Saturday, April 15, 2006

Dyeing wool

















Because I'm not getting to go to the Dunedin mini-symposium to play with wax, I decided to play with dyeing wool instead. Specifically, hand painting, as I'm not really interested in plain colours.

This is my first attempt at using acid dyes. There are 8 x 100g skeins of 60% wool 40% alpaca - this is commercial wool and was grey originally, as you can see. I mixed up around 9 or 10 colours, and handpainted each skein with at least 6 of the colours. So while each skein is different, they will
all blend together in a garment as they all contain some of the colours.

And that garment will be mine! I'll show you how it progresses once I've decided what to knit and started on it.

Now that my wool dyeing has turned out so well, I'll do a tutorial next time so you can see how to do it yourself.

3 comments:

Michelle said...

So very yummy!!!!

Shirley Goodwin said...

Thanks, Michelle. The colours are actually much more vibrant than the photo shows. I'll photograph the wool again when it's dry and wound up in its skeins.

Webfrau said...

You might want to check out Scout's knitted swag www.scoutj.com
She's been experimenting with dyeing lately and built a board for winding the yarn on to get nice stripes. She's starting a yarn dyeing swap if you're into that sort of thing.