Fiber Monday - The light at the end of the tunnel

This morning I turned in my inventory sheet for the holiday market. This means I have everything made which I'm going to sell. Note that made is very different from finished. I have ironing to do on the guest towels; hemming, washing, and ironing to do on the dinner napkins; and I need to wash and do a final weigh and measure on much of the handspun. But this is still a much better place than I was a week ago. 

On Saturday I realized that I was quickly running out of time for one of the ideas I had in my head. I had a bunch of merino handspun mini-skeins that I thought would be fun to dye different colors with natural dyes. In theory it sounded good, but some of the dye stuff I had never used before, so it was a toss up if it was going to turn out to be something I could sell. And since the inventory lists were due today, it didn't give me a whole lot of time to get it all done. And nevermind that starting today the kitchen was going to be consumed with Thanksgiving preparations and it is not advisable to do dyeing while food is being prepared. The weekend was my one small window to do four different dye colors. 

Enter manic dyeing.

I've never been so happy that I overbought dye containers at the thrift store a couple of years ago. I really needed them. But I'm also happy to report my experiments were a success and I have some beautiful colors that I can sell. 


I'll go through each skein with the details.

As we all know, I have camera issues, so this blue is a little different from how it appears in person. It's a little lighter; more like the bottom of the skein. This was dyed with logwood using some wood ash to shift the pH so that the color shifted blue.


This kind of mossy, yellow-y green started the same shade as the yellow in the set. This one was dipped in an iron bath to shift the color more towards green. 


This was dyed with poke berries after being mordanted with vinegar. That is supposed to make the dye permanent because of the way it interacts chemically with the berries, which have a reputation for being a fugitive dye. My source has skeins that still have color years later, so we'll just keep our fingers crossed.


This salmon-y orange skein was dyed with sandalwood. 


And I've shown you this skein before. It was dyed with goldenrod from my backyard. 


All of the skeins are a 2-ply spun from 100% merino wool. I'll be selling them as a set because one of the things I like about natural dye colors is how they all tend to play nicely with one another. 

Now back to my endless hemming where I fantasize about doing completely different projects from the ones I have been working on for months. 

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