Natural Dyeing – The Knitting Doctor

A Real Update

I have been knitting, just very slowly. Nothing new finished, nothing new on the needles. Oh wait, I never did do a Finished Project post for the Fritz baby blanket. Sheesh. I’m probably the lamest knit blogger on earth.

I’ll do that next time. I have to find the photos.

I’ve been doing a little spinning and dyeing lately.

Here’s the spinning. This was spun on my wheel. It’s about a DK weight, will make a nice scarf. Or maybe mitts. Winter is coming.

And last weekend I hauled out the dye pots. This was prompted by John harvesting a big ass mushroom in the neighborhood. Here’s the shroom.

Unfortunately it only yielded a very pale nondescript beige color, despite a couple of manipulations. Not worth wasting yarn for. So I went to the backyard and cut the rest of the fading rudbeckia flowers.

I added a little envelope of mystery dried blossoms, not sure what they were but they were small white flowers, smelled like fresh cut hay and made me sneeze. I expected the combo to yield a yellowish gold color on yarn. Here’s what I got.

Once again, the October skies make it tough to get a good photo. The real color is a very deep khaki, very unexpected. The yarn was mordanted with alum and a bit of cream of tartar, nothing else. This is superwash merino/nylon fingering weight, about 800 yards total. (This is commercial undyed yarn, not handspan.)

That’s it for today.

Dyeing Adventure

I realized today that I never blogged about my dyeing adventure a few weeks ago.

I had bought a whole bag of Bluefaced Leicester white spinning fiber some time back, thinking I’d dye it first and then spin. I’ve discovered that it is a whole lot easier to felt unspun fiber than yarn, so after one attempt, I spun it first with plans to dye later. Here is the result.

The dye material is tickseed, or Coreopsis (with a bit of dried marigold I had saved from last year that wasn’t enough to dye anything by itself). John planted these in pots down by the lake, and I’ve been dead-heading them since they started blooming earlier this summer. I simmered in water for an hour or so, then let sit overnight (mostly because I ran out of time). The next morning I strained out the flowers, and in went the wool.

The wool was mordanted with a mixture of alum and cream of tartar to help the dye set. It all simmered for another hour, then I let it sit until it was cool. Then out of the dye pot, rinse, dry, and skein it up.

That is 366 grams of wool, about 790 yards total. I think it will make a nice rustic wrap of some sort.

I’m home from work today with a migraine, not getting a whole lot accomplished. It’s getting better at this point, though I still feel like somebody poured Karo syrup into my brain. It makes for a waste of a perfectly good day off.

And, because it’s my blog, and I can, I’m posting one more photo of my last finished project. I posted this on Facebook, and somebody commented that all it needed was a tiara. Here you go, Dorothy.

Though THIS is the one I really want.

So you suppose Princess Sofia will send that to me when she grows tired of it?

Onion Soup

Well, we really didn’t have onion soup for dinner. I finished my dye project that I mentioned in the last post. Here’s the finished yarn:

This started as “commercial” natural colored yarn, from my Nature’s Cauldron natural dye CSA. The wool is 100% merino, grown at Mary Vega’s Ranch in California, and milled at Yolo Wool Mill. In all there are 600 yards of sport weight wool. I put “commercial” in quotes, since although this is mill spun yarn, it’s not exactly a big commercial yarn business.

That color is pretty true to real life. Want to know how I did that? I didn’t get any photos during the dye process, since it was just a big mess of boiling onion skins.

I’ve been saving yellow onion skins for over a year. We use a lot of onions in cooking. Every time I would get out an onion to chop, I pulled off the papery yellow skin and put it in a bowl. When the bowl got full, I started putting it in a big bag that I kept in the garage. Last weekend I finally used them. I shoved them all down into my huge stockpot that I use for dyeing, and covered with water. Then I brought it to a simmer and cooked it for a little over 2 hours. I let it sit for about another hour with the burner off, then pulled out the onion skins and strained the liquid.

Then in went the wool. I prepped this the weekend before, using an alum mordant to help the dye stick. The yarn went into the dye pot, brought to a slow simmer, and again left to simmer for a couple of hours, then I let it cool right in the dye pot. Rinse, dry, and there you go. Bob’s your uncle, I have this gorgeous pumpkin pie colored yarn that I never would have expected from a bag of onion skins. And it is surely one of a kind. I’ve seen photos of the results that people get from onion skins, and it’s anything from a much paler yellow to a deep bronze.

Here’s another one of my do-it-yourself projects. I didn’t dye this myself, but I did spin it.

The fiber was from Cupcake Fiber Company, it’s a superwash merino/nylon blend, about 6 ounces worth of fiber. This was spun up on my Marie wheel, it’s a 2-ply yarn, mostly a sport weight. There are about 460 yards there.

And just because I haven’t shown a picture of the wheel lately, here she is in my little spinning corner.

We’re off to the farmers’ market! Have a great Sunday!

Summer Wrap-Up

Or, A Very Big Post

Now that summer is officially over, let’s get back to the monthly wrap-up posts, shall we? This summer was a bit of a bust as far as knitting goes. I got lots of other non-fibery projects done though, and enjoyed a lovely summer with family and friends, so I count it as a success all the way around! Here’s the summary:

I did no knitting at all on the True Blood Faery sweater. The current status is that I have the main body done and blocked, and I’ve started on a sleeve.

I knit about an inch on the current sock in progress. It just seemed to want to stay in hibernation.

I am nearly done with that Electric Blue High School Graduation Baby Mystery Project. I’m on the edging, about 6 rows to go, but those rows currently are at 592 stitches, and getting bigger every time around.

I spun up several skeins of yarn.

I started doing natural dyeing. Here’s the latest:

These were dyed with chopped dried madder root. The top yarn is handspun Romney, from a sheep named Rainbow, that was a gift from Dorothy* last year. I spun it up into a two ply right after she gave it to me, and it went into the stash. I was looking for something else to toss into the dye pot and found this, it was spun undyed. The roving is BFL, about 4 ounces. The color is pretty accurate, at least on my monitor.

After I pulled those out of the dye pot, I decided that there might be some color left, so tossed in the skein of rhubarb-mordanted Perendale wool that was in the August CSA box, along with 4 ounces of a BFL-Silk blend. Here’s how it came out.

That’s also pretty accurate, it’s a pale peach color. I haven’t quite decided if I like it or not, but I can always over-dye it next time I have the right color dye pot going.

Project Details:

Fiber: Two skeins of Romney wool, handspun by yours truly, 4 ounces of BFL roving, one skein of local California wool, and 4 ounces of BFL-silk roving

Mordant: The peach wool was mordanted by Birdsong from the CSA with rhubarb. I did the rest with an alum/cream of tartar mordant. I used about a 10% alum mordant solution

Dye: Chopped madder root. There was about 230 grams of the madder, I would definitely use more if you wanted to dye this much fiber and have it all come out red.

What I Learned: As the dye pot exhausts, the color changes. Duh. Madder is treated a little differently than the fennel. For one thing, it doesn’t stink like the fennel, I did this in the house without any problems. From what I read, if you cook the madder too hot or too rapidly, it will turn more orangey than red.

Here’s another summer thing. I bought a new spindle! This is sort of an early birthday present for myself. I’ve been looking at Golding spindles for a long time, and finally saw one that had my name stamped all over it.

Do you want a close up of the top? Of course you do!

Pretty, eh? The Scottish thistle is in honor of our next big adventure. We leave for Scotland** next week for a couple of weeks. I can’t wait! When I saw this up for sale on the Golding website, I knew it had to be for me.

OK, a quick list of September fiber goals and I’m out of here, or I’ll be late for church. I’m not getting very ambitious since I’ll be gone much of the time.

Finish the baby thing.

Finish those red socks.

Read books.

Enjoy the vacation.

That’s it. I’ll try to do one more post before we go, since we had a very special visitor last week that I’d like to tell you about!

*The wool was the gift, not the sheep.

**As usual, for you stalkers thinking you can steal my yarn while we’re gone, we have a house-sitter. She brings her llamas to guard the wool, so don’t even think about it.

Public Service Announcement

Kim at filleverywindow is doing her annual Knitters’ Hunk contest. It’s only into day 2, but the competition is fierce. There are some prizes involved, but mostly lots of eye candy. There was a little dust up over an uncooperative blog platform involving a do-over, so the contest is just getting started over. There’s plenty of time left to ogle vote!

In fibery news, here’s what that Army Blanket Green Polwarth is spinning up to be. It’s really a nice soft sage color. I’m not quite half done spinning the fiber, it will be a two ply when it grows up.

And here’s what’s in the dye pot today.

That’s the first round, and there’s four ounces of Lincoln wool 2 ply handspun that I did awhile back, and four ounces of unspun BFL roving. Once that’s out of the dye pot, I have a hank of rhubarb-mordanted yarn that Birdsong sent in the first CSA shipment, and four ounces of BFL-silk roving to toss in. It will be interesting to see the difference in the two batches, if any.

Once again, it’s impossible to capture reds with a camera, at least with my mediocre photography skills. That’s close, but it’s a little bit less orange and more garnet in real life. The dye plant is madder root (but not from my CSA box).

Last but not least, a cat photo for your enjoyment. I heard some rustling around on my desk yesterday, and here’s what I found.

I guess Will likes a messy desk as much as I do.

And Now For Something Completely Different…

And, A Finished Project!

Earlier this spring, I signed up for a novel CSA* project. It’s from Birdsong at Nature’s Cauldron, and it’s a natural dye plant CSA share. The first shipment arrived last week, and contained a big skein of yarn, and several different paper sacks, all loaded with a variety of dried plants useful for dyeing fiber. This shipment contained comfrey root, fennel, some lodgepole pine bark, and a lichen. I could hardly wait until I had a day off so I could play. Here’s the photo evidence of my first effort.

I decided to try dyeing unspun roving first. This is 4 ounces of undyed Polwarth, soaking in the sink pre-mordanting.

That’s the pot, ready to go. I spent the last few weeks before the first shipment came collecting tools. Fortunately we have a second tiny kitchen in our basement, so I can keep the dye equipment and supplies out of our food prep kitchen.

Fennel chopped up and ready to go. We just happened to have a bunch of fresh fennel in our food CSA box this week as well, so the tops and stems went in as well as the dried stuff.

Here’s the fiber in the mordant pot. With most natural dyes, you have to pre-treat, or mordant the fiber with one of a variety of chemicals to make the dye stick and help with the colorfastness. This is an iron mordant, which also changes the color of the finished fiber. With iron, this is called “saddening” the color since it dulls it and makes it more of an earthy color instead of a bright clear color.

The mordanted fiber:

That’s the fennel cooking. This smells nothing like the bulb of the fennel plant. After this had cooked for awhile, I got online and ordered a hotplate so that in the future I can do this outside. It just plain stinks.

I simmered this for about 90 minutes, then turned it off and let it sit overnight, then repeated the cooking the next morning, after opening all the doors and windows. Here’s the strained dyepot, ready to go.

That’s the fiber, out of the pot, on my improvised hammock drying rack. And here’s the finished fiber:

That’s pretty close to the real color. If you’ve ever seen an old army blanket, this is the exact same color, so it’s officially Army Blanket Green. I think this will make a swell hat or a scarf.

Project Details:

Fiber: Polwarth, 115 grams.

Mordant: Ferrous Sulfate, purchased from Griffin Dyeworks. I used 11 grams of the iron, or 10% of the fiber weight. I heated the iron in water to dissolve it, then simmered the fiber in it for 90 minutes, and rinsed.

Dye: Fennel tops and stalks, both dried and fresh. I had 577 grams of fennel total. The dye pot was prepared by boiling the fennel in water for 90 minutes, turning off overnight, then repeating in the morning. I soaked the fiber in water, then added it to the dye pot, brought to a simmer for 90 minutes, cooled, then rinsed and dried.

What I Learned: This was more fun than a barrel of monkeys. It’s really much like running a chemistry experiment, with the added bonus that you get yarn to play with at the end. This really appeals to the weirdo mad scientist in me that never got to have a chemistry kit as a kid.

Next up?** The skein of yarn that was included in this shipment was pre-mordanted with rhubarb, so it’s ready to dye. I also have another skein of my handspun that is undyed, and lots more plain roving, so tomorrow’s experiment is going to be with madder root (not in the shipment, but I had ordered some to play with). I’ll report back with the results of the experiment when it’s done!

*CSA=Community supported agriculture

**Yes, I’m still working on that baby blanket.