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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Yarn Dyeing: Adventures in the Dye Lab (Part 1)

Hi all. First, sorry for my somewhat prolonged absence. It’s not that nothing is happening, in fact it’s quite the opposite and ALL THE THINGS are happening and I can’t stop and catch my breath long enough to tell you about them. I’m queuing up a bunch of posts now, so hopefully there will be some content to keep you updated while I try to keep up with life.

First, I want to start with my adventures of a week ago now (wow, it doesn’t seem like that long). I’m fortunate that in my city there’s a fantastic textile centre (which also houses the weavers’ guild and I believe at least part of the knitters’ guild) and that said textile centre has a dye lab. That’s right . . . an entire room dedicated to dyeing fibres. And if you’re a member and have taken the requisite courses from them (yep . . . they teach dyeing and other fibre arts, too!) you can pay a small fee and rent it for the day. Which means that I don’t have to dye yarn in my kitchen all the time and can instead have a dedicated space that I can check out that never, ever, ever, ever will have someone’s food prepared in it!

Last Friday, I took the second of the two requisite courses that will allow me to check out the lab, Colour Wheel in Wool. Now, the class presumes that you have no familiarity at all with acid dyeing or dyeing in general, and of course I do have some, but everything I know I read in a book or online, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to have someone who’s actually researching for a book on dyes teach me a few things. And I was right. The crux of the course was that we had 12 pieces of undyed wool (fabric, not yarn, but the idea is the same) and 3 colours of acid dye (magenta, yellow, and blue). We started out by learning to mix larger quantities of the dyestock and then how to mix various levels of these pre-mixed colours to make 12 different colours.

It was hugely insightful for me, because everything I’d read says that the acid dyes don’t often mix well, so I thought I was more or less stuck with using the pre-mixed colours to do my work. But according to my instructor, even the pre-mixed colours from the various companies will mix with one another if you use this process and are careful to stir/shake the final blend together well enough to distribute the colours. Probably if I just dropped two different dry powders together in the water it wouldn’t mix, but she says that this process will work just fine. So now I have some things to think about while I experiment. And experimenting I am, as you’ll see in the next few posts.

It was a great morning in the dye lab and I came out of it with a ton of new ideas and insights into my craft. I was renewed and inspired and invigourated, and it’s hard to beat a morning like that.

Here’s a (not all that awesome) photo of my creations. I’ll try to take a better one for you this weekend so you can get a better idea of what I made. The teal is the most perfect colour for me ever and it was only because I had more profitable endeavours that I didn’t just immediately go home and drop some of my personal stash of undyed yarn into a pot of that teal and start making myself something amazing. Rest assured, though . . . it will happen someday. Hopefully soon.