#dyeing

[roboticchibitan]

Wish me luck I'm gonna dye some yarn in Mason jars in the oven. If I put the jars in the oven before heating it up, only set the oven to 200°f and let the jars cool in the oven before removing them, I'm like 97% sure the jars won't explode. I will, however, be testing this with one (1) jar first. If it works, I have ten Mason jars to use for dyeing and can dye my samples in only 3 batches!

[one-time-i-dreamt]

I dyed my hair (dark) at home all by myself for the first time and the bleach didn't take properly so I was left with bright orange-ish hair with shades of black and browns in between. I was more worried about how to style it than how much of a clown I looked like.

[highlynerdy]

The final (I think) result of all the dyeing I've been doing for The Bestie Art Retreat

I may do a few more pale shades for contrast, but oof, it's probably been a decade+ since I've dyed this much fiber at once. Wools used: Rambouillet, Targhee, New Zealand Romney, Domestic Wool Blend, Falkland, Shetland, and Merino/Silk.

[thedimelion]

The results will be a unique and slightly rustic flag. In general, I want people to be aware of their impact when it comes to buying textiles, and that there is alternatives when wanting new clothing or similarities.

[vintagehomecollection]

On the wall, farm garments exemplify a rare combination of sashiko quilting and kasuri dyeing, and probably date from the Meiji era. The sea chests flanking the bed are typical of those from Sakata in northern Yamagata Prefecture.

At Home With Japanese Design: Accents, Structure and Spirit, 1990

[notquitebilateral]

ORGANIZED, FINALLY. I now have a dedicated dyers journal, which is fantastic because I am doing a demo in a month.

I am so happy with this comparison in particular.

[allonsybadwolf]

Here are the results from my week of dyeing!! I shared the last two photos already but I wanted to post them all as a group. The first four (plus a couple more) are available in my shop right now ✨ and if you buy fiber from me PLEASE tag me in any photo posts of your finished yarn once (if) you spin it, I need to see it 👀

[phoradendron]

Lately I have been obsessed with the concept of using mushrooms and lichen to dye fibers with. I came across the Mushroom Color Atlas, created by Julie Beeler and her team, which is a wonderful reference and so so beautiful. I could not have imagined the colors you could get with mushrooms, especially the blues and purples. Each color will tell you the fiber the color was achieved on, the mordant used, the weight of mushroom to fiber, the freshness of and parts of mushroom used, the temperature the dye baths were brought to, and the period of time it was on heat, and the acidity the bath was brought to, if you’re interested in the process. Or you could just look at the amazing array of dye and pigment that were created by mushrooms

[siriscrafts]

I put a solar dyeing jar up! I'm dyeing a t-shirt with onion skins and dried lupin leaves! Red onion skins should give green, yellow onion skins a warm golden yellow and lupins cool yellow. Now it will soak up the sunlight for a couple of weeks and slowly release the dye. No electricity needed! I recycled the last of my alum into this – the water in the jar is the mordanting solution i used in my ecoprinting project!

[cjgladback]

I went to my first fiber festival this past weekend! Hoosier Hills Fiber Festival; if I'm still in this state come June next year, I'll probably be back and would love to meet anybody else there. Socializing/hanging out/talking to people without feeling like I was obstructing Real Customers was the one thing I missed, though I didn't really get to any of the free lectures so maybe that's where I could've met some people. Since it was an unknown situation with a lot of people and nearly an hour drive each way, I strategized to make sure I'd go:

First day, I signed up for a couple volunteer shifts. Absolutely a recommended strategy.

Got to be helpful!

They happened to have goodie bags, to help me justify the gas and time (I now have a nice tape measure to replace the one that's been vacationing with a missing sewing kit for a couple years and a lasercut wood two-inch gauge window that might help me with consistency versus my suboptimal practice of just trying to knit perfect squares when swatching in pattern)

I got to learn things about the layout and schedule I wouldn't know to ask when answering questions and acting as a gofer -- especially true working two different locations

And of course, some people were pretty much guaranteed to be happy to see me!

Second day, I signed up for a workshop in the morning so I'd be there and able to shop for anything I needed at the end. Ombre yarn dyeing was the class! It's acid dyes, something I'm several years off from wanting to get into enough to commit to dedicated cookware, full pots of dye powder, etc. The room with the workshop was a barn that had plenty of outlets--but they did not represent plenty of breakers. So there weren't quite enough functional heating elements for the class to have sufficiently cooked our yarn before leaving, and I did need to risk a giant stock pot at home for three batches of four jars, almost-simmering in a water bath for thirty minutes each, of the yarn that hadn't proven it was done (all but the two palest greens). I was a little worried the delay/drawn out heat situation would affect the results but if it did it wasn't much; I got pretty much exactly what I was hoping for with my two color gradient and the single is great too!

The single dye gradient is the color Moss, which did some interesting things with the red portion separating out once they were heated. Every skein has redder blotches, so I'm not bothered about any inconsistency -- if anything it'll help my finished product camouflage stains. Though it was definitely a surprise for me and the other Moss user in the class when our first yarn to have exhausted the dye was the complementary color to what it went in as.

The two color gradient used Rhodamine Red on one end, which was one end of one of our instructor's samples where she chose a cool-green for the other end to show how multi-component dyes mix less predictably than most paint. (It was kinda like shading with markers where you can still see washes of the pink and green in what you squint at and call a grey-brown.) The other end was Cantaloupe, which was one of the maybe three colors she didn't have a sample cut of yarn for. But she described it as the flesh of a perfect ripe cantaloupe and obviously I had to see that, and it sounded like it would be fairly guaranteed to combine nicely with the magenta while being just enough around a bend in the color wheel to be interesting--warm orange versus cool pink. As I said, it turned out pretty much exactly as I was picturing. Not anticipated was how much the jars looked like they were full of some delicious dragonfruit-mango beverage. Were I still a barista I'd be trying to recreate this for my shift drink.

Image descriptions under the cut.

[ID: Five images following fourteen small skeins of sock yarn dyed in individual glass jars, in two gradients. One gradient is six skeins from a medium forest green through a pale creamy pink, the other is eight skeins from a vibrant yellow orange through an even more vibrant magenta. The first photo is inside under fluorescent lights, showing the 32oz glass canning jars with metal lids and rings, full of dye and yarn on a table at the end of the class in which they were filled and heated for a short time.

The next two images are animated gifs. The first gif is two frames showing the finished dye jars sitting in grass, with their yarn and with it removed. The green gradient left only transparent blue color in its jars, and most of the pink to orange gradient's water looks more orange without its yarn, aside from the third and fourth jars from the orange end, which shade toward a neon lilac with the peachy pink yarn removed. The second gif is a view of the inside of the bright green wash bucket, with just the pink-orange yarn in it, then all of them mixed up, all as they were after a soak with the rust-brown water, in the first rinse, and that rinse water alone showing its transparent but still brown tint.

The last two photos show the gradients lined up along a weathered wooden bench on the side of a deck. The first photo has the wet piles of yarn bundled in front of each of their respective jars with remaining dye. The final photo has the clean, dry yarn wound into center-pull balls and still vibrant in the direct sunlight. End ID]

[roboticchibitan]

What I wanted to do: split a 436yd/100g skein into ten 43yd/10g mini skeins using my niddy noddy to measure by yardage

What I did: made eleven 9.5g skeins

[dangerphd]

had a braid of Polwarth that needed over-dyed. I basically just followed the given colorway, but saturated and covered all of the fiber using those original colors. Pink, orange, yellow, two greens, two purples, and a brown. 🤞🤞🤞

Additionally, had a couple of one-off braids in stash that I want to both soften a bit, and bulk up for more yarn. Enter, merino. Dyeing a couple of bumps of fiber in what I hope ends up being complementary shades to blend and combined with those braids. I think the blue will be fine but I worry about the saturation on the peachy orange...but if it's too much it'll just be an excuse to try again 😂

[aprillasaurus]

My pokeberry dye project is dry!

Above is the finished product- on the left is some white merino dyed with the juice of the berries, and on the left is some greyish merino (old faded natural dye project) over dyed with the skins and seeds.

More images and information on the process under the cut:

What I did:

- Pick pokeberries. Some were plump and ripe, others were more like raisins. They were all pretty full of pigment though.

- Mash berries with gloved hands. Strain the juice out (I used a cheesecloth) into one container and place the skins and seeds in another.

- Add 1 part distilled white vinegar to one part berry juice. For the skins and seeds, I poured the vinegar over them until they were just covered and let them soak overnight at room temperature.

- Strain out the seeds and skins from the vinegar- when I did this, the skins were translucent as all the pigment had gone into the vinegar.

- Add to mordanted wool. I used alum at 12% the weight of the wool, heated up to steaming without boiling and held there for a couple hours before cutting the heat and letting cool overnight. My wool was unevenly mordanted, which I think is partly why it dyed unevenly.

- Heat the dye bath over low heat until it’s steaming but not boiling. Once it got hot, I turned the heat off and covered with a lid to let it cool slowly overnight.

- Remove from the dye bath and lay out in a tray for an hour or so. Apparently this is to oxidize the dye, though I saw no significant change in color.

- Rinse and dry

I’m very happy with how this came out! I do wish I’d strained with more layers of cheesecloth since I still had some small bits that have settled into my wool, but they should fall out when I spin. I think my wool dyed unevenly due to a combination of uneven mordanting and being compressed into a braid.

Bonus: why you need gloves… this was after sticking my hand in to press the wool down into the dye bath. It took several washes to mostly fade 🤠

EXTRA bonus: some wool I dyed with pokeberries two years ago!

[disgruntled-lifeform]

Hypothetically, if someone (not me) was to decide they wanted to start dyeing wool and had no idea where to start, which direction would you point them in?

[hlahlahlahlahly]

This summer I had a sudden desire to dye a bunch of rainbow striped yarn in different ways, and play with the results. So far:

Method 1, i thought it would be a cool challenge to dye a skein of yarn carefully planned so that i could knit a crescent shawl and have stripes the size I want all in one skein. So I picked a pattern, did a swatch, did a bunch of math (yes, there was a spreadsheet), portioned out the yarn by weight and I think it turned out pretty well. Almost all the color changes happened where I wanted them, but I did have to dye more yarn to finish the bindoff.

Method 2: I wound a longish warp on my warp board, and dyed sections of the warp in sequence. Unfortunately I did it in the evening when I was tired, and put the turquoise not where I actually wanted it, but it still turned out really fun

Sock 1, a herringbone rib

Sock 2, SlipStripeSpiral combined with a plain white yarn

Method 3: I held the yarn double, and knit a blank in garter stitch on size 15 needles. I then dyed it as a repeating long gradient, using the garter ridges for even spacing. I did it on our somewhat sloped sidewalk, so the dye would run more, and the underside would get an interesting effect.

Sock 1: standard top down sock with a sailors rib pattern

Sock 2: toe up with a traveling stitch zigzag

I should be able to get probably 3 more pairs of socks out of this, but I haven't decided on what design I want to do yet, so nominate your favorites if you get so moved

[allonsybadwolf]

I've been IN the dye pots y'all. New braids dropping in my shop very soon. I have so much wool to spin right now. It's literally all over the house. We've way over capacity. I need to finish the lace weight spin on my EEW and my spindle spin and then maybe I'll do a poll on what to spin next, because I am currently SPOILED for choice. and. famously bad at choosing 😂