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01/06/2006
dyeing felted tweed
A while back, I wanted to knit Salina from Rowan's Vintage Style. As usual, I was getting a bit ahead of myself, not really thinking about patterns and yarn and what I would really stick with and what I would really want to wear. Still, I bought enough Rowan Felted Tweed for the project, way on sale of course, in Corn.
Corn. Corn! What was I thinking here? I don't understand. Was I thinking Corn meant "pretty green" or "soft blue"? Rowan has some interesting ideas about naming colors, but Corn is pretty straightforward. Yellow. Murky yellow. The color isn't so awful, really, and the yarn is so pretty with flecks of blue, black, and white. But I would look awful in this color, and I can't think of anyone who could get away with it. I thought about making something striped, or something with an intarsia something in the middle, like a Weasley sweater. But what color would go with Corn? Maroon? Green? Blue? I can't imagine not hating the Corn no matter what other colors surround it.
So when I wanted to test my skills in Kool-Aid dyeing, I had a perfect candidate. Initially, of course, I looked all over my neighborhood and couldn't find the little sugar-free packets of Kool-Aid I'd heard about. So I dove in and bought a small jar of sweetened Grape Kool-Aid. How could sugar hurt? I dyed some pink yarn I had, some pink wristwarmers, and some white Lamb's Pride. The pink yarn barely changed, since I didn't add enough Kool-Aid. The wristwarmers because a deep maroon-purple color, and the Lamb's Pride because a deep purple-ish rose color. (I used it for a sort-of fair isle project I hope to document soon.) The problem with the sweetened Kool-Aid, I found out, is that there isn't a sticky gooey mess, as much as all the yarn becomes...stiffer. It was a bit sad with the Lamb's Pride, made very little difference in the pink yarn, but I no longer have any interest in the wristwarmers. (This may be a blessing in disguise - I really should stop wearing fingerless glove guys when the weather is cold and snowy.)
I decided to try a bigger supermarket when I went home for break recently, and was well rewarded. Pathmark had a huuuge selection of unsweetened packets. I took a few in each color, more in the blues and greens I was most excited about using for the Felted Tweed.
(This represents only some of the colors I used, since some packets were thrown out.)
I made some long hanks of Felted Tweed to look for a good color to dye the rest of it. I ended up making four samples that way before deciding that I just would not be able to decide on a color, dye the rest of the yarn that color, and find one project to use it on. There just wasn't enough yarn, and I didn't have the faith in the dyeing coming out the same.
These are the first four samples, from left to right: Ice Blue Raspberry Lemonade, Arctic Green Apple, Grape (the unsweetened kind), and Slammin' Strawberry Kiwi. Something interesting and great happened, that you can sort of see in that picture. Apparently, the flecks of color in the Felted Tweed are not wool, so when I dyed the yarn, those flecks remained. I can't change their colors, but I like that they're there. I especially love the color of the Grape one, it's way nicer than when I used sweetened Grape. I also liked that dyeing the yellow yarn blue turned it into a nice greenish turquoise color, all the way on the left.
My next attempt was to make yarn two colors - half of each of the two on the left. I burned this yarn on the side of the pot - I think maybe because I didn't remember to soak the yarn before dyeing it. I had more success trying a self-striping technique with some more white Lamb's Pride Bulky I had lying around (to be safe I rigged up a system involving wooden spoons and a teapot to keep the yarn away from the sides of the pot). The colors came out too bright, though, so some overdyeing is in order.
I'm not sure what else to do with this dyeing stuff. I don't really want to buy new yarn to try more self-striping stuff, and I don't know what I want to do with the rest of the Felted Tweed. For now I have the rest of the Kool-Aid selection stored away, and maybe soon I'll try other colors and make something stripey.
10:25 Posted in dyeing | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this