Fleece on Earth

Saturday was our rain date for the dyeing workshop my mom planned last weekend. It was rainy this weekend too, but not quite as rainy and cold as last weekend.

Only six of us showed up, but since we had to do it all indoors, that was probably good. We used ProChem One Shot dyes and KnitPicks worsted and fingering weight dyeable yarn.

I was favourably impressed with the yarn quality, actually. The fingering weight is very soft and the yardage is a great value - over 400 yards in a skein, enough for a pair of socks. The worsted was also nice and soft and took the dye well. It was about 220 yards/skein, so I toyed with the idea of dyeing three skeins for a clapotis, but am not sure if I'm ready to tackle that yet.

We used a microwave and plastic casserole dishes and experimented with a variety of techniques. Some of the yarns were painted (using hair dye bottles) flat on plastic; we rewound some skeins into longer (2 metre) skeins and painted those; my mom tried winding some into a 42" skein and painting the skein on the niddy-noddy; my sister and I tried coiling a skein into a circle and painting it in pie wedges; and of course we tried the ball winder method (the bottom of the ball one colour, the top of the ball another colour). I went up today to take pictures and we tried a somewhat different technique with a ball-wound skein - we painted that skein in wedges, like a pie, instead of top and bottom.

Pictures! I took one of the skeins so I could see that the different techniques looked like in the skein, then tried to take pictures of each skein so that I could see what the techniques looked like "flat," as it were.



1 & 2 - ball wound and dyed. 1 was dyed with cherry red on the bottom and maize yellow on the top. 2 was dyed with mountain aqua, kiwi green, and then we squirted bright orange into the middle of the skein and cooked it some more.

3 & 4 - painted skeins. 3 was the skein Mom painted on the niddy-noddy. We think she got pastel-like colours because the yarn was under tension when she painted it. 4 was a 2 meter skein that we attempted to paint like a Koigu skein.

5 - the skein we coiled into a circle and painted in pie wedges. We did three different shades of green and filled in with some indigo and some bright orange.

6 - the "test" skein we had on the table! Every time we mixed a colour, we tried it on this skein. At the end of the day, we looked at it and thought it was pretty cute, so we added a little more dye and cooked it too. ;-)

Individual pictures of the skeins can be found here:

1 and 2 | 3 and 4 | 5 and 6

Individual skeins:

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

This was so much fun. They are planning to dye some more on Weds. I might take the day off! I ordered some more dye yesterday when I got home too. We needed/used a lot more yellow than we thought we would, and we've discovered that colours like burgundy and teal and purple aren't all that easy to mix.

There's a lovely maple leaf scarf at Earthfaire so tonight we tried to dye an autumn-colours skein for the pattern, which I ordered yesterday as well. I also think a lot of the projects in Lavish Laces could use this yarn, at least the fingering weight yarn.

Oh - I also took some pics of the unblocked (!) but still completed alpaca stole from Lavish Laces (it's the background knit in the yarn pictures above, but you can't see much of it). My daughter was a very willing model. I went ahead and started working on the Falling Leaves project in my grey handspun from Lavish Laces too. Go me!

Labels: dyeing