Citrine Curry
This was an effort to dye using a more traditional method - the stove top :) I love my crock pot, but I wanted to see how this worked and what results I would get. There were couple of surprises not the least of which was that I didn't care for it while it was in process but I loved it once it had been washed and dried. I also used a more complicated coloring process than was, strictly speaking, necessary I suppose, but I feel it worked well.
Materials
Approximately 4 ounces of Lion FIsherman's wool, natural color.
1 1/2 tablet orange Easter Egg dye
1 1/2 tablet yellow Easter egg dye
1 pkg watermelon/cherry kool-aid
5 teabags
White vinegar
Water
Method
Stove top
Colorfast?
Yes
Color name
Citrine Curry
Process
I started by making a strong tea solution using 5 tea bags - Trader Joe's English Breakfast, if it matters :) When it had cooled, it became the base of the dye baths - there were three of them. I set the yarn to soak in tepid (barely) water (no salt or detergent of any kind) and went to work prepping the dye solutions. I divided the tea equally between three jars. Number one got an orange dye tablet, number two got half an orange and half a yellow dye tablet and number three got a yellow dye tablet. Each jar also got about 1/3 teaspoon of kool-aid which added a light orangey-pink tone.
I squeezed as much water out of the yarn as I could and divided it as evenly as possible between the three jars which had been placed in a strainer in a kettle. I filled the kettle with water and put it on the stove, brought the water to a simmer and let things run until the dye baths were exhausted - about 1/2 hour. I turned the heat off and let everything cool down (a considerably longer process than it usually is with the crock pot), washed and rinsed the yarn and hung it to dry.
To my considerable surprise, what had looked like a muddled mess in the pot, looked intriguing and interesting once it was straightened out. As the colors all reminded me of various foods, it also made me hungry :)
Notes:
It was pleasant to successfully (more or less) dye a three color yarn in one day and the actual dyeing took much less time than usual though the prep time was quite a bit longer - mostly due to the steeping and brewing of the tea. Interestingly, previous attempts with tea (Cantaloupe and Buttered Toast) had resulted in a dyebath that wouldn't exhaust. I had pretty much begun to feel that while tea did have the desired muting effect, its presence would prevent a complete uptake of the dye. However, that didn't happen this time. There was no color left in the jars when the processing was finished - just a somewhat translucent milkiness.
Also of interest was that though the yarn was sitting in boiling water for half an hour, it didn't full or mat in the slightest. The crock pot runs at a much lower temperature than this process did. This tells me that I'm agitating the yarn too much in the crock. There isn't a lot of room to stir things in the jars that contained the yarn and the dye so there wasn't any stirring - and clearly the temperature wasn't the issue. Defeinitely something to remember going forward.
My burgeoning interest in warm colors continues :) This is very pleasing and every time I look at it I see curry and lemons and feel like I'm sitting in a field of marigolds. Wheeeeee...!
Colored by Robbyn on 10/06 at 12:50 PM
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