http://www.spinoffmagazine.com/media/p/2718.aspx

This is in a thread about spinning Falkland wool. Direct link to the post that also has pictures:
http://www.ravelry.com/discuss/a-spinners-study/989833/1-25#25

You need to log in to Ravelry.com to be able to access the above link.

I have a nice, hand-dyed braid of Merino top from GLBLF that I think I will spin this way. Hopefully in the next month or two.

Here is the dried red skein, before reskeining it:

Here it is reskeined:

Here is my superwash fiber before braiding it:

Here it is braided:

Basically, I wanted something dark to knit mittens and hat for my son, but not black. I wanted a variegated type of yarn. I decided to try kettle dyeing again. Last time I tried this I used way too much water. The dye went all over the place. I may have been doing other things wrong, too, but for sure I had too much water. So I went back and read the “Hot Pour Method” in the Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook more carefully. A key point is to have what they describe as 1.5 inches of water in the bottom of the pan. Really, I think that may even be too much, but as they point out, with less water it is difficult to regulate the temperature in the pot. It’s important to keep the water just below boiling for the dyes to strike in one spot (also along with the correct pH level) instead of having the dyes wander around the pot for a while looking for fiber to attach to.

Well, when I did this dyeing in December, I did 2 skeins of Knitpicks bare 100% superwash merino (4 oz each). They just fit in the pot. Placed them in a horseshoe shape (letter U) side-by-side. Twisted Sisters recommends 2 tsp of vinegar to a gallon of water. I mixed a smaller batch (quart) with the same proportions. I had no way that day to test the pH so I just trusted it would be OK. I put just enough water in the pot to barely cover the two skeins of yarn and started heating the pot up slowly, to just below boiling.

Applied dye with the water bottles I had used previously. I still had dye mixed up from months ago and used that. The colors I used were Jacquard Sapphire Blue, Navy, Brown and Jet Black applied in that order.

However, I had some problems…

1. Getting an even temperature in the pot. I have a gas stove. This day I was using the enamel tamale pot I have. Cheap from K-mart. I have to keep the flame on the stove low in order to not boil the water. But then some spots are practically coming to boiling while other spots are cold. I tried moving the pot around on the burner to try and even out the temperature in the pot. Stirring is not really an option.
2. White spots. Applying the dye with the water bottles shown above…it would surface strike, leaving the yarn below white. I used my trusty plastic dye spoon to try and move the yarn around to expose the white parts, even picking up yarn with the spoon and holding it at the water surface level, so that I could get the dye exactly onto the spots I wanted. Later someone suggested syringes to me, and I have used them in my latest dye escaped (yesterday) and talk about the syringes below.
3. Too much water. As I added dyes to the pot, the water level increased. It made it harder to keep the dyes in one spot until they would strike the yarn. In retrospect, I probably should have added more vinegar to the pot as I proceeded.

Overall, I don’t think the water bottles give me enough control for dye application.

Nevertheless, despite my problems, I really, really liked the way my brown and blue dark yarn turned out, and it was pretty much as I envisioned it. One skein was darker than the other because I ran out of the black dye while I was in mid-process, and I didn’t apply evenly between the two skeins. But it wasn’t a huge difference, and overall still very pleased.

Well… Now I am dyeing yarn again for a new project. Yesterday, I started out to make a red/brown/orange mix. Same yarn as above, same technique, except a friend of mine lent me some of these syringes to try. I did not try out the 1 ml syringe, although I can see how that would be very useful for mixing up certain color combinations. For the yarn dyeing I mostly used the 12 ml syringe. Later in the evening I was dyeing fiber, and used the 35 ml syringe. I’ve decided to ditch the bottles shown in the photo above for storage purposes. I’m switching to Mason jars.

Here’s a picture of my yarn in the pot:

It looks much darker in the pot than it actually was. This time I had a pH meter that I picked up at Home Depot. $7.58. It’s for measuring the pH of the soil for plants (get it in the gardening department). When I mixed up my vinegar/water solution it told me dead-on pH was 4, which is the target pH. However, when I put it in the pot with the yarn, pH was registering much higher there, around 7. Also, subsequent batches of my vinegar/water solution on the same day also registered higher pH and I had to put LOTS more vinegar in (like 5 to 6 times the recommendation from the book). And still didn’t get down to 4. And eventually just said, “What the heck” and questioned whether the meter is reading accurately or not.

So just one skein this time. In a U-shape. I try to stripe the dye perpendicular across the legs of the U. Not that you can tell in the picture above. It all kind of swirls around. This time I used Jacquard colors Yellow Sun, Aztec Gold, Chestnut, Brown, Fire Red, Cherry Red, and Burgundy. Apply from lightest to darkest. You can’t even see any of the Yellow Sun any more because I didn’t really want yellow anyhow, and I let the reds get on it to make orange. The yellow did go all over the place, though. I tried to keep it to one spot, but it kind of spread out quite a bit. No worries, that’s why from lightest to darkest. You can dye over the light colors.

The syringes provided MUCH more control in the placement of the dyes. Much easier to avoid white spots, although I still had some. Mostly where the yarn was tied. I have to tie much looser next time and make sure to only use acrylic or cotton yarns for ties. The wool yarns used as ties suck up dye and block absorption to the layer below, making white spots. I started with a lower water level this time, too.

Here’s the skein hanging up to dry. I hope to get nice pictures of it reskeined tomorrow:

I also dyed some superwash wool top yesterday. Here it is in the pot prepped for dyeing:

So the vinegar solution level is pretty low. Not even covering the fiber. I think it was about 1.5 inches deep. Again, as in both situations described above, bringing the heat up slowly to a consistent/even temperature is a challenge on my stove. The pot above is a new one I just got. Stainless steel. 16 quarts. Cheap at the grocery store ($21).

Anyway, once I got the heat up to what I hoped was hot enough, I started striping the colors perpendicular across the fiber. Here is the finished striping in the pot, still cooking a bit:

From right to left, the colored stripes are: Kelly Green/Spruce mixture, diluted somewhat. On that right-hand green part, I did not try to saturate the area completely and it has come out to have some white or near white spots in that region of the fiber, which I think looks good. Yellow Sun/Aztec Gold stripe. Sky Blue. Turquoise. Spruce. Chestnut. And the left-most area was supposed to be a sort of olive green. Just flying by the seat of my pants, I thought mixing Aztec Gold (a light brown color) with Kelly Green (an extremely bright green) might do the job. But it looked so brown in the pot. Mossy brown. Honestly, I didn’t think I was going to like this result at all. Also, the Turquoise kind of got edged out or swallowed up by the surrounding colors. Somewhat of a disappointment.

Using the syringes does help to get the dye to lower layers of the fiber, but you still have to watch out for white spots. I had a rubber spatula that I was using to gently move the fiber aside and look for those. I still missed some. Even though this was superwash, because superwash falls apart easily when submersed in water, I didn’t want to mess around with it too much.

After cooking it for an additional 20 or so minutes, I turned off the pot and let it sit for a half hour or so. But too impatient to let it cool long, I dumped it out into my salad spinner:

I liked it a lot better dumped out. Let it sit and cool for another 30 minutes and then started to rinse it. But the water was coming out with lots of light green tint. I decided I maybe still needed to set the color. Put about 6 quarts of water into my pot, a couple good glugs of vinegar, and put the fiber back. Brought it up slowly to temp, cooked it for another 20 minutes, turned it off and went to bed.

This morning I hung up the fiber to dry. It has an overall greenish tint to it. It still had some green running off of it when I rinsed this morning, but I’m a bit cautious of handling the fiber too much (superwash…can still fall apart and get mussed), so I decided I can rinse it more thoroughly after I spin it. I think I’m going to like this. I hope to get better photos tomorrow when it is fully dry:

Editted to add:

I found I had written an earlier draft in December about my dyeing last month of the brown/blue yarn for my son’s mitts and hat. It can be found here:

http://www.thinkspot.net/fiberlife/?p=109

So here is a little photo documentation of what I did…

I had some inexpensive Merino top that I had dyed a few months back in a few bright colors. Here they are:

From left to right: Black, some brown and a golden blend I made. Sun yellow (I think?). Kelly Green, turquoise, and I believe Sapphire blue. I did not use the darker blue on the far right in this blending.

So I decided to use the black, brown, yellow, green and turquoise in my blend. I tore off some bits of this top and made little bundles:

From one of the bundles, I loaded one of my carders:

The brown and yellow are also on there, but below some of the other colors, so not as easy to see. I then carded back and forth between my combs and finally took off a rolag of blended fibers:

From here I made several more rolags…possibly 8 or so? I don’t recall. I did find that the little bundles of fiber I had pre-arranged were too big to card an entire one of these bundles. Anyhow, made several rolags and then put them side by side and pulled them into a piece of roving as shown below:

Now you can see in the pulled roving above, that the colors are not so well blended. I will want to card and blend some more. But I ran out of time on Thursday and had to put the stuff aside.

I will say that even this inexpensive merino is making and incredibly fluffy, spongy, soft roving. Amazing.

This adventure will be continued at a later date…

Anyhow, for the next time… here’s an article with some hopefully helpful tips on dyeing silk hankies. I don’t want to forget these, so saving the link here:

Dyeing Silk Hankies – Lizard Toes

This link has some tips on fleece washing. I’m going to try this:

Washing Corriedale Wool…the way I do it

She recommends it for any high-lanolin breeds, which includes cormo.

I used 4 color of Jacquard acid dyes: Sapphire Blue, Navy, Brown and Black. I had solutions of these already prepared from several months ago, so I just shook them well and it seems they were fine to use.

To start, I soaked two skeins of the Bare Worsted in water with a couple drops of dish soap for a bit over an hour. Then I squeezed it out and put it in the dry dye pot. I was following the method for Hot Pour dyeing from The Twisted Sisters Sock Workshop. So I prepared my vinegar solution. I knew I wanted only enough vinegar solution to barely cover the yarn, if that much. Too much water and the dye will just go all throughout the pot and not stay in one spot on the yarn. Also important is to have the correct amount of vinegar.

All told, I ended up to use about 8 cups of water with 1 tsp of vinegar. It seemed like barely enough at the beginning, but in retrospect I wonder if I might’ve gotten by with less, as it seemed there was too much liquid in the pot at the end of the dye process.

I put the vinegar solution into the dye pot over the yarn and started to slowly heat the pot up. You’re supposed to get it to 190 degrees F. So steaming, but not boiling. I found it hard to get a uniform temp throughout the pot. The center was quite hot, but the edges were cool. I tried moving the pot around on the burner to even out the temperature. Stirring really isn’t an option.

Eventually I decided it was hot enough to begin. The temperature is important so that the dye strikes where you put it and doesn’t disperse throughout the pot.

I started with the sapphire blue. I made a stripe across the pot, and the dye seemed to stay put in that stripe. However, after poking my rubber-gloved finger through to examine, it was clear that the yarn on the bottom was not getting much if any color. This situation was repeated through all the colors. I ended up having to move strands of yarn aside with my finger or a spoon to reveal missed strands below and trying to apply dye to the still-white yarn strands. I ended up to use quite a lot of dye and didn’t have the control I would have liked. Somehow I thought if I used the right amount of vinegar and had the temperature correct, that it would work as described in the Twister Sisters book.

I did turn the heat up and the pot was simmering. I was glad I was doing Superwash wool, so I didn’t have to worry about felting.

It seems to me that direct painting of the yarn might allow for avoiding some of the issues with color distribution and placement and afford more control than this “Hot Pour” method.

for blending the fibers. Just saving the link here for me so I can find it easily again within the next couple of weeks…

Here are two that I read about on the Ravelry forums and would like to try at some point and don’t want to forget…

from Post #8 in the Stinky Wool thread (must be logged in to Ravelry.com from preceding link to work) on the Dying to Learn Dye! Restaurant group at Ravelry, Maddie writes (in regards to dyeing raw fleece):

… basically take a big canner pot and pack in your wool locks so that they are butt end up. I think you could do it either way, but that worked best so that the dirt fell down towards the tips, where most of the dirt is. You pack the locks tightly enough so that they don’t flop over and they stay intact. When you think it’s good, you take the fibers back out, and put in water the same height as the locks were. Add a healthy squirt of Dawn. This aides in wetting out the fibers, and also helps to clean them. Add a good half of a cup of vinegar. Re-insert the fibers. The water should come just up to the butt ends of the fleece, but no higher. Put on the stove, and start to gently heat the pot. DO NOT BOIL. If you boil, you can damage the wool, and it will be “crispy”. (You can guess how I know this. LOL) If it simmers you will also probably get what I call “the cone of bubbles”. It’s kind of like a volcano of bubbles. While you are heating, you take any powdered acid dye, I use Cushing, and sprinkle on the dye in a section. You can use about 4 colors, but 2 or 3 are better. Try to keep the dye in it’s own section. It will start to blend and overlap as it heats. I find that it’s really best to use colors that won’t muddy. For example, don’t use green and red; too much brown will result. It’s better to use blue and red and let the middle blend to purple. Heat to just under a simmer and keep it there for about 20-30 minutes. You can manipulate the dye a bit with the end of a wooden spoon or whatever other dye tool you use. Just try not to get a real liquidy puddle; the goal is to have the fiber packed in enough so that the water doesn’t shift a lot. When done “cooking”, take the whole pot out to the garage or outside. Leaving the lid on, put it on the cement to cool. Leave over night. In the morning the dye should be exhausted and now the whole thing is cool enough to rinse in cold water.

I asked whether she thought, instead of using powdered dyes it would be OK to use liquid base dyes instead. She replied that it would probably work, but she thinks that the powdered dye tends to stay in one place a bit more.

Here’s another interesting idea for making semi-solid kettle dyes, posted by mrslevite in Post #6 of the thread “Is it possible to make a semisolid while handpainting?” in the group “Love to Dye”.

For more solid semi-solids, kettle dye, adding color to the fiber or yarn before adding any heat or acid. Gently lift or move the the yarn or fiber to let the color reach all parts. Let it sit for a while. Then you can start adding heat.

I asked about when to add acid and she replied:

I bring it up to the temp for about 20 minutes or so – if I’m that patient – then add acid and keep it up to temp for 10-20 minutes longer – or until I remember to turn off the heat. I usually dye in the crockpot, so I don’t worry about cooking it too long.

I have resisted the whole crockpot thing for dyeing so far. Not sure if I will give in at some point…?