Doesn’t this look like fluffy shiny deer guts? The effect is far more realistic in real life than I was able to capture with the camera. I thank goodness that the smell is not that of authentic intestines.

One of the things I like about dying silk is that it’s fairly goof proof so long as I give the dye enough time. It can be treated like an animal fiber and put into acid dye, or like a plant fiber and soaked in soda ash. I ended up using scarlet RIT dye (which is a little of each type of dye), warm water and giving it a good three hours soak before pulling it from the dye pot.

I can’t believe how paranoid I was the first few times I handled the stuff and how casual I am with it now.

Spun up it makes a more attractive and much less graphic yarn. It’s almost appropriate for Valentines day.

When I have my second bobbin full I plan to ply it, but it is so tempting to leave some portion as a single to weave in with the flax that is currently languishing on the other wheel.

Bombyx silk fit the bill.

I dyed this batch quite a while ago, the technique was really simple. I waited for a warm day, soaked the silk in water and soda ash, added a little ammonia, emptied dye into the bath and wrapped the whole thing in black plastic and set it out in direct sunlight. Time and solar energy took care of the rest for me.

I can’t believe I let this color languish for so long. I think it’s much prettier on the bobbin than in a zip bag hiding in the closet.

It’s easy to let spinning take the better part of my spare time. It’s cold and drizzly here, but easy enough to day dream of slipping into warm clear waters elsewhere.

I can almost smell drinks with paper umbrellas.

As it turned out, I was horribly horribly wrong. It was a bad change, a disturbing change. It made my complexion  look as though I had failing liver function.

Not a total loss though, it did pretty things to my yarn. I figured that the peroxide would have weakened with age so I added a little vinegar and ammonia and then soaked it. Ammonia always seems to do a nice job of distributing the dye through a skein.

Not exactly an intense color, but clean and I’m sure Lexi won’t mind a bit if I knit her a shawl from it.

My camera can’t seem to comprehend the real color, but I assure you it’s much more fluorescent than it appears. There’s actually streaks of two colors “fire” and “mandarin” so the color is also deeper than pictured. After a few weeks it’ll tame down into a more faded traffic cone color.

Why orange?

• It’s easy to spot a hair in my food, and identify it as mine or not mine.
• My children *never* lose sight of me at the grocery store.
• I come in handy during traffic emergencies.
• My conservative friends rarely ask me to baby sit.
• If I am lost in the woods I will not be shot by hunters.
• My friends don’t ever accidentally mistake another person for me at a distance, and accuse me of ignoring them later.
• People remember me.
• I like the irony.
• It looks good with pinks, neutrals and earth-tones.
• I’m never accused of being a fully domesticated housewife.
• Makes my Pokémon and Hello Kitty stuff seem not so weird by comparison.

Although I swear I put more dye on the first one, I must have twisted it too tightly since there are large white swathes that look kind of like graffiti. I used the more 60′s style of dying, crumpling, then twisting, then wrapping and dipping in the dye.

The second cloth I pleated with large (about an inch and a quarter) pleats that progressively get looser, then tightly bound it in sections using rubber bands.

Although I like both cloths, I’m definitely more partial to the second one. The pattern seems more complete. Next time I do some cloth I’ll add some humectant to encourage more movement with the dye.

I fancy that after I’m done staring at them for a while I might actually do some fussy cut patchwork.

Out of no where I started getting a hankering to use long draw method with baby camel down. No– not top, not roving: actual baby camel down. For those of you that haven’t spun camel you won’t be that impressed until you try, the fibers are slippy and grippy and very very short. If you’ve spun dehaired camel before let that sink in before moving on.

Ready?

Okay lets go one word at a time: Loose. Baby. Camel. Down. Long. Draw.

The first bobbin was an exercise in non-perfection for me. I stuck with it though and came up with a yarn. Not the prettiest yarn, not the ugliest, but ever so soft and moderately interesting. The second bobbin went much better and came out as a fairly even single. I haven’t plied it yet, but wound it into a ball and I’m letting it rest before plying.

Resting with it is a ball of stuff that Opal sent me many moons ago. It’s sort of a rustic looking single right now, I let the little neps and noils stay (usually I’d pick those out but I’m going for a homey yarn) and I am debating as to whether it should be a 2 or 3 ply.

I managed to earn a little money doing odd jobs so I promptly went to the Little Barn website and spent it all. Actually I was only going to order ramie from another website but that site’s shopping cart wasn’t working– so ummm. I didn’t order the ramie, that’ll have to wait until the next time I have some cash in my grubby little paws.

In the meantime I’m spinning some of the fleece I’ve been arguing with since last summer. It’s base color is cream with black peppered through it, very coarse, and I can’t find the thing where I wrote down the breed because I knew I’d forget (this is part of my MO when it comes to dealing with raw fleece) in short it looks like Churro but isn’t Churro and has longer less coarse staple.

Anyway I am learning to like this wool, last summer I was overwhelmed with the urge to wash what was left of the raw fleeces and did this this one in cold water with salt, I put a galvenized tub in the shade next to the house, filled it with a garden hose and sunk the fleece down with some big rocks from my garden. The hard part was letting it soak over night, then pulling out the fleece, putting in clean water and letting it soak for a second night without messing with it. The salt water soak worked extremely well for removing the dirt and the excess lanolin, however it still has lanolin, so I do have to spin it when the room is warm otherwise it’s a battle.

My hands are super soft now.

Back to cravings. I’m always attracted to natural colored fibers first. I have plenty of white to work with but I like the honey color of natural tussah, I like the cinnamon and moorit colors of certain wools, black and gray and taupe that come straight from the animal, and the silvery gray of water retted flax. Even if I intend on dyeing over the fiber I like the depth and richness that naturally colored fibers take on when dyed.

I crave loose down over top with short fibers: cashmere, camel, cotton, quivit, and yak. I crave top over bells or caps or hankies with silk fibers. I crave locks over roving for hair type fibers. I crave roving over locks for wooly fibers.

I don’t really have preferences for long or short staple, fine or coarse, slick or crimpy or lofty– they all have their qualities, but some will wait around to be spun longer than others until I’ve figured out what’s the best thing to do with those qualities.

Bead Jewelry designer Patricia C. Vener wrote a beautifully illustrated color treatise for Autumn 2006 season, even though Winter ’06/’07 is almost upon us her vision for Autumn is still very contemporary and can easily carry though until Spring 2007 if you are (like me) a color junkie.

After Vogue Knitting convinced everyone that crayon bright colors were “in-in-in” they did a really unsubtle about face and are pushing grays like crazy. Sock knitters will really enjoy the newest issue though, as there are some incredible patterns for socks.

One bit of advice, a lesson that I learned in my short tenure in the fashion industry, it’s much more important that you wear what actually looks good on you than to follow the whims of couture. Fashion trends are just trends, beauty and style are eternal. If you look fabulous in apricot wear it. If you look like a walking tomato wearing those washed out grays, then don’t wear them, or create a non-tomato illusion with the right accessories.

If you like color, then use it and ignore the trends.

No sneak peeks. I want this to be surprise.

The internal debate however is set aside with the above skein (and it’s mate, and a few of their friends) as I’ve developed this fantasy that a really talented doll artist will want to incorporate it into a fabulous doll, or that a weaver will want it.

For some reason I’d just really like to see it worked up in the spirit of dusk over the Atlantic, or the depths of Crater Lake, or something that requires more artistic vision than I currently possess.

In dyeing if you buy the kit, weigh the fiber, measure the water, watch the temperature and time closely everything will be fairly consistent. Unfortunately what qualifies as “the kit” is vastly varied, for me it was Kool-Aid packets, water and a crock pot. Not the most efficient way to purchase quantities of dye and acerbic acid, but serviceable enough to get me started.

RIT and Dylon dyes are “all purpose” dyes, meaning that they have an amount of acid and alkaline within the dye, so that it works on protein and cellulose fibers. However they are very unsatisfactory for absorption into wool and gives a really weak unsteady color absorption unless constantly agitated (unspun wool + hot water + agitation = felt!) and the colors available are limited.

Food dyes are also a limited choice, since blue #2 is actually cyan, red is red, but red can also be magenta and yellow, and yellow can be yellow, goldenrod, or chartreuse, and green is cyan + yellow, and so on. This is why it gets difficult to make true colors like purple, and attempts at purple usually end up looking too red or slightly dirty (like grape flavor Kool-Aid (please note Kool-Aid and Easter Egg tablets use standard food dye colors)

So then we go to the big girl dyes. I haven’t as yet geared up to buy every shade of Jacquard MX or some other “professional” dye. I keep convincing myself that when I have a couple hundred dollars to throw at my dyeing obsession that I will upgrade my dyes through a serious online shopping spree but on a housewife’s wage that’s a ways off (yeah I don’t think they’d let me pay them in cookies and gratitude.)

So really I’m left with what is readily available, a somewhat less expensive way to purchase dye (as compared to food dyes) yet more expensive per ‘serving’ when compared to buying bulk quantities, but in small enough quantities that I don’t have to worry about long term storage (which is also a consideration when buying oodles of “the good stuff”) Rainbow Rock is by far my favorite brand, and the advantage to buying their tye-dye kits is that the dye is already in squeeze bottles, with gloves, and soda ash– this combo works for cotton, silk and nylon fibers on a “just add water” basis. Also the colors do mix well, and you can go back over a too dark area with water and sponge to dilute a color or lift it completely off of your fiber before it sets.

With a few basic changes you can use the Rainbow Rock tye-dye kits to hand-paint wool roving or yarn, use 1:1 vinegar and water solution to pre-soak your wool 1/2 hour for pastels 1-2 hours for brighter colors, and get your crock-pot or steaming basin ready (and nice and warm.) You can also buy basic colors and black from Rainbow Rock in larger packages that also include urea granules (which allows for more dye to be dissolved in smaller quantities of water resulting in more brilliant colors, and it’s also a humectant that keeps water to the fibers longer to aid in color absorption — not totally necessary for vat dyeing methods but still helpful.

Step One Read all the way through (including tedious safety notes)

Soak wool in 1:1 vinegar and water solution or acerbic acid solution for at least 1/2 hour (pastel colors and tints.) For brighter colors allow to soak longer before dyeing (at least 1-2 hours.) Prepare dye solutions in squeeze bottles per directions on package.

(While waiting for the first soaking I use this time to cover surfaces that I don’t want dyed, layout Seran wrap, and gather all the stuff needed for hand-painting. You’ll want:

1. A steamer or crock-pot that you plan to use only for dyeing
2. Name brand Seran Wrap
3. Gloves
4. Dyes and squeeze bottles
5. Large bowl or tub (again only used for non-food purposes)
6. Steamer basket (make sure it fits in steamer or crock-pot)
7. Eye and splash protection (safety goggles and apron or old long sleeved work shirt) and dust mask.
8. Optional: Extra squeeze bottle with water in it (makes a nice eraser for “oopsies” if you’re quick enough)
9. Optional: Large clean sponges to absorb excess water and dye (especially useful if you want very crisp color transitions or like to smoosh the dye around (for a water color effect)

Lay out Seran wrap (the generic plastic wrap melts in the steaming so make sure you get the brand name Seran wrap) and secure it to your table. When the soaking is finished layout the roving and tug it open and flat onto the wrap protected surface.

Paint the fiber as you like, then fold the wrap over the roving all the way around length wise then roll the Saran wrapped wool into a cinnamon roll shape and secure (I use big rubbers bands in the tye-dye kit but tape works too.) Then stick that baby in the crock-pot (or steamer) just above the water level on medium heat with the lid on (I use a metal vegetable steamer/strainer in the bottom of the crock-pot to keep my dyed “buns” out of the water) and ignore them for a few hours.

Instead of pulling the buns out of the crock-pot, I turn off the crock-pot and cover it with a few towels in order to let the roving cool slowly, by morning I can safely unwrap and rinse them using room temperature water.

Safety Notes: When working with powdered anything work in a well ventilated area and wear proper protection (dust mask), even when using food dyes (inhaling stuff is just not the same as eating it.) Acerbic acid (vitamin C, citric acid) can be a skin irritant even if the solution doesn’t seem to be very strong. Soda ash and urea are skin irritants wear eye and splash protection (flush affected areas with water and call physician for further advice.)

Urea solution will turn to ammonia solution with exposure to oxygen, store dry urea in an airtight container and throw away (you can use it as fertilizer) any granules or solution that develop an unpleasant odor. Never mix urea or ammonia with Chlorine bleach!