Tour de Fleece dyeing - photos
Jul. 4th, 2009 04:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stitchy_stitchyI started with this....
(8 ounces of Romney top - it started as one long strip, and I halved it, and halved the halves, and halved the half-halves...)
Combining them with some off-brand egg dye kits, I ended up with...
I started with a test batch using one strip, and thought I had the blue dye - but I had the green. That's okay, green is cool too. I used one strip, one tablet, 1/2 cup of vinegar, and enough water to cover, which worked out to about 3.5 cups. (And yes, I do need to give my kitchen a good cleaning...)
In the oven at 200 degrees for about an hour and a half, and then I turned it off and left it overnight. In the morning, there was no color left in the water, and...
...pretty bright green fiber. I decided to leave one strip undyed, use up the rest of the kit I'd opened, and then pull the blue (which I could reliably recognize after figuring out which was green) out of a second kit, and I got to work on that the next night.
Pink - I used less vinegar, because the PAAS kits now say not to use any at all with the pink.
Anyways. It took a lot more time in the oven for these to set properly, especially the blue and the yellow; my Inner Scientist is wondering about the effects of pan geometry and water amounts and this and that and the other. But I ended up with...
All kinds of pretty dyed fiber.
But wait, you might ask - doesn't the standard egg dye kit include a purple tablet? Yes, yes it does....and that was the one that failed spectacularly but not unexpectedly, because purple eggs tend to fail in the same way.
You can see that even before I heated it, it was doomed. I soaked the fiber in that dish, then took it out and mixed the dye, then put the fiber back in. The dye broke even as I was mixing it - the blue didn't want to mix with the pink - and then when I put the fiber back in, I probably should have had more water in the dish: the fiber soaked up every drop that was in there. Pouring plain water right on the fiber resulted in the lighter-colored spots - it got some of the dye back into circulation, but those spots never really took up much of the dye, and nothing really changed from that point.
See all the blue crud in the pan? The blue dye never really struck, and the water evaporated. (Pan geometry, yup.)
The final product is kind of cool, but not really a good match for this project; I'm going to save it and do something else with it. That might be "overdye with blue", that might be "Spin and enjoy the pretty pinks and purples"...haven't decided yet.
(8 ounces of Romney top - it started as one long strip, and I halved it, and halved the halves, and halved the half-halves...)
Combining them with some off-brand egg dye kits, I ended up with...
I started with a test batch using one strip, and thought I had the blue dye - but I had the green. That's okay, green is cool too. I used one strip, one tablet, 1/2 cup of vinegar, and enough water to cover, which worked out to about 3.5 cups. (And yes, I do need to give my kitchen a good cleaning...)
In the oven at 200 degrees for about an hour and a half, and then I turned it off and left it overnight. In the morning, there was no color left in the water, and...
...pretty bright green fiber. I decided to leave one strip undyed, use up the rest of the kit I'd opened, and then pull the blue (which I could reliably recognize after figuring out which was green) out of a second kit, and I got to work on that the next night.
Pink - I used less vinegar, because the PAAS kits now say not to use any at all with the pink.
Anyways. It took a lot more time in the oven for these to set properly, especially the blue and the yellow; my Inner Scientist is wondering about the effects of pan geometry and water amounts and this and that and the other. But I ended up with...
All kinds of pretty dyed fiber.
But wait, you might ask - doesn't the standard egg dye kit include a purple tablet? Yes, yes it does....and that was the one that failed spectacularly but not unexpectedly, because purple eggs tend to fail in the same way.
You can see that even before I heated it, it was doomed. I soaked the fiber in that dish, then took it out and mixed the dye, then put the fiber back in. The dye broke even as I was mixing it - the blue didn't want to mix with the pink - and then when I put the fiber back in, I probably should have had more water in the dish: the fiber soaked up every drop that was in there. Pouring plain water right on the fiber resulted in the lighter-colored spots - it got some of the dye back into circulation, but those spots never really took up much of the dye, and nothing really changed from that point.
See all the blue crud in the pan? The blue dye never really struck, and the water evaporated. (Pan geometry, yup.)
The final product is kind of cool, but not really a good match for this project; I'm going to save it and do something else with it. That might be "overdye with blue", that might be "Spin and enjoy the pretty pinks and purples"...haven't decided yet.
no subject
on 2009-07-05 01:57 am (UTC)I once used a purple easter egg dye on an ounce of Perendale and got an length of roving that was almost polka-dotted because of how uneven it took up. I fixed that by combing the wool until it was blended again.
no subject
on 2009-07-06 12:30 am (UTC)I'm probably going to leave that bit of fiber as-is; I kind of like the way the variations turned out.