Dye Lab!!

Here is the long awaited post about how you learn to Dye fiber at Yarn School. It's very enjoyable because the Yarn School elves do all the hard stuff and just let the students play with color. All the dyes are premixed and after you cook your fiber they rinse the extra color out and hang to dry.
Playing with color dyes is interesting because it never looks the same once the process is over. You have to trust the picture of what the dye's look like when they have processed and hope you got the right ratio of dye vs. water.
But no matter what you get its TONS of fun!!

Here is the undyed fiber that we had to start with. The white wool was provided as a part of the class. The natural gray I brought and I wanted to play with if I had time.

First things first you must soak the fiber.

My classmates with our teacher Adrian in the front and middle!

We did one ball of fiber in a crock pot and let it cook for a couple of hours. This is a hand painted super wash wool that I made some super bright clown yarn out of. This was wrapped in plastic and microwaved for about ten minutes to set the dye. You also have to spray with Citric acid to get the dye to stay.

Here is how my gray turned out. I dyed it with Turquoise, Aztec Gold and Brown/Olive.

 

Here is my super bright super wash!!

Hang tight with me I think I have a couple more posts about Yarn School left! Hopefully by then my bedroom will be painted and I can show off that! That is the big house project for May.