Fibre Week 2010 - Day 5

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.

Colorful Weekend

After a family-filled weekend it’s time to buckle down and get lambs weaned, gardens planted, and start making my lists for my trip to Alberta for Fibre Week and more Master Spinner classes. This past weekend was the last hurrah before the busy summer kicks in...and it was filled with color!

Our “dye day” turned into two dye days and a lot of experimentation. Our goal was to create an indigo dye vat and dye baths of Cochineal, Alkanet root, and Madder. We dyed silk scarves, silk hankies, alpaca and wool yarns, wool locks, and mohair. The results were interesting:


Link here to all the pics from our dye days.

And here are Willa Jane (my niece) and Steve (my dh): one ole farmer teaching the next generation!

Now it's time to get busy!

Act 1: Add Color

Now that the dye baths are done and the mordanting is done, it's time for color. In addition to the dye book (containing samples from 10 different natural dye materials) I have to spin and dye enough yarn for a small individual project.

I filled four bobbins with Bluefaced Leicester wool from my sheep for my individual project. I think I'm going to attempt (FOR THE 5TH TIME) a pair of socks. I know, I'm sort of embarrassed to admit that I never made it through a pair of socks. But by the mere fact that I'm committing here will get me through to completion.

So, the four bobbins produced two 8 oz skeins of two ply, sport weight yarn (14 wpi). One 344 yard skein went in the marigold dye pot because I had enough dye for a skein that size. At first I wasn't crazy about the color, but I let it simmer in the pot for a good couple of hours. After I took the pot off the heat, I let it cool in the dye bath all night. The color seemed to solidify and came out a much richer shade. I like it.
I was amazed, though, at the amount of dye that kept bleeding out of the yarn during the rinse baths. I must have rinsed the marigold skein about 10 times. Yet, it didn't take away from the yarn's shade...didn't lighten it up. I thought with so many rinses that it would.
And then there was walnut. The second 8 oz skein made the walnut dye bath. I didn't get a chance to pick up walnuts in the fall so I ordered some walnut crystals. Because alum was used as a mordant, the walnut came out a lighter shade than it would have with no mordant. I like the fact that you don't need a mordant with walnut.

For my project I was thinking of the marigold and a much darker walnut, but since it didn't come out as dark as I thought I'll have to rethink my project. I'm on some tight deadlines here too so to spin and dye more to produce the exact color I want is not an option. So I'll work with what I have.
And now the sampling starts. I have ten groups of sample skeins. Each group has samples with different mordants. I'll spend this week stirring the dye pots of dahlias, cosmos, eucalyptus, logwood, osage orange, madder, and cochineal (bugs).

Stay tuned!

Natural Dye Day

(Dye materials - marigolds, dahlias, eucalyptus, cosmos, black-eyed susan, madder, osage orange, logwood, cochineal)

Now that my breeds book is done it's on to the dye book for the Masters Spinning Program. I hoped to get the dye work done in the fall but it didn't happen. So there were many trips out to the garage today to check the dye pots. Not the best way to keep warm in the deep freeze we've been having. But it's underway and to get the work done I'll be working on it all week. Last week I made about eight dye baths to get ready for some marathon dying.

Dahlias from my garden

Madder Root

Black-Eyed Susans from my garden

Eucalyptus from my garden

Marigolds from the garden and just finishing up in the dye pot.

Draining the marigolds and waiting for a few more dye baths to finish.

I love the whole concept of natural dyeing. Growing the plants or collecting them from the fields is a great holistic approach to using what the earth provides. It's funny, the burdock and nettle that we thought were nuisance weeds while growing up on a farm are now treasures for the dye pot. I think what intrigues me the most about natural dyeing is the unknown color shade that you get from the dye material. The level of dye extracted from the plants depends on so many factors (hmmm....sort of like a metaphor for life).