The Dye Pot

Buttered Toast

That’s what I got.  This is what I started with…

Materials

Approximately 3 ounces fingering/sport weight wool (Unger Britannia Shetland)
PAAS dye tablets: 2 orange, 2 yellow
White vinegar
Water in which 5 teabags had been steeped

Method

Crock pot

Colorfast?

Yes

Color name

Buttered Toast

I washed this yarn in dish detergent and did not rinse before dyeing it.  The dye was dissolved in a cup of white vinegar and then the tea (and some more water) was added to the dye solution.  This was poured carefully over the wet yarn in the crock pot.  The pot was covered and turned to the low setting.  Where normally I would let this work until the dye had all been absorbed - this dye never exhausted.  As happened with Cantaloupe (for which I also added tea to the dye solution), I let it run, stirring gently once in a while, and finally gave it up after the yarn had been in the pot for about 6 hours.  The solution still had some orangey color to it, but clearly the yarn wasn’t ging to take up any more of it.  I let the yarn cool in the crock and then washed it in shampoo/conditioner (Fructis if you’re curious!), rolled it up in a towel for maxumum moisture extraction and then hung it to dry.

No real need to tell you what the colors reminded me of :) Specifically, I was dealing with an image of my grandmother’s home-made bread, perfectly toasted and smothered with butter - no margarine for Grandma!  The swatch was worked on US size 4 (3.5mm) needles over 21 stitches and a bit of the original yarn was worked at the end to provide a useful contrast image.  I will likely continue to do this when I am over-dyeing.

Notes:

As I had never over-dyed another color, I had no idea what to expect.  When this came out of the dyebath it was dark and very nearly as unappealing as it had looked when it went in!  Once I had it washed though, and as much of the water sqeezed out of it as I could get, I could seen gold in the fiber and the yarn seemed much warmer and brighter.

As I mentioned above, the dye didn’t exhaust on this attempt.  As that has happened before when I used tea as part of the dye liquid, it’s tempting to conclude that the tea is inhibiting the yarn from taking up all of the dye.  I think it’s too soon to draw that conclusion (though it seems likely) and want to experiment a little more.  The yarn had already been dyed once and it’s old :) Not like that’s criminal, but both those factors might have affected things as well.

The yarn was fairly rough to start with (as I generally expect Shetland yarn to be) but had a softer hand after being washed with the shampoo.conditioner combination.  Also, though I expected it to felt a little - it didn’t.  At all :)

Posted by Robbyn on 07/16 at 09:14 PM