Dyeing with the Kids

We had loads of fun this week.  I decided it was finally time to try dying unspun fiber.  I waited until the littlest one's nap time, and got a pound of Navajo churro fleece to soaking in my big pot.  I wrapped the wool together like a package with a piece of scrap yarn, hoping to make it easier to manage.  It really didn't.  So I got it out and put in the rack from my boiling water canner (it has handles!).  That helped a lot.

Next we got the wool out and let the excess water drain off.  I should have done a better job on this step, but the kids were SO EXCITED to start with the colors!

The big one was in charge of the blue, I was in charge of the green, and the little one was in charge of the yellow.  Each color was three packs of sugar free Kool Aid.  I am very glad right now that I use only food dyes, because at one point or another both kids decided to taste the dye stock.  To add to the fun and excitement, we used a nasal aspirator (I couldn't find the turkey baster) to spray the dye onto the wool.

Yes, the rack is sitting in my wok in that picture.  It was just the right size, and I needed something to catch run off!  Then into the pot it went to heat set.

It simmered and simmered until all the dye was sucked up into the wool.  Now, there's one thing about this wool that I didn't mention before -- I used a cold water scour on it, so the lanolin was still in.  Navajo churro sheep don't produce a lot of lanolin, but this means that the more lanolin any given part of the fleece had in it, the less dye it took up.  I'm hoping to get a cool heathered yarn when I card it all together and spin it.

Loads of fun and excitement for all ages!  And now I have green wool.  And a rusty canning rack.  It turns out that the thing wasn't meant to withstand as much acid as I just put it through.  But hey, next time, I'll rinse it better.  We still had a great time!

Kids + Summer + Kool Aid =

YARN!  Here at Casa Driggs we have been having some fun with Kool Aid and wool.  I really enjoy dying, but not enough to buy a separate set of pots for it (check the labels of commercial dyes some time -- even the "green" ones are pretty toxic!).  So the solution is food grade wool dyeing.  Other advantage?  It won't hurt my kids if they decide to sample the dye pot.  This is our most recent creation:

That's 200 g of wool, dyed with five packets of sugar free Kool Aid (three orange, on cherry, one lemonade).  It really is great fun for everyone!  With that in mind, I have some tips:

• A general rule of thumb for a saturated color is one packet of Kool Aid per ounce of yarn or fiber.
• If you are kettle dying, make sure to heat until the dye bath is CLEAR -- if you're hand painting and microwaving/steaming, the run off when you're done should be clear too.
• If you're dyeing with kids, it's extra fun to play changing colors -- when you mix the packets together, and then again as you're watching the dye bath go to clear.  This is especially fun with purple, as red dye strikes at a lower temperature than blue, so your purple water will turn blue before it goes clear.

Hand-dyed cashmere, even

Also, red is my FAVORITE color.

The second review in my cashmere series is a real treat... Sumptuosity Lace by All For Love of Yarn.  Oh.  My.  Goodness.  It is 70% baby alpaca, 20% silk, and 10% cashmere, and hoo nelly, do I love this yarn.  It is a very fine lace weight - there are 1300 yards in 3 oz - and so you need to be careful not to work it at too loose a gauge.  That being said, most lace patterns it's not overwhelmingly important exactly how big the finished object is, so that's easy to work around.  It is a two ply, but I haven't been having issues with splittiness like I do with a lot of two ply lace.

As for texture... I cannot stop patting this yarn.  It is beautifully soft and smooth.  It is also, however, extremely slippery.  One of my attempted swatches, I did on nickle plated needles (it was the only US4 I had!), and let me just say that it was a good thing the kids were already in bed.  My husband now jokes that I only swear when I'm in labor, and when I'm knitting lace.  It behaved itself quite well on my Harmony wood needles, however, so it's just an issue of the right needle for the right yarn.  On the note of swatches, this yarn really doesn't like to be frogged.  That fine baby alpaca halo just grabs.  That's a good thing tho if you happen to drop a stitch - if you catch it right away, it doesn't seem to run too far, which makes for much easier fixes.

Angela's yarns all have fabulous color.  The high silk content of this yarn in particular means it just DRINKS dye... the color is rich and saturated and glossy.  The kettle dye is very subtle, just enough to add some depth to the color, without distracting from the pretty stitch work at all.  It does have some halo to it, but not much.  A suggestion of a halo, perhaps.  In short?  I very much recommend this yarn.  It's absolutely delightful.

Do you have something you want me to review? Needles? Yarn? Notions? Drop me a line! marusempai at gmail dot com Put "Maru reviews" in the subject line.

Wool, part 1

Wool is going to be impossible to cover in one post, because not all wool is the same.  There are, in fact, eleventy bajillion and one (or something... I can't find a definitive number) different breeds of sheep.  Not all of them are wool sheep -- many are what is called a hair sheep, which are raised exclusively for meat, and do not need to be sheared because they shed their coats in the spring.  The wool sheep all produce different wool.  Some is coarse and scratchy, some is buttery soft, and everything in between!  There are, however, a few things that all wools have in common.

Wool felts.  Soft wools are generally easier to felt than course wools, but under the right conditions, all wools do felt.  The only exception is superwash wool, which has been treated specially to prevent felting.  Even then, though, some superwash wools will felt if conditions are extreme enough.  The recipe for felting: agitation, water, heat, soap.  Basically what happens is the tiny scales on the fiber's surface open up, interlock, then close up again.  Felting shrinks wool severely and makes it denser.  Felting is permanent.

Wool can be dyed with acid dyes.  This means no icky mordants for the home dyer -- you can dye wool by microwaving it in a bowl of Kool-Aid!  This means it takes minimal equipment to set up and try, which is always good in my book.

Wool has memory.  That basically means that whatever position the fibers dry in, they want to stay in, until they get wet again.  This is good for things like ribbing (it will stretch and spring back) and also for lace (when it dries stretched out it will stay stretched out).  Some wools have more memory than others.

Many yarns just say "wool" on the label.  This means that the company has a standard blend of sheep breeds for consistency within the line, but it's impossible to know the exact properties of generic wool without either touching it or more descriptors.  For example, Patons Soy Wool Stripes is ridiculously itchy.  Patons Classic Wool, on the other hand, is fairly soft.  Both are labeled simply as "wool."

As this is becomming quite a long post already, part 2 will come later, and will discuss the relative benefits of soft wool and coarse wool.  Yes, you may sometimes want to use coarse wool!