The Dye Pot

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!

Posted by Robbyn on 09/07 at 09:26 PM