Category Archives: Dye Pot

Emerald Bamboo

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Fresh from the dye pot this week. Bamboo blend sock yarn in Emerald (Pantone’s colour of the year for 2013)  60% Superwash Merino 30% Bamboo 10% Nylon; fingering weight.

I did a fair bit of experimenting with this colour.

This is 3 batches using my 2ply worsted weight 100% Columbia wool. The dye company has two different suggestions for Emerald on their web site. The group on the right is obtained with a light turquoise recipe and the middle group is from a light forest green recipe. To my eye, they look like light turquoise and forest green, not emerald.

The group on the left is my own recipe, obtained by mixing turquoise and sun yellow. It’s a little on the pastel side, but I think I hit the mix pretty well on. The bamboo sock yarn is the same proportion of yellow and turquoise, but in a higher rate of application.

Here’s how it knit up for me:

This is a Small+ pair, (Ladies 6 – 8.5 shoe)  with a 1×1 cuff and 1×5 leg and instep. Knit with a 72 cylinder on the Verdun 47.

 

Shamrock Green

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I’ve dyed a zillion different greens – moss green, sage green, leaf green, avocado green, grasshopper green, pea green, spruce green, evergreen, yadda, yadda, yadda.

I’ve used commercially produced green yarns by Fortissima, DGB Confetti, Diamond, Opal and Kroy, Koigu, and Lorna’s Laces among others.

I’ve got a project or two for which I want a bright, vibrant, solid or nearly solid green. Lorna’s Laces has  one called Carol Green that I’ve used with my Lorna’s Rainbow Socks, but I’m working these projects in my own yarn which is a little heavier than Lorna’s Shepherd Sock, so I decided this was one to dye myself.

I didn’t have any Shamrock or Kelly green dye, and its a nuisance to order one small bit of dye from Boston, so I made my own blend, using other dyes that I have on hand.

With the help of the book Complex Color – Color Mixing for WashFast Acid Dye by Susan Rex, I picked out the brightest green I could find in her colour chits, and worked out the dye recipe based on the weight of the yarn, using the formula she provided.

The section of the book I was reading dealt with over dyeing – as in dye a yarn one colour, and then over dye it with a second colour to achieve the desired third colour. I cheated on this, and just mixed the two dyes together.

The two colours I used were Sun Yellow and Turquoise. Using a turquoise instead of a basic blue with yellow it what puts the punch in the green.

Taking the photograph actually took longer than dyeing the yarn! It took many tries to get what looks true on my monitor. I believe I’ve captured the colour quite well, though I would say I couldn’t quite capture the vibrancy.

My original planning was to use this green as one colour amongst other colours. But now I’m temped to think of some green-only projects.

This was a fun project for me – appealing to my latent Mad Professory side – mixing colours, weighing stuff, calculating magic formulae, AND having the yarn come out bang on the colour of the chit.

Coffee Cup Sox

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Here are my Coffee Cup Sox – well, one of them – that are my entry into the coffee cup theme competition at the Toronto One of a Kind show.

I hope the photo actually appears! I’m blogging from my bb as isp has been down, yet again, for 6 days.

I adapted a pattern from Jenny Deters ( www.spinsister.com ) I took the argyle pattern on the foldover cuff, and replaced the center part of the motif with my crude coffee cup.

To get the coffee cups upright and to avoid a million ends showing inside the sock – I began with Jenny’s pattern for the foldover cuff and intarsia knit diamonds. But I left the coffee cups off.

After knitting to the point of hanging the hem, I tied on scrap and knit the topper of the csm, much like I do with thigh highs. Then I duplicate stitched the little coffee cups and rehung the work on my cylinder. After a few rows knitting I hung the hem. This placed all my ends inside the cuff, out of sight.

The rest of the sock is pretty basic. As this is a smaller ladies size, and for some visual interest, I started a 5:1 mock rib a few rows after hanging the hem. I carried this on until 30 rows before the heel – at that point I changed the top of the foot side to 2:1 and went to stockinette on the back/bottom.

All knitting done on the 72 cylinder.

The coffee coloured yarn is my own fingering weight 75/25 wool/nylon, dyed in actual Hazelnut Vanilla coffee. The argyle diamonds are 100% Milk from Viking of Norway, and the coffee cups are 100% spun sugar from Araucania’s Ruca Mully.

The sugar was hard to work with for duplicate stitching. It has many fine strands that don’t really stay plied. And using a dk-sport weight to duplicate stitch into a fingering weight – well it was trying at times!

Hazelnut Vanilla

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Back in August I was telling you about the Coffee Cup Contest for artisans at the Toronto One of a Kind Christmas Show.

I still haven’t finalized any plans, but I’ve started putting together some possibilities.

Starting with – my Hazelnut Vanilla Coffee Yarn.

I dyed two large skeins (500 yds each) of my 75% wool 25% nylon fingering weight yarn.

I made two pots of coffee, using freshly ground Hazelnut Vanilla flavoured coffee beans. I used 12 heaping tablespoons of coffee for each pot. I put the hot coffee into my dye pot, added ‘some’ water, a tablespoon of citric acid (for mordant) and a tablespoon of glauber salt to level the colouration.

I brought the pot to a bare boil and let it simmer for about an hour and a half.

My ‘dye’ didn’t exhaust but I got a good catch on the yarn. My rinse water showed some colour in it but the yarn didn’t appear to fade. I may rinse it an extra time before knitting with it just to be sure the colour is actually fixed.

What’s especially cool about this yarn is that is SMELLS like a great cup of coffee (which is why I used citric acid as my mordant, and not vinegar!).

Click to Smell

My current thinking is to make a pair of Thigh Highs. But I’ll need something else. According to the competition rules there must be a coffee cup in the work, so just smelling like coffee isn’t enough.

I guess I could hunt up some fair isle or intarsia pattern ideas for adding a coffee cup motif.

I scrounged up these yarns that I could use with the Hazelnut Vanilla:

On the left of the Coffee skein – Pure Milk Fiber from Viking of Norway, in pale blue (#920), buttery yellow (#940), and mixed blue and yellow (#969).  100% Milk,  165m/50g. Cool water wash. No dryer.

On the right of the Coffee skein: Araucania‘s Ruca yarn -  in Solid #103 (mauve) and  Multi  #13. 100% Sugar Cane. Hand dyed in Chile. 241m/100g.  Handwash in cool water. No dryer. Dry cleaning recommended.

I dunno – maybe with the mauve is too many colours.

Maybe this is a little more coherent? BTW, the blue milk fiber is almost dead on the same blue as in the Sugar multi.

The Milk and Sugar fibers are both very unstretchy – like a pure cotton, but great feel and look – with a sheen like a good silk. The yarn also is a little heavier (I didn’t do the math, but just going on looks) than my sock yarn. Upshot – I don’t think I can do a fair isle or intarsia with these yarns on my sock knitter – I think whatever I do I will have to duplicate stitch on the socks after the fact.

So now I’m on the hunt for simple motif patterns of some kind of coffee cup(s) or mug(s) that I could work on. And maybe some other simple decorative stitching to add.

Thoughts welcome…

From the Dye Pot

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This is for a batch of Bumble Bee type knitting.

The yarn is my own 75/25 Wool/Nylon fingering weight in Jet Black and Yellow.

For the yellow – I used the (Primary) Sun Yellow washfast acid dye, but I added about 10% Golden Yellow to the mix so soften the Yellow. (The Golden Yellow on its own is quite orangey, hence the blending.)

At The Dye Pot

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The last Qiviut I got is a large batch of a single natural colour – I would describe as a greyish-brown.

I decided to dye a few skeins to use for accents.

I’ve never dyed dark natural fiber before, and Qiviut is very expen$ive so I didn’t want to dally to long on a learning curve.

So I decided to first see what compare the Qiviut to samples from my library of dyes, so see if it was related to any particular colour. The most cohesive chit was the Mouse Grey.  Various other blacks, charcoals, browns and greys didn’t look as much from the same family to the Qiviut.

 

This kind of surprised me, as I usually work with Mouse Grey in the lower values – much lighter than the Qiviut colour I would be trying to dye over.

I gambled two  100 g skeins and used a deep intensity of the dye – 3 tsp for the 2oo grams of fiber (70% Qiviut, 20% Merino 10% Nylon).

That was much more dye than I needed, and even after a good long simnmer there was a lot of dye not exhausted.

 

There was quite a bit of cucky on the side of the pot and in the bath itself. The residue was coloured somewhere between bad coffee and strong tea.

Here is how the yarn turned out:

 

I’m very pleased with the result. The dyed skein, to me, looks like a deeper value of the natural colour on the right.

Oh – see the yarn I tied the skeins with – that’s a worsted weight pure crap wool I bought  a zillion pounds of to learn with when I got my first sock knitter. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.  Still, I have enough of it to tie skeins for dyeing well into the next century.

The dyed skein in the photo is still damp, though I did spin it out in the washing machine after soaking in the rinse water. It may dry a wee bit lighter.

At the Dye Pot

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Here’s the latest from my dye pot.

This is fingering weight Blue Faced Leicester that I’ve wound into 400 yard skeins. Each batch was 6 skeins, or about 1.5 lbs.

The batches are three different intensities of Washfast Acid Dye in colour Sky Blue. For the batch on the left, I used 2 teaspoons of the dye; for the middle batch, 1/2 tsp; and for the batch on the right, 1/8 tsp.

Note how the batch on the right has a greeny tinge to it more than a bluey tinge.

Strange that, especially if you recall my baffling experience a short while ago with colour Ivy.

The two batches of roving on the left side are Ivy. The pale green batch on the right is Sky Blue!

The Sky Blue batch is actually a ‘pot scrubbing’ batch – I put some citric acid (mordant) and a length of roving into the dye pot with no added dye to try and grab the devilish little molecules of dye that are clinging to the sides of the pot.

Oh well. I wanted blue and green, and I got green and blue.

Just in a round about way to get there!

Baffled

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This one has me stumped.

The wound ball of yarn is my own 70/30 wool/nylon dyed Peapod Green. I get that colour using Washfast Acid Dye Ivy @ 0.25%

The top roving is 100% wool, from the same sheep, shorn at the same time. Also dyed with Ivy @ 0.25% – but it has come out a pale sky blue.

The bottom roving is from the same batch at the top roving, but this time dyed @ 0.5%  – and this has come out a darker sky blue.

And here is the dye pot, after the roving (2nd batch) is removed.

The green is not striking the wool.

Same method of pre-wetting and dyeing the fiber. Same sheep. Same dye. No chemical treatment on any of the fiber. Fresh, clean water used for each batch (ie no leftover residue from some previous dyelot.) The water isn’t softened. Same mordant.

Only diff I know of is the nylon content vs pure wool.

The batches were dyed 24 hours apart.

At such a low rate of dye I would expect the dye to be completely taken up and only crystal clear water left at the end.

As Sarah Palin would say, “WTF!” (which I believe is American for #$#^*(*(@#!)

At the Dye Pot

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I forgot about some cones of ecru Merino Tencel I had  tucked away. So over the past few weeks I’ve been ‘putting a pot on’ while I knit.

I used the same colours I’ve been working with this spring in other dye projects:

Merino Tencel fingering weight – 50% superwash merino 50% tencel, wound off into ~400 yd skeins/ ~4 oz and pot dyed in batches of 8.

Merino Tencel - Honeysuckle

Merino Tencel - Pea Pod

Merino Tencel - Regatta

Merino Tencel - Lavender

Merino Tencel - Mocha Plum

Merino Tencel - Silver Cloud

Merino Tencel - Grasshopper

BFL Orchid Hush

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I wound up a few skeins of my most recent dye work:

The colour on the far right is Orchid Hush – one of the Pantone colours  forecast for fall/winter 2011/2012.

I used ProChemical Washfast Acid Dye, colour Periwinkle 411 @ 0.05% OWG (weight of dye as a % of weight of yarn) which is about 1/8 tsp per 2 lbs of yarn.

I doubled the  % of dye to get the middle tone, and quadrupled that to get the deep tone.

The yarn is 100% Blue Faced Leicester fingering weight. It has a good twist.

I haven’t yet knit with it…..it has to wait in line, but I’ll blog on it when I’ve done up some socks.