Wool Dyeing

Lately, I’ve been up to my eyeballs in dye. I signed up for a wool dyeing class and between this and the cotton dyeing for the still life, my kitchen has been covered in plastic for quite some time. But you can see from the wool color wheel I dyed that I’ve been having some fun.

Three color dyeing

Pastel dyeing

That’s not to say that I haven’t run into any disasters. But my one disaster turned out to be serendipitous. The assignment was to dye three values of the same hue on one length of yarn or roving. I won’t go into all of the details of my fiasco (or the mess I made in the kitchen) but, suffice it to say, my black, charcoal, and light gray sample turned out black, brown (when the black dye separated) and light gray. It looks suspiciously like a racoon’s tail.

The more I looked at it, though, the more it grew on me so I decided to spin some up and see what I got. I spun a rustic looking thick and thin yarn and with my first look at the singles and I was hooked. I plyed some of it and knitted a swatch. Sometimes the colors met in the ply and sometimes they didn’t. This gave the knitted swatch a great tweed look. The swatch is only 20 stitches and in a larger piece I won’t get the color block effect but that will be fine.

Now the question is, can I reproduce that disaster?       END OF POST