Fiber Monday - I blame the weather

March 06, 2023

To give fair warning, this post could be exceedingly long and have more than the usual number of pictures.

Last Wednesday, an afternoon I try to keep free, the weather was beautiful. It was sunny and the temperature was in the 50's, which at this time of year feels gloriously warm. With a free afternoon and weather I could be outside in, I decided to take advantage of it and finally mix up dye stock solutions of the 14 new dye powders my adult children gave me for Christmas. Because acid dye powder is very fine, I like to do it outside where no one can accidentally breathe it in. So, I got all my supplies, donned my protective gear, and got to mixing. I'm much faster these days and it took less than two hours to get everything mixed up.

One thing I find intriguing is that the actual dye color doesn't always look like the dye stock. For instance this dye:

It's a mauve color which means it's going to be on the lighter, pinker end, but it looks like a very deep pink in the jar. One of my new colors is intriguingly called 'duckling' and I can't tell from the dye stock exactly what color it is going to be.

Of course having all these new dyes to play with made me want to try them out. I went digging around in my studio and discovered I had a little over 200 g of washed cheviot fleece. So I dyed some a pink color. (Because it is early, early spring and everything is brown, and it's the only time of the year that I crave pastels.)

I realized I didn't want to go through and just try different colors, I wanted to try something different, so decided to do a depth of shade experiment. Depth of shade is what determines the color strength of something; how light or dark it is. The standard is 1% depth of shade which is what I had been during at. I wondered what would happen if I dyed the rest of my wool at 2%, 3%, and 0.5%. So I tried it. I was so excited to create this color gradient with just one dye.

I decided to card it and then spin it in its order of depth. The carding is going pretty quickly and I'm over halfway through now.

The 0.5%

The 3%

And what is left to do.

I also realized I had 1oz each of two other bits of wool, some Romney and some Jacob sheep. So I dyed those.

The romney

And the Jacob

I love my growing dye notebook. I have enough information on each sample that I know how to recreate each color in it.

But that is not all! There was also spinning. I finished two of the colors of that last huge batch of dyeing I did. Only nine colors left. The blue:

And the brown.

Now that this brown is spun I like it better and don't find it quite so ugly. See all the different shades in it?

I also started spinning one of those batts I made a while ago. I think this is the last of them. I decided to try something different on this as well. I'm working on making a thick and thin single with enough twist so that I can weave with it. We'll see; it's an experiment.