Dyeing Three Colors in a Single Dye Pot - First Attempt 2009 Feb 14

This project is the first Woolpack project since I joined the Woolpack in January 2009. I think that I misunderstand the actual task assignment but what are they going to do if I've got it wrong? - take away my birthday? The task is to dye some roving using three colors simultaneously in a single dye pot. Before this I knew absolutely nothing about dyeing. That is not to say that I am now an expert for nothing could be farther from the truth. So, here are some pictures and notes of this project.

I didn't want to do roving - no particular reason. I originally imagined that I would do a single small batt at the bottom of the dye pot and place the dyes so that I could observe how the dye migrated and see if it was influenced by the "grain" of the batt. That idea evolved into filling the pot with pieces of batting in layers; each layer's grain perpendicular to the adjacent layers.

I had a washed fleece of some sort of white-ish wool from some unknown source that I rewashed and then carded into batts. I used most of one batt for this project - about 4/5ths of a pound (about 13oz). I tore chunks from the batt that were about the size of the Plan B Dye Pot. They seemed to end up a little larger but that doesn't seem to have mattered and in fact, may have worked to my benefit.

For dyes I chose more-or-less primary colors because for me the purpose this time is to learn about the dyeing process, not so much to learn which colors go together nicely. The dyes I chose are Ashford Wool Dyes in scarlet, yellow, and navy. Using these colors, if I buggered up the process, I'd get mud, if not, then, whatever I get should be relatively pleasing to the eye.

I had problems keeping the pot temperature right. In fact, I'm not really sure what the temperature in the pot ought to be. I am sure that it shouldn't be hot enough to boil. At one point I wandered away from the pot to attend to something else and came back a few minutes later to hear splashing on the stove. I was convinced that that was the end of the experiment and that all of my wool would be mud colored - it looked sort of brownish at the top. But, I was lucky.

More comments with the individual pictures. The colors, on my computer and my monitor, do not look anything like the colors that I see under sunlight. For instance, the yellow dye in this picture looks almost like hunter orange on my monitor when in real life, the color looked more like brown mustard. A rather large difference.

On to my second attempt.

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Last modified: 2009 Mar 07 1803:26 UTC