Dyeing: August 2005 Archives
I'm not sure if what I am doing today is so basic as to be unnecessary or if it will be helpful. But I thought I'd use the spinning of my Blue Hawaiian roving as an opportunity to describe how I prepare a hand-dyed roving for spinning. If you can do this in your sleep, just skip down to the bottom few photos which show the Blue Hawaiian colorway in all its spun up and ready to knit glory.
I find that after dyeing, the ends can be a little matted and hard to deal with, so I just snip the ends off with scissors.
After getting rid of the ends, I spend a reasonable amount of time teasing and fluffing the roving in preparation for dividing it into strips that I will spin from. This helps me get rid of tangles and understand the construction of the roving aand identify the natural dividing lines.
I try to split the roving into two roughly equal parts as I start the dividing process.
Then I try to divide the halves into roughly equal width pieces that have an amount of fiber that I am comfortable spinning from. Usually this involves dividing each piece into two until I reach a minimal width.
I'm almost ready to start working on it at this point. I like to use this stage to see how the different pieces play against each other. Are some more dark or light than others? I've gotten better random color distribution when I don't just work from one side of the roving to the other.
I take each piece and tug all the way up and down to pre-draft the fibers. I do this by holding my hands about 6" apart and just gently tugging to loosen up the fibers. Obviously it's not good to pull too hard or you separate the fibers. This makes the roving pieces nice and fluffy and easy to spin from. It's also a good way to figure out which end of the roving is easier to spin from. It seems like there's always one direction that works better than the other. I'm not sure if this is because of the scales on the wool, static electricity or some other wooly property that I don't understand.
Spinning up the stuff on a drop spindle is the subject of an entire post on it's own. If you want a good intro, check out this quarter's Spin Off for a nice intro (there are also a lot of good resources on the web... just google for drop spindle instructions). Here's the Blue Hawaiian yarn as a single. Lots of nice luminous blue and green. You just gotta know, given my color preferences, taht this colorway makes me happy.
After spinning th single, I wind it off onto my niiddy noddy, tie it in 4 places and dump it into a warm water bath with some Eucalan to help set the twist. I don't actually have to do this step, but I find it helps me get better control of the yarn when I'm plying. I was able to wind this single around my niddy noddy 126 times and it's about 54" around one time, so the total yardage is about 190 yards! That's a lot of yarn from .5 ounce. Amazing to think that I have spun enough from this little piece of wool to go up and down a football field almost twice.
After setting the twist for the single, I create a center pull ball with the help of my ball winder and swift and create a two ply yarn by spinning from both ends of the center pull ball. I've found that I like plying better when I use my Bosworth spindles which are heavier weight than my Charis spindle. This is a shot of the two-ply yarn after another dunk in some hot water to let it relax and let the twist set. This yarn is happy, soft and balanced. After plying, I've got about 93 yards. It's very similar in diameter to the Sunset roving after plying, but I haven't calculated wpi to confirm.
Here's a close up of my favorite hand-dyed, hand-spun yarn to date. This yarn is really quite close to what i had in my mind's eye when I started thinking about the color way. I wanted something that would have a tweedy quality when knit up, but would be closer to a solid color. Engaging, but not gaudy. The color in this picture isn't perfect (I think the colors are a tad richer in real life), but close enough to give you a very good sense for what kind of personality this yarn has. Makes me want to grab my knitting needles and dive into the water.
I'm spinning like a fiend right now -- all my drop spindles are whirling as fast as I can make them go. If I could make two spindles go at once, you know I would be. Dyeing wool is painting on an empty canvas, but it isn't a finished product, at least not to me. The real magic doesn't start to happen until the wool becomes yarn, and until the yarn becomes a fabric.
This weekend, my goal was to get the first of the Sunset rovings to a two-ply yarn and to get my Hawaiin Shore roving (which I have taken to calling "Blue Hawaiian" in my head) spun into a single. I accomplished both goals. Each is it's own story, however. And since the Blue Hawaiian remains to be plied, the Sunset gets to the blog first.
Unlike the spindle shot from Friday, this image shows off all the colors in this single. Truth be told, I wasn't really looking to have all that pinky stuff in the yarn. I also wasn't intending to concentrate it all in one place. I wanted a more random color distribution, but this happened because of the way I split pieces off the roving as I spun. I split the roving in half, width-wise and didn't realize that the sides weren't balanced very well. As a result, most of the deep gold ended up on one side and most of the pinky stuff ended up on the other. Lesson learned. I will now prepare the whole roving for spinning before starting and randomize the pieces a bit better in the future. I'll probably also stick to horizontal instead of vertical stripes. I dyed this roving this way as a learning experience, and i can definitely say that I learned something from it!
This is just another gratuitous pretty yarn shot. I thought it looks so nice and happy in that center pull ball. It also gives a better idea of where the individual stretches of color are concentrated.
Here's the yarn after being two-plied. I like the colors in this a great deal, but would like a little more gold, a little less pink. I did a wraps-per-inch measurement and get about 23 wpi , which makes it a fingering weight yarn. It doesn't really seem that fine to me, but I can see it knitting up nicely on US size 3 needles. Ninaclock asked on Friday what I was going to do with a mere .5 ounces. Well, intially I wasn't really planning to do much with it at all besides see if I liked the result. But this stuff calls out to be knit into something, I think. I'm wondering if I have enough for a small scarf/lacy neck warmer....
Makes me glad I took notes and know how to reproduce the colors!
So now I have to think about what I might knit up with it.
While there hasn't been a lot of knitting around here lately, there has been a little bit. Look what finally got to be blocked this weekend?
This scarf is about .8 ounces of hand dyed BFL roving spun into a lace weight single. It ended up about 5 foot long and a little over 8" wide the way I blocked it. Pretty respectable length for a small amount of wool.
Stretched out and basking in the sunshine, it occured to me that this scarf would also make a nice table or dresser runner. I am pleased by the fact that the garter stitch bars still stand out a bit after blocking. I am even more pleased by the fact that while the striping is not random in terms of color order, that the widths of the stripes are quite random. This is due to both my spinning and to the fact that I did not spin from exactly equal pieces of roving. I do like the effect.
A more classic, if slightly skewed, shot of the scarf just being a scarf. After blocking, the lace holds its shape quite well. No picture of me wearing this thing because, well, it's an 80 degree day here in Chicago. Not really wool scarf weather. Plus, the husband was out doing some yardwork.
No "look what I made" post would be complete without a closeup of the lace pattern after the project was blocked. I cast off the project in the loosest and sloppiest way that I could. Made a big difference in terms of being able to get nice shaping on the cast-off edge. I am not as pleased with the edges of the scarf. I should have added a few selvedge stitches to the edge. As the scarf gets worn, I doubt that will be something I notice much. So it doesn't really bother me too much.
The thing that turned out to be a pleasant surprise is that both the back and front of this scarf are attractive to look at. And actually don't look that different from each other unless you are quite close to the scarf. Another little benefit of blocking the bejeezus out of lace -- the difference between stockinette and reverse stocknette becomes somewhat blurred.
So now I can say that I have actually turned some of my handspun into something! How cool is that?
So what did all those lovely little balls of wool turn into?
Julie and I started with about 12 1/2 ounce pieces of Blue Faced Leicester. Why BFL? First, both of us like spinning with it. Second, it's not so hard to get a lot at a reasonable price. The results of our dying experiments surprised us a little bit. Reds, yellows, browns and greens dominated our dyeing process. Pretty strange coming from the original blue undertone girl. Yet I found it almost impossible to put down the warm fall tones.
In the end, I played with three sets of colors.
This is a blend of yellow gold and some varying shades of red violet and red violet mixed with red and red violet mixed with scarlet. It reminded me of the colors that you see at sunset as the sun hits the horizon. Both pieces were dyed with the same set of colors. The upper piece has less yellow and a bit of undyed area (on purpose) while the lower piece has a more saturated bit of red-violet in the corners.
This set of colors are all diluted directly from regular stock dye colors. The intent was to use different depth of shades and see how that played out. The end result is something that reminds me of the color of the ocean when I was in Hawaii. I wish now that I'd tried another piece with these colors -- one where I used the lightest color as a solid background with splotches of the others. Fortunately, it's not hard to get to these colors, so I should be able to try them again the next time I dye.
If you can believe it, both of these pieces are dyed with the exact same set of colors (the palette I featured yesterday). Pretty amazing the different effects that can result. I'm quite fond of both of them. I find myself amazed and surprised by my love of the brown. Normally I have no interest in brown at all. But, in this case, it brought the whole set of colors together for me.
One thing we were more careful about this time was not oversaturating the fiber with the dye and then cooking them longer than we did last time. After letting them cool, we found that when we rinsed them, almost no dye was released. On our last dyeing adventure, our pieces hemorrhaged dye after the setting process. Getting those bottles with the squirt tops really made a difference because we were able to control the amount of dye that we added to the fiber a lot better than before.
Now the adventure will be in spinning them up to see what happens when the roving becomes yarn. I actually like all three of these colorways, but the proof is really in getting some yarn spun up. The last batch surprised me a lot and some of the rovings I loved in the just dyed form made up only so-so yarn in my book. Do you have a favorite? One you can't abide? I'd love to know.
Today I got to spend a wonderful day with a good friend and surrounded by color. What were we up to?
This picture is for Claudia, my dyeing safety guardian angel. I had similar gear and was even wearing my face mask when I took the picture. We both used all this stuff for the whole time we were preparing our stock dye solutions. Dye is not good stuff to wear or to breathe, friends and neighbors.
In order to start a more scientific approach to this process we started out by creating a set of 2% stock solutions. Why 2% instead of 1%? Mostly because that is what would fit best into our 16 ounce bottles given the amount of dye we had to start with. These bottles are pretty handy with their capped spouts. They also can withstand high temperature liquids and can be used to store dyes. Dharma Trading Company is the place to go if you need some of your own. Their products are affordable and their shipping is very speedy.
It didn't take us long to start playing with some color...
Paper towels are a handy way to test dyes. These will be the first entries into our "Dyeing Diary". We also discovered that syringes are a handy way to measure dye solutions out. We did get some strange looks from the people in the medical supply store when we asked for them, however...
What can I say? We get a little cool weather in Chicago and I start thinking about fall. This was my attempt to try to get close to the colors in fall leaves. This is probably the color composition that I am most pleased with from the day. The scary thing is, it's completely unusual for me to like colors like this at all. There's not a dash of blue in sight...
You can probably imagine what these are headed for. More on what they became tomorrow when I have some good outdoor light for color photos.
post edited to correct the spelling of the word 'dyeing'... thanks Quirkybook, for the correction... I need to find a spell checker for Movable Type
