Fiber Heaven

For my birthday, my mom gave me the best present in the world: a shopping spree at The Artful Ewe, a wonderful yarn and fiber shop in Port Gamble! I went crazy.

So, since a lot of the fiber was raw and un-carded, I've been learning how to card wool. I've been doing it as I spin, picking out a small piece of a color I like, carding it, and then spinning it, one at a time. I've also been using wire dog brushes instead of carders. They are much cheaper and work perfectly for my purposes.

So needless to say I've been having a blast playing with all this new and colorful fiber. This is my latest creation. (Also see the picture above)

Black Bean and Onion Socks

These are my wooly, slightly felted, super warm, comfy socks that I made with my black bean and onion dyed handspun yarn! I've only made one so far because I need to make some more of the white yarn. Seriously, so comfy. Come winter time, I will wear them constantly. 

The colors changed a little after being felted because not all the dye had come out in the rinse, but I liked the colors better afterwards anyway.

Natural Dyes: Black Beans

Who would have thought that black bean juice would dye yarn a beautiful shade of blue-grey? I had a really hard time capturing the color of this yarn in a photograph. It's a little bluer than the photo shows.

I wanted to have a little variation in this yarn, so I tried to make one lighter skein and one darker skein for plying together. This is how I go about winding and preparing the yarn for dyeing. I also used an alum mordant on the wool before dyeing. 

Method:

Black bean dye is a cold dye, meaning that you let the yarn soak in cold for a long period of time instead of simmering it on the stove. The yarn must also be mordanted to actually absorb and keep the dye, unlike the onion skin dye.

I soaked a bag full of black beans (maybe 3 cups?) in water for 24 hours until the juice was nice and blue. I then prepared two containers of dye, one with just bean juice, and the other with all the beans left at the bottom. I thought that the container with the beans in it would come out a little darker. I then added one skein to each container. 

I let the no-beans skein soak for about 12-14 hours, and I let the  beans skein soak for 36 hours. The one I let soak a little longer with the beans turned out a tiny bit darker and grayer, but I was surprised that the difference was so subtle. The closer skein is the shorter soak in the bean juice, and the farther away skein is the longer soak in bean juice with beans still in the container. Although there wasn't a whole lot of contrast, I think the subtle difference gave the final yarn some nice character.

I can't stop spinning!! It's my new addiction! 

Plying Yarn: Color Experiments!

After getting inspired by a book I came across on spinning variegated sock yarn, I just HAD to try it! The next step will be to learn to dye my own fiber, but I wanted to experiment and didn't want to deal with that step right now so I went to the yarn store and bought a few ounces of dyed fiber. This is what came out of it!! It was SO fun to make!!

The way you make yarn like this is to randomly spin multiple colors of fiber, switching colors every couple of feet. It sounds tedious, but you get the hang of it and it goes just as fast as normal spinning if you've got a system down. I kept the different colors on my lap and just switched out whenever I felt like it. 

I made two bobbins full:

Then, once I had the two balls of randomly colored yarn, I plied (plyed?) them together. This was the best part, as you get to watch the yarn come together in all sorts of fun color combinations!! Plying means spinning the two strands together in the opposite direction that you spun the yarn in. This makes the strands, which have a lot of excess spin in them, relax and stabilize.

Here is my beautiful new creation next to the onion skin dyed yarn I made yesterday.

 I can't stop making yarn!! I've got two more skeins soaking in a black bean dye bath right now as I blog! My new morning routine has consisted of waking up early, listening to the radio, and spinning, before the house wakes up. It's a great way to start the day! 

:)

Natural Dyes: Onion Skins

Now that I've gotten the hang of spinning yarn, I've moved onto the next project: dyeing yarn! I was going to begin my experiments with synthetic dyes, but then I learned about natural dyes and got excited about that instead. This blog provided some great ideas and tutorials. 

Here's the final product! The colors are more beautiful and rich in real life. I'm so pleased with how it turned out!

At first, I thought about starting to collect onion skins in the kitchen and just dyeing my yarn when I got enough. But then I remembered that I'm an impatient person. Instead, I went to Safeway and gathered all the loose onion skins from the onions in the produce section and tried to pretend I wasn't doing something strange. This surprisingly yielded enough for a batch! Yay for instant gratification!

Something to know about dyeing is that if you want the dye to stay in the fiber permanently you need a mordant. It's easy and cheap to make a basic mordant. These are the instructions I used. All you need are two ingredients: Alum and Cream of Tartar; both of which can be found in the grocery store spice section. This makes an alum mordant. 

Onion skin dyeing is unusual in that it does not require a mordant. However, mordants can do a lot to change the way the color comes out. To experiment with this, I used alum mordant on my main skein, and then I did a little sample on the side without any mordant. In the top photo, the larger middle skein is with the alum mordant treated yarn, the smaller more brownish yarn on the right is without any mordant. The yarn on the left is the original color of the fiber. 

Here was my yarn dyeing process:

Step 1: Make yarn into a loose skein, and tie yarn in several places to prevent tangling during the dyeing process.

Step 2: Heat up the fiber. Fill pot with water, place fiber in the water, and slowly heat it to a light simmer. (I used a thermometer the first time just to get an intuition about it. I heated it to around 80-90 degrees. 

Step 3: Carefully remove fiber. Mix 1/2 tsp alum and 1/4 tsp cream of tartar into water. Return fiber to mordant bath and simmer for an hour.

Step 4: While yarn is in the mordant bath, prepare the dye. Throw all the onion skins into a pot, add some water, and boil the onion skins for around half an hour or until the water seems saturated with color. 

Step 5: Drain mordant bath, and gently move the yarn from the mordant bath into the dye bath. I left the onion skins in, and I think that this gave the color a little bit of variegation and character. 

Step 6: Simmer yarn in dye bath for around half an hour. Perhaps if left in the bath overnight to cool or simmered for longer the color would have come out darker. I don't know, I'm still an amateur.  

Step 7: Pour pot of yarn and dye into a clean sink. Gently rinse the yarn in hot water. (Temperature shock can cause the yarn to felt. This is bad!) 

Step 8: I used a salad spinner to get the yarn semi-dry. Then I hung it up over the sink to dry overnight.

Step 9: Show everyone, admire the colors, photograph, and start a project!

Stay tuned for black bean dye next! :)

Hatstravaganza

I've been enjoying experimenting with fair-isle knitting. I spent a lot of our recent vacation to the midwest in front of air conditioning or on the Mississippi river knitting hats. Here are the fruits of my labor: