Yarn Dyeing: Buy All the Undyed Yarns!!!

After my morning in the textile centre dye lab on Friday, I convinced the lovely Jonas to take me back there on Saturday morning. Not for dyeing this time . . . but for a related cause.

I’d gotten an email, I remembered after getting a verbal reminder, that the textile centre was doing a fundraiser on Saturday morning/afternoon. Apparently they’d gotten an incredibly large donation of yarn and fibre from an estate and they were selling it en mass to raise some money for the centre. I had thought about going, but then immediately forgotten that it was happening until the instructor in my dyeing class mentioned it. She went to scout what was available and let us know that there was quite a lot of undyed/white/light coloured yarn on offer. This, of course, piqued my interest, and I asked Jonas if he would mind driving me back over there the next morning so I could see if I could replenish my stock of tester yarns. I’d previously (when I first started dyeing) bought a bunch of yarn on super sale from my LYS that I used as colour testers and practice skeins, but I’d run out and now if I wanted to test a colourway I needed to dye a full skein or else sacrifice a skein that I could be selling as a tester, and neither of those things tends to gain me any money back for a skein. I get that this is part of business, but if I can get non-marketable skeins and use them to experiment then more’s the better, right?

Jonas agreed, because he’s amazingly supportive of my somewhat ridiculous hobby that I pretend is a business, and drove me to the textile centre at 10:30am on a Saturday morning. We got our number and waited for the sale to start, then immediately rushed to the table labeled “wool” in the yarn section. There was far less there than in the “cotton” or “other” sections and far less yarn than fleece and of course far less undyed yarn than already dyed yarn, but! What I found were two LARGE bags of undyed or very light coloured wool for $3US per bag, a box of various skeins of silk for $5US per skein, and a FULL BAG OF 100% SILK SKEINS for $50. There are probably 10 skeins of pure silk in there. Since I’m working on a bunch of Downton Abbey yarns and I figure the Downton ladies would love to be represented in silk, I decided to buy the bag and another tester skein that I can split into 5 parts and try to create the Downton colourways in a bit of luxurious 100% silk. 

The process was quick, painless, fun, and $65US later I came home with this:

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