Today was dye day. Natural dyeing amazes me every time. You never know what you are going to get when it comes to color range. Today we used madder for our dye material and each of us put 25 10-yard sample skeins of yarns (mine were hand spun from a crossbred fleece) in the dye pot. Each skein was manipulated with different mordants and modifiers before and after they spent time in the dye pot. Each of us ended up with 25 variations of color from one dye pot. Amazing! I love nature dyeing and while I'm up here in Olds my marigolds and lady's bedstraw are growing so they can be used to do some dyeing later this summer. Anyway, here are today's pics of our dyeing efforts:
Mario and Heather weighing out the madder.
Lois and Jackie stirring the dye pot.
Madder particles are in a large tea bag in the dye pot.
Val spinning cotton on the Takli spindle while skeins are in the dye pots.
Heather showing Val a more efficient way to spin on the Takli.
Skeins coming out of dye pots.
Skeins after rinsing before modifiers.
Rinsing more skeins.
Reorganizing the dyed skeins into groups for the modifiers.
My skeins after the dye pot, but before the modifiers.
All 200 sample skeins after the dye day was complete. The first row of skeins are mine. Of course, they are brighter and more vivid in person.
Tomorrow we are spinning silk! I'm going back to my town house now and I'm going to admire my 25 dyed skeins, oh ya, and read my course book to prepare for Friday's test.
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