Wool Roving

I've been dyeing wool roving - sort of a bus man's holiday! These are the last five batches. I hang them in my kitchen window to dry. It adds a nice spot of color!

I've dyed wool with Kool Aid. Fun to do with kids, no toxic stuff to worry about, but a little on the expensive side if you want to dye any volume. I switched to MX dyes with vinegar as my acid after a few times playing around with Kool Aid. At first, I used the left-over dye from a fabric dyeing session, now I have to mix dyes just for wool!

There is an color shift when dyeing wool, so the results are less predictable than with cotton. This adds an element of surprise that I anticipate and appreciate. Back to the dyepot - I'm in a green and blue phase right now.

New Pincushions

Outside, we have a foot of snow on the ground, the end result of The Blizzard of '07. I've shoveled the snow. I've shoveled the drifting show. I've shoveled the snow the plow threw up into the driveway. I've shoveled more drifting snow. I'm tired of snow! I spent the afternoon inside, declining the offer to go to a movie (Zodiac) so I could stay AWAY from the snow! I made these three pincushions which I may list in my etsy shop later.

This cute little froggy just called out to me "I want to be a pincushion!", so now he is. I needle felted the wool, starting with a "bead" of wool that had been machine felted. (Making felted wool beads didn't work out the way I wanted, so I'm using the beads as a base for other felting projects.)






My second pincushion was a cute little pink cup. You can't see it, but on the saucer was a black poodle. Almost too cute to hide! I tried to felt a striped pattern on the top of the wool, but it looked weird, so I turned the wool upside down in the cup. The matching pink saucer MAKES this pincushion!






My third pincushion was felted last week. I machine felted a wool base because this cup is so big. I hand felted on dark red wool yarn, then put it through another machine felting cycle. You can still see the texture of the yarn, as well as a little of the base wool peeking through. Not as "cute" as the first two, but I like it.

Dyeing Wool Yarn

I've recently been dyeing wool yarn with Procion dyes and vinegar. What I've discovered is that wool absorbs dye differently than cotton. When I'm dyeing cotton fabric, it is easy to get the textures and shades that make hand dyes so appealing. But that darn wool yarn soaks up the dye! Case in point: I poured blue dye in a dish, put my wet wool yarn on top of the dye, then poured on yellow dye. During the heating process, the blue dye absorbed into the yarn, mostly overwhelming the yellow. There are some bits of yellow left, but nothing like I anticipated.

This picture is from one of my students - these are her colorwheel fabrics:

Thanks Mary R!

Kool Aid, Kool Aid!

While visiting my parents, my Mom and I decided to Kool Aid dye a skein of handspun yarn (100% wool). Our yarn is heavy with lanolin. I wonder how much that will affect the color? Mom was sure she had a bunch of Kool Aid packets in the house, but we couldn't find them. When facing the decision to buy .20 Kool Aid or .10 WalMart brand, I decided an experiment to compare them was in order. I bought six packets of each, Grape flavor.


We divided the skein roughly in half. Each half was put into a glass baking pan, covered with warm water and left to soak for 45 minutes. This was an arbitrary length of time - having the wool saturated is the goal. After the excess water was gently squeezed out, the yarn was dyed using 6 packets of "dye", two glugs of white vinegar and enough water to cover.

After each dish went through a "microwave for 2 minutes, wait, microwave for 2 minutes" cycle, the WalMart brand dye had mostly absorbed into the yarn. The water in the yarn with the Kool Aid dye was still very dark. It was almost 10 pm, so we left the yarn/water to cool overnight.

The next morning, I squeezed out the excess water. I had to rinse the yarn quite a bit, which I hadn't expected. (After doing additional Kool Aid dyeing, I realize I should repeat microwave/cool cycles until the dye is absorbed into the yarn. With the heavy lanolin, that would never have happened.) I hung the skeins of yarn off the side of the deck to dry.

This picture shows the yarn after dyeing with a skein of the original color. The color was much weaker than I expected, which I attributed to the lanolin. There was no noticeable difference in color when I compared the Kool Aid dyed yarn to the WalMart brand dyed yarn (no picture)

When I got home, I scoured the dyed yarn. I redyed one of the skeins using two packets of Grape flavor Kool Aid. (Mom found her Kool Aid stash & sent it home with me.) I did the heat/wait cycle until the water was clear - really a light blue rather than clear. No rinsing was necessary. This picture shows (L-R) original yarn, heavy lanolin content dyed yarn, and scoured, re-dyed yarn.

No grapes were hurt during these dye sessions.