July 7, 2015: fiber arts Tuesday

Last Tuesday I was getting ready to dye some wool with natural materials. The entire process took a few days, and I have some photos here to show the different steps.

I started on Tuesday evening by processing a pound of combed top (I used Wensleydale silver), placing it in a pot of water with alum and cream of tartar, bringing it to 180 degrees, and keeping the temperature more or less steady for an hour. I learned exactly why my friend Leslie at Nice Threads Fiber Studio recommends a crock pot--the kind used for cooking meat, with a thermometer that tells you the temperature of the solid stuff inside the pot--for this kind of process. If I do a project like this again, I will shell out the fifty bucks for the crock pot!

On Wednesday I took ziploc bags full of wet wool to the art studio at school, where my friend Erin and I mixed several natural dye preparations. She dyed squares of silk and I divided the wool into smaller pieces in order to test the different colors. We used mint, osage, indigo, tumeric, hibicus, pokeweed, and red cabbage. The only real challenge we encountered was that she was dying her silk in hot water dyes. Wool will felt if it's exposed to water that's too hot, or if it's subjected to a sudden temperature change (and heat + moisture + agitation = felt when you're dealing with wool). I soon found that some of the dye she was using was too hot, so experimented with placing the wool in cold water dye solutions. Here is a picture of some wool soaking in hibiscus dye.

We spent most of the afternoon trying out wool and silk in the different dye preparations. We definitely had some successes and some failures, and it was fun having time to try out all the different colors.

After several hours, I put my wool in ziploc bags so it could remain in the dye solutions over night, and brought it home to soak for a while longer. The next day I rinsed it out and hung it up to dry in the bathroom. I hang wool to dry over the shower curtain rod the way I suppose some women hang panyhose or bathing suits!

The next step was carding the wool to untangle the fibers and make it easier to work with when it's time to spin. I use two dog brushes which work quite well as hand carders. First I pull the fibers apart with my hands, then card a little bit at a time.

 In these photos I'm carding the wool that was dyed with osage; the wool turned out a buttery yellow color. When all the osage wool was carded, I put it in a bowl:

I carded the tumeric wool next, and spun the osage and the tumeric, then plied the osage and tumeric together in order to get yellow yarn with two slightly different shades of yellow. The final product looks like this:

The next task will be to card the wool dyed with the hibiscus. It turned out a mauve-ish lavender color, and will be quite beautiful when it's spun.