Indicolite
This is another in a series of efforts to dye some mohair from a yucky pink to a useable color. The previous attempts, Purple Haze and Oasis Sunset were pleasantly successful so when I discovered more pink yarn…
...(this is a deeper pink) overdying seemed like a reasonable option.
Materials
Approximately 4 ounces of Classic Elite La Gran Mohair, medium grey/pink color.
About 1/2 oz liquid, blue food coloring
White vinegar
Water
Method
Crock pot
Colorfast?
Color crocked very slightly through all washings and rinsings. I would assume that it may continue to do so (the way jeans do) for a while.
Color name
Indicolite
The battle for purple continues :) I thought I had a shot here with the liquid food coloring (blue) to which I would add just a touch of red icing dye thus circumventing the violet icing dye’s inevitable color change when the vinegar is added. I started with a fair amount of the blue and then added the red after dissolving it in hot water. That gave me a great violet! Then I added the vinegar and the whole thing changed into a dirty, swapy green. Bleah… For the first time I threw out a dyebath. Better that than the yarn, I’m thinking :)
I proceeded using only the liquid, blue food coloring. I washed this yarn in dish detergent and did not rinse before dyeing it. The dye, being liquid, didn’t need to be prepared or dissolved and so it was simply added to water and vinegar (probably half a cup) to create enough dye solution to cover the yarn. The yarn was soaked and then washed in dish detergent. The dyebath was poured into the crock pot, the yarn was added and the pot covered and set to low. The dyebath never did quite exhaust. This ran all day and was allowed to cool overnight. Washing, rinsing (many, many rinses!) and drying followed the standard procedure.
Notes:
I now know that the issues of achieving a violet color in the presence of acid have to do with the red component of the color - at least in the icing dyes. I’ve used red and pink kool-aids and not noticed any color changes, nor were there any problems with the red easter egg tablets. Grape kool-aid (a natural, you would think, for a purple dye) has a substantial green component which I find unattractive and drab.
Indicolite is the blue-green variety of tourmaline and this yarn came out almost exactly that shade, hence the name.
I must say, mohair certainly dyes nicely - at least Classic Elite’s mohair does. I’m getting the hang of hnadling it properly too. The first time I did this, the yarn was a matted mess after it had dried and required much coaxing and pleading to straighten out. This time the yarn unwound (from the skein) and wound (into the ball) as smoothly as silk.
Colored by Robbyn on 09/22 at 11:25 AM
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Black Watch
I wasn’t aiming for anything in particular with this project, more looking to expand upon the experiment in variegation done in Crimson and Clover. Well, that’s not exactly true I guess; I was hoping for more of a teal and less of an evergreen than I got but it’s all good, right? If it doesn’t look like mud, then it’s a success - or so I tell myself :) And anyway, that’s just color - the experiment part went swimmingly!
Materials
Approximately 4 ounces of Lion FIsherman’s wool, natural color.
First stage: About 1/2 tsp Wilton’s icing dye - leaf green
Second stage: 1 bottle (1 fl oz) McCormick food coloring - blue
White vinegar
Water
Method
Crock pot
Colorfast?
Yes
Color name
Black Watch
Stage 1
As before, I tied the skein off into six, roughly equidistant segments. This time I made a conscious effort to tie the denim strips very tightly and had better luck with them blocking the dye from the yarn beneath them. I soaked (but did not wash) the yarn, ties and all.
I dissolved the icing dye hot water and then added that to about a gallon of tepid water along with about a 1/2 cup of white vinegar. This went into the crock pot and the yarn was then added. Heat was set at low. I checked things every hour or so but this went for about 5 hours before most of the color was exhausted and even then here was a very faint green tint to what was left in the crock. The yield was a bright green yarn interspersed with the natural cream of the undyed stuff at six more-or-less regular intervals. I washed the yarn, untied the ties and hung it to dry.
Stage 2
The next day I tied the yarn off again, in the middle of the green sections this time, so that a little of the green was left on either side of the ties and the cream was completely exposed. I made the dye bath with about 1/3 of an ounce of the liquid blue food color, white vinegar and water. Then I soaked the yarn and added it to the dye bath. After three hours or so in the crock pot, on low heat, the color had exhausted but the yarn looked dull and uninteresting. It was also still a great deal more green than I wanted so I mixed up the remaining blue color and added that to the bath (removing the yarn before I did so and replacing it afterwards). This took a long time to clear - about six more hours - but the results were much more pleasing to my eye. The yarn ranges through medium/dark blue to evergreen to bright green.
Notes:
As an experiment in dyeing a yarn three different colors, this worked out pretty well. The problem, if there was one, was that the green was almost overwhelming. I will know next time to either use less dye or to mute it a bit (a bit of red or orange?) if I don’t want it to be quite so vivid.
Tying things off makes for a lengthy process - this took three days all together - but produces a nice result I think. These colors are acceptable and work well together. I’m still new enough at this whole dyeing thing for that to be enough :)
Colored by Robbyn on 09/15 at 10:27 AM
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Crimson and Clover
Again we had a case of the musical generation gap :) When I asked Myria for her thoughts about a name, she suggested
Crimson and Clover - only the version she was thinking of was done by Joan Jett while I was remembering Tommy James and the Shondelles!
This batch went a little differently than usual. First, I wanted to try (intentionally!) to create a variegated yarn and second, I used (at least for the first step) a new type of dye. Well, new to me anyways :)
These are
Wilton's Icing dyes. I am provisionally pleased with how well they work - more about that later.
Materials
Approximately 4 ounces of Lion FIsherman's wool, natural color.
First stage: About 3/4 tsp Wilton's icing dye - violet
Second stage: 4 packages of Kool-Aid - cherry (
not black cherry)
2 tbl table salt
White vinegar
Water
Method
Crock pot
Colorfast?
Yes
Color name
Crimson and Clover
Stage 1
After I had wound the skein, I tied it off tightly at regular intervals with strips of old denim material (
Very old denim. I wouldn't recommend anything less than ancient because denim can crock color for quite a long time when it's washed.) I wanted the material to be cotton so that it would be impervious to the dye and so that it would help block the dye from getting to the segments of yarn it was tied around.
Then I dissolved the violet icing dye in
plain water to which I had added the salt in an effort to promote uptake. I did not initially use any vinegar because the Wilton site warns that adding acid to the violet dye will change the color to blue! I had hoped adding the salt would help the uptake. If I had thought about it even a little though, I would have known better since the wool needs the acid to help it absorb the dye. But the violet was such a beautiful color and I so hoped I could get it to work - LOL - by sheer will power, I guess :)
In any case, the washed wool went into the crock pot and, after I had added enough water to the dye to cover the yarn, that went in on top. I turned the crock pot to
high for about an hour and then set it to low for another couple of hours. When I checked the yarn after that, the dyebath was still dark. Lifting the yarn out of the crock made all the color, save for a very slight pinkish tinge, run right out of the yarn...sigh...
So I dipped out a glassful of the dyebath and added a glug of vinegar to it to see what would happen.
And, of course, the advice given on the Wilton site was quite correct. It went from a beautiful medium/deep violet to a kind of Caribbean blue. By then I had realized that without acid of some kind, this wasn't going anywhere. So I removed the yarn from the dyebath, added about a half cup of white vinegar, mixed everything together and then put the yarn back in. The color
did change but not as radically as I had thought it would. I wound up with a color more like iris than violet - not what I'd hoped for, but entirely acceptable even so.
After the dyebath had exhausted (another two hours or so), I washed the skein in shampoo/conditioner, squeezed it in a towel to get out as much water as possible and hung it in the kitchen window to dry. The above picture is what it looked like the next morning after I had untied and removed the denim strips. As you can see, the wraps didn't
completely block absorbtion of the first dye but they did a decent enough job. I might try strips of plastic next time - cut up a garbage bag, maybe?
Stage 2
The next day, I dissolved four packages of cherry koolaid in white vinegar while I pre-soaked the yarn (I didn't wash it again). I suppose I could have prepared the second dyebath and gone straight into that part of things when the first dyebath had exhausted. But that would have meant watching the dyepot for another three hours and
then doing the washing, rinsing, squeezing and hanging - and that all was too much like work - so stage 2 waited until the following day :)
I intended to overdye the whole skein so that both the color already in the yarn and the blank spots would take up the color. That procedure went perfectly normally and I finished things up in the ordinary fashion.
Notes:
I'm quite pleased - even a little smug - about the finished product. There's a lot of playing around room in this process. For example, what if I had tied off the center of the dyed sections of the yarn before dumping it in the second dyebath? That would have (theoretically, of course) given me three related colors in the yarn instead of two. This is something I will certainly try in the future. I am also storing jars for the more traditional method of creating a multi-colored yarn and will be trying that as well before too much longer
As with
Oasis Sunset, I had wondered exactly
how much dye the yarn could hold before it wouldn't accept any more. This time I dyed the yarn twice - once for a base shade and once to apply a secondary color. The yarn took all of the dye both times. Makes me wonder if I could go on applying colors indefinitely.
As for the violet...well...I have some thoughts about using combinations of blue and red to get where I want to go. I suppose it's possible that the addition of acid will alter that too but it's also possible that it's just the particular substance (pigment? chemical?) that's being used for the violet dye which reacts with the acid. Nothing to do but try!
Colored by Robbyn on 09/07 at 09:26 PM
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