Immersion Dyeing - My Way

There are many ways to do immersion dyeing of wool fiber to get a semi solid color. I thought I would share my way of doing it.

This method originated from a way that Carol Lee at The Sheep Shed Studio does her dyeing. I saw it on the Yahoo Group, Dye Happy some time ago.

You will need a large dye pot and some roving as well as acid dye stock and vinegar  or citric acid. The roving needs to fit in the dye pot with some space to move around in the water for more even color.

Pre-soak the roving in water and a little bit of Dawn dish soap. In the meantime, put the dye pot over your heat source and bring it to a full rolling boil. You want it rolling not just bubbling.

When the water boils, add the acid dye stock to your pot. My dye stocks are mixed to a one percent solution. For eight ounces of fiber and a nice medium shade, I like to use one half cup of stock. For the fiber shown in the photo I was aiming for a lighter color so I used one-eighth cup or two tablespoons of stock. This fiber weighed about 7.25 ounces.

TURN OFF THE HEAT

Is the heat off? If so, you can squeeze out the fiber and add it to the pot of very hot water and dye stock. Push it down into the stock and let it sit there for five minutes or so. The dye won't strike yet because there is no acid in the dye bath,. Waiting helps make sure all the fiber is in contact with the dye.

Next add the acid. For this pot I added about one half cup of vinegar. Push the fiber down gently to mix the vinegar with the dye liquor.

Put the lid on the pot and let it cool. The pot will stay hot enough for the dye to strike for over an hour. I let my pot cool completely before I rinse and dry my fiber.

The thing I like about this method is that it gives me a fairly even strike and there is no chance of felting the fiber assuming that the heat was turned off before the fiber went in the pot and that there was no vigorous stirring.

Give this a try next time you want a semi solid fiber.

Winter Fiber Fun - Roving Dyeing

My friend, Mary at Fancy Fibers, organized and ran a wonderful retreat in February, 2009, at a local camp. It was loosely organized for all types of Fiber Folk to come and do their thing and just hang out for the weekend.

She planned only a few classes for the retreat. One of those was a fiber dyeing class that I ended up teaching as a last minute fill in when the original teacher had to cancel. The roving was merino superwash supplied by my friend Joanne of Terrific Fibers

The class had about 14 people in it including several first time dyers. I was very concerned about keeping the dye where it should be and off of where it should not be, and I am happy to say we were succesful with that effort.

We covered everything well with plastic and newspapers, then laid out our soaked rovings on plastic wrap. We painted these with dye stock, then sprayed them with vinegar and wrapped them tightly. We rolled them up jelly roll fashioned. We labeled them with some plastic tape and markers and put them in roasters to steam.

Each of the rovings turned out beautiful, and the fiber spins like butter.

Kettle Dyeing for Turkeys

I thought it might be useful to document my latest fiber dyeing escapade. I am terrible about taking notes or keeping dye records. Everyone who dyes fiber does things a little differently, so perhaps someone will find this interesting.

Last week, Wal-Mart had their electric turkey roasters on sale for $22. This is the sort of thing I had been waiting for. I had been wanting a new dye pot, and this seemed like the perfect choice.

The Turkey Roaster is sort of like a large crockpot, but better since there are more temperatures to choose from. This roaster will never see a turkey or food, since it is contaminated with dye.

Last weekend I had to try it out. I kettle dyed some bats of Romney wool. It is always hard for me to decide what colors I would like to use. I decided I need some more neutrals, since I don't have much neutral yarn.

I have one color of Jacquard Acid Dye called Chestnut that I had never tried - perfect for my neutral theme. I filled the roaster about half full of water and added about 1/2 cup of vinegar then left the water to heat. I filled another bucket with water and put the fiber - a bit over 8 ounces - in to soak while the water heated up.

I had an auxiliary thermometer to monitor the water temperature. I have found it is very hard to tell how hot the water actually is without the thermometer. When the water reached about 195 degrees, I added my dye - 1 cup of one percent Chestnut dye stock - and stirred to distribute the dye. I squeezed most of the water out of the fiber. Next I put the fiber into the dyepot and pushed it gently down into the dye. I adjusted the temperature to keep the pot hot but not boiling, covered the pot and left it for about a half hour. Then I turned it off and left it until it was completely cool.

At that point, the fiber had taken up all of the dye in the pot. I removed the fiber and put it into some warm water to rinse out the vinegar, then squeezed out the water and left the bat to dry.

I repeated this a couple of times over the next 2 days, using the same water and vinegar that was in the pot. The water was clear, so there was no problem with getting the colors mixed. Once I used about 1/4 cup of the same Chestnut dye which resulted in a pretty dark gold.

The other time I used black dye. My black dye stock is a 5 percent solution since I usually want strong color when I dye with black. I only used 1/4 cup of the strong dye stock. The fiber did not use all of the dye after the 30 minutes in the hot dye water, so I added additional dry fiber on top to take up the excess dye.
The fiber that was at the bottom of the pot is a dark charcoal. The fiber from the top of the pot is a beautiful silver gray. If I wanted really black fiber, I would need to overdye the charcoal again with black.

Kettle dyeing does not produce an even color. The fiber has dark and light spots. This works out fine though when the yarn is spun it has nice color depth.