As you've already seen if you read crftyspider, the fiberartist or listen to yarnspinnerstales (and you should do all three if you don't already) I hosted dye day this year. The odd Tuesday ladies occasionally get together to dye a big mess of fiber. This is usually a once a year occasion, since dying is messy and complicated and best done in the company of good friends, with food. And iced tea.

This year also required plenty of sunblock. Even with sunblock I managed to get really sunburned on my back. But I got almost two pounds of cotton lint, a pound of cotton/rayon roving, two skeins of sock yarn and some punis dyed in an afternoon. Phew! Here's a pictorial documenting the process:

This is some of the lint that I acquired from a very good hearted soul known as stashymoma on Rav. I carded some of the white on my hand cards to make the punis which will be appearing later in the show. Here the lint is shown basking in some Soda Ash water. Soda ash is required for the dyes we were using to actually bind to the fibers. I know this, because when I put some of mom's violet Procion MX dye on my esprit sock yarn with no Soda Ash, there was not violet yarn. It was rather a sad proof of experiment, but there must always be a Ho to test your Ha (sorry, stat geek joke. Moving right along).

So I squeezed the lint out and layered it in aluminum roasting trays, with the idea that as there was leftover dye available I'd dump it on my lint and see what I got. I also had a handful of punis that I'd carded earlier, two skeins of Elann Esprit (cotton elastic sock yarn) and a pound of Pareto roving (80/20 cotton/rayon). If it looks like the esprit is dark in these shots, it's partially because it was wet, and because it was not actually white. It is in fact "nougat" colored. This is because elann didn't put the white on full bag sale and because I am not afraid of overdying. ;D


This is the dyes I was planning to use. TheFiberArtist acquired a stash ::polite cough:: of these dyes from a friend of hers. This was some mad scientist stuff here, concentrated liquid dyes in old vinegar bottles with very aged, brown labels and DUST on every surface. Several of them had little twists of very dry brittle yarn on top to show what color they yielded.

Here's my colors all picked out. I didn't know if the Procion MX would dye rayon or not, where the Cushing's extra dusty would. So I picked a selection of greens and blue greens with the intent of doing a "shady lawn" sort of colorway for the Garden Spinning swap.

I measured the dye into clear plastic cups, then diluted it with more Soda Ash water. Below you can see my roving all laid out intestine like in a pan. It was very wet from having soaked overnight in a solution of 1 C. soda ash to ~4 gallons of water. I squeezed it out a bit before laying it in the pan, but it was still very wet, so I didn't dilute my dyes as much as I would have for a dryer roving. I also laid the roving shortways along the pan, the same direction I intended to pour my stripes of dye, in order to get long color repeats.

In retrospect, looking at this picture, I'm not sure why I thought those blues in the center there would end up green in the final roving. I should have added some green to them before I poured and relied less on wicking. And, since we're on a bit of retrospecting, my idea for the long color repeats would have been much better if I wasn't then turning right around and dividing this pound into 2oz chunks for the swap, a fact I thought of much much later. Go brain go!

It was a lot of fun to take the several deep breath cftyspider coached me through and pour the dye on the yarn. White was suddenly COLOR. Very satisfying to the part of me who still thinks crayons are perfectly acceptable wall decorating devices.

I also ended up snagging some yellow that crftyspider mixed up (sorry!! but it was perfect!) to add some dandelion yellow highlights to the open spots on yarnspinner's suggestion. What, your lawn doesn't have violets and dandelions in it??

I had to do some digging to make sure there wasn't much white left in the roving. I also ended up pouring so much liquid in the pan that I was worried it would all end up muddy olive colored. So I poured a lot of dye liquid off (from the darker end of course) before I did this part. After this was all dyed, I smooshed it a bit, then put a lid on top of it and set it out in the sun.

Then it was time to attack the punis and sock yarn. It was basically the same drill. Take fiber. Add dye. I wanted to do a warm skein and a cool skein. But mostly I wanted to see what happened when I added dye to fiber. So I wasn't the most scientific with it. The punis were dry, to see how much wicking happened (if any at all). The yarn had been soaked in tap water only, since I had no idea what overnight exposure to soda ash would do the the elasticity of the yarn.

A cool shot through the plastic. I'd just dumped some very diluted purple on the lint and was holding it up to see how much made it through.

All told I ended up with a tray of cool mix (black, purple, electric blue) a tray of warm mix (crimson, orange, yellow) and two trays of terracotta. The terracotta was a really good color, I was helpless before it.

After everything was dyed it was left in the anvil of the sun (also known as my deck. In three days the camels die. When the camels die, we die. Remember that.) for the rest of the afternoon.

Then I moved everything into my garage to wait overnight, and on Monday I began the rinsing. It took all day, and I am not joking. I started with the roving since that was the most important to have dried in a timely fashion. I dumped it out into the bathtub, trying to keep the darker parts downhill from the lighter parts (to prevent the creation of mud colored roving, which I have been told is caused by "backdying"). I totally forgot the information given to me in Cozyb's tutorial about starting with cold water to avoid this backdying. I turned the showerhead on the hottest setting  (why yes, I have been accused of boiling lobsters while I shower, why do you ask? I often forget that my tub has a cold water tap too). Then I let it drain and repeated this until what drained through was pretty clear, even with me moving and squishing on the roving. With lots of water it looks like this:

all fat and sassy intestinals bleeding green. After it got rinsed about eight times, squished as dry as possible and carried outside to dry on the porch it looked like this:

Very cool and kelpy. It didn't dry there, since there was a freak rainstorm that lasted all of three minutes and accomplished nothing except raising the ambient humidity to 98%. So eventually the whole forest got moved into the garage to be poked at every few hours. It didn't rot, and it did in fact dry. Eventually. All told it took almost two days.

At the same time as that roving was rinsing I had the violet sock yarn and punis rinsing in the sink. Yes, I'm big on multitasking. Especially when one of my process goes something like: *let water filter through roving until it seems to be all gone, then rearrange roving and add water. Repeat from * until your screaming becomes intolerable or the water runs clear.

The pan of cool mix yarn and punis looked something like this immediately after dying:

Vibrant!!

Of course, the truth in dying is in the rinse water. And that purple rinsed. And rinsed. And rinsed. It took me about 8 drainings to get the green nicely cleared. I think it took closer to 20 to clear the purple. I don't know if it was just not diluted enough or what. In contrast, the terracotta lint rinsed clear in two. I actually rinsed it four times because I thought it was lying to me. But it was clear after the second one. The warm mix yarn rinsed clear in three or four rinses and I didn't even get a picture of it, since it didn't spend long enough in the sink for me to remember that I should. But the purple rinsed and rinsed some more! You can see the nougat peeking through to laugh at me:

The water stayed roughly that purple every time. It was very frustrating, since you just KNOW that the more dye leaving in the rinsewater, the paler and more bleh your final product is going to be. I was pretty much assuming at this point that I would still have nougat colored yarn, with a violet cast to it. One of those colors you call "lilac" or "LA smog" in the hopes that imagination will add color where there really is none.

In contrast, let's look at that terracotta that so charmed me. First good sign - when I went to move it into my garage I stuck a finger into it, and pulled it back out half scalded. That sucker was HOT. Not boiling by any means, but it was easily over 100F.

And pulling some lint back, the water was roughly the same color as the soaking water. So that dye exhausted amazingly well. The darker color on the edges were underneath the rest of the lint, so the parts that soaked actually in the hot dye got a bit darker than the rest.

Anyone hungry?  I almost didn't post pictures of this since I thought my vegetarianism might be called into question. Somehow I managed to dye "marbled meat" color. Go me! The other warm mix had a very vibrant yellow, but the orange/red part was much more pastel.

There was also the very nicely gothic "bruise mix" lint:

I'll spare you all the bad puns that ran through my head as I rinsed this one. I think I was a little slaphappy from dye and tapwater fumes at this point. I understand now why dying is usually done by rivers. This is not the proper hobby for a desert climate. I used a lot of water, and if I didn't live right next to a river I might have felt guilty about that. As it is, I know that my heavy water consumption is ecologically helpful, since even that dye laden rinse water is cleaner than what they first pulled out of that river.

Another thing I learned. Dyed, rinsed, squeezed punis are almost as funny as wet cats, and just about as happy with life:

So very pathetic. I thought I might have totally ruined them. Luckily, they get over it:

Seriously, I did nothing to those punis except leave them in a windowsill. They apparently forgave me.

In fact, everything seemed to forgive the abuse after it had a night alone in the garage to think it over.

The kelp became actual roving. (It got even softer and nicer after I gave it a loving beating).

Even the sock yarn seemed pleased:

There's only vague hints of nougat in there. I think next time I'm going to wind the skein larger (these were done with the skein winder on my charka, which is not known for thinking big) and try some actual planning in the color arrangements. I would also love to try knitting a ball into a flat to do some non-wool friendly Flat Feet kind of yarn. I kind of coveted the ones I saw in Alaska, and I have 8 more balls of the nougat to play with.

In fact, I think the only one who took a little persuading to forgive me was my husband, who was stymied from playing his new game for the day while we had guests:



He forgave me eventually, probably because he didn't want to be banished to the garage too.

There's a great deal more photos on my flickr account, tagged with "dyeday2008" (if the direct link doesn't work).

I learned a lot from this dye day, and had a great time with everyone. I can't wait to see everything from the swap all together, and I am suddenly much more inspired to sit down at my spinning wheel!