Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Fiber dyeing

With the change of the seasons and my playing with fiber again I've gotten the itch about dyeing fiber again. In the past the dyeing I've done has not been anything too fancy.

 I've been frustrated with my lack of being able to mix the basic colors and get different shades and hues. It seemed to me that no matter what I did, I was ending up with the same shades of colors no matter how I mixed the colors up.

It didn't matter how many youtube videos I watched and playing around with the colors, something wasn't clicking.

Some of my fiber friends suggested I get a color wheel so that I could see how the colors played with
each other. I read my copy of the Twisted Sister's Sock Workbook" yet again and decided to play around with food coloring.  Yes, food coloring.  Right now I don't have any plastic bottles that I can dedicate to acid dyes and honestly, in the new kitchen, I'm not sure I wanted the acid dye powder flying all over the place.

So ... I grabbed some of my handy-dandy canning jars and mixed up a few colors and measure out a yard or so of Superwash wool top and experimented.

I'm really pleased with what turned out.  I kettled dyed and handpainted the yarn.  I took my time and let one color exhaust before adding another color.

It's so happy.


I originally mixed up red, yellow and orange colors and towards the end of the process I took the little bottle of green dye and just dropped drops here and there over the fiber.  You can see in the above photo where the green broke up a little bit and turned blue. 
 

Like I said, so very happy with how it turned out.

Then I subscribed to the Knitting Blooms Podcast and saw she had shared a tutorial on handpainting roving.

The clouds parted and the angels started singing.  Her tutorial was exactly what I need for handpainting fiber to click.  Yes, that day I went to my local Wal mart and bought what I needed and that night I used leftover dye and dyed 3 ounces of superwash wool top.


I can't help but smile when I look at this braid. I can't WAIT to spin it up.  But first, I need to finish plying my Tour de Fleece 2012 fiber. 
 

I can't wait to break out the dyepots again.


1 comment:

Kelsbels said...

Love the colors in both! Such fun, bright happiness!