Saturday, May 17, 2008

Playing with colour

A few weeks ago I picked up 3 little RIT dyes(blue, red and yellow). My thinking was that I love spinning coloured fleece, in part because it looks better on the blog, but I keep buying plain white fleece because it is cheaper and I have a hard time picking out predyed rovings online. Mostly I just wanted to play around dyeing things.

I used my big crock pot that never gets used for cooking to heat up my water and keep everything just this side of boiling. Instead of jumping right in with the fleece, I did some warm ups with some yarn. The first yarn I dyed was a bright pink skein of Dream in Color Smooshy sock yarn that I had won but that really wasn't a colour I would use. I threw it in with the blue dye and now I have a nice dark purple/indigo sock yarn that I will actually use. In fact I have already started using it:

This photo doesn't really capture the colours but I'm sure I will be taking more pictures as the sock develops.

The sock yarn didn't exhaust the blue dye so I threw some of my white BFL roving in. It wasn't a dark enough blue though so I eventually threw in some blue ink I had lying around. I kind of like the result, though I think I still have some colour to wash out once it becomes yarn:

Finished with the blue I moved on to red. Again I started by dyeing a yarn, this time an natural coloured skein o sea silk. I forgot to take a picture but I'm sure I will get around to starting a project with it soon. This time I added more roving and my yellow dye as well. I don't have a picture of the result but I did take a picture of my second attempt at playing with red dye and roving:

Currently I am spinning this red fleece into the fine singles that I seem to produce most easily. I'm thinking it will be a three ply eventually and I'll wait to see what my yardage is before I decide what to make with it. I'm really enjoying spinning something I dyed myself. It is hard, though, to spin and watch tv. I guess the only thing to do is keep practicing.

1 comment:

Briley said...

looks wonderful! I love playing with dyes.