first and had to balance it as well as I could!

I made only 2 passes with the 5 pitch combs, because this fiber was very clean and because I didn't want to overblend the colors.

Not too much waste.

This is unfortunately not a very good picture, I will try to get one in natural light later in the week. Looking at the result, I think I'm going to have to find some more white rambouillet in my stash and dye more of the 3 contrast colors. It isn't exactly mud but there isn't as much of the contrasts as I would like to see. I did another lump later on that was a bit better with balance.

The top came out very dense and soft. I was intending that by combing after dyeing, I would end up with something that would draft well, and I think that will be the case. An interesting experiment!

Posted by Prudence at November 14, 2005 08:41 AM