Fiber & Friends #3

I've wanted to dye with indigo for a very long time, probably about as long as I've been fooling around with fiber. Indigo ikat,  sashiko, shibori and batik have always been favorites in shades of blue. I even own an indigo dye kit that I have never felt competent to use.

So I was absolutely elated to find that I could take a class in Cordova from a true natural dye expert, Kathy Hatori of Botanical Colors.  I had read enough about indigo to know that it was an art, not just a 1 2 3 set of instructions.

The class was held outdoors, at a cabin by Eyak Lake. It's a great idea to dye outdoors, for obvious color-drippy reasons.

Here's our class space--a propane burner and vat for each student, with various dyed and undyed skeins hanging about. The magenta and golden skeins were for overdying with indigo. I was so preoccupied with turning white yarn blue, I never got around to the overdyes.

My main aim was to dye my 6 skeins of Cormo wool from a Juniper Moon CSA share bought last year. My plan was to just plainly dye two skeins, dye two skeins shibori-style with resist areas, and do an ombre job on the last two.

First up was the process of making the vat: stirring up the indigo powder with a little henna and calcium hydroxide.  We started in quart jars and eventually progressed to the big pots of warm water. Because making indigo dye is an organic process, there's some waiting time, but eventually you get your vat ready to go, and it looks like this:

Bubbly scum on top, and a metallic sheen. The top of the vat is blue because the dye has oxidized in contact with the air, but the liquid below the surface is a green tea color. As you proceed with your dyeing, you must constantly check the color of the dye solution, and rebalance it with additions of fructose when it veers from that tea green.

One thing you quickly learn about indigo is that your fiber exits the vat not blue, but green. Then with exposure to air, the dye oxidizes and turns blue. Intensity and depth of color is not so much the strength of the dye solution, but the number of times the item has been in and out of the vat, each dip with a pause to air and oxidize.

Here is the pair of cormo skeins tied with rubber bands and ready to go in:

 

And here is a pair of the plain skeins after a couple of trips to the vat: 

They look a bit uneven because they have picked up some of the powder from the bottom of the vat. A plain water rinse evened them out and neutralized the pH from the dye solution.

 Here are my products of the day, posed with some fishnets for added ambiance--The darker blues are the plain skeins, the lighter ones the shibori and the other two. Plus the colorful non-overdyes.  Time and the waning strength of my dye vat made my later skeins much lighter than the first two, and the ombre version a goal for the next time.

 

Yarn is famously not the only thing that turns blue on indigo day. Indigo dyers are known for their blue hands. Though I wore gloves during the actual dyeing, I got a little blue in the paws just from handling the yarn to reskein it  before its final rinse.

Yet More Yarn Yarns

Trawling (appropriate for fisherman sweater, no?) through denim yarn patterns, I think I've found what my ecru Rowan pile wants to be:

The Cornish Knit Frock by Jane Gottelier from the book Indigo Knits. I had a flirtation with the Whitby Sweater from the same book, but decided that in ecru it would look like any old aran, as it would not have the lightening effect that makes the cables stand out when using a colored yarn. Besides, Whitby is in Yorkshire, not Cornwall.

An added attraction is that the Cornish sweater was made by one of the Knitting Goddesses, Kay Gardiner of Mason-Dixon fame, and was done with the same yarn substitution I am using, Rowan Denim for elann.com Den-M-Nit. Happily for me, Kay demonstrated that the shrinkage of the two yarns is the same.

Plus there is the connection to Cornwall. My DH is from there, and we have visited family there many times.

Fisher ganseys are also on my mind because I am happily anticipating my sojourn to Cordova, Alaska this summer for the Fisher Folk knitfest:

I have always loved gansey sweaters, the look of them and their lore. I have knitted a few, and will enjoy knitting more. They are a garment that looks great on everyone, men and women, big people and little people.

And when I'm in Cordova, one of the workshops I'll be attending is an indigo dyeing session. I'm going to take my now-foofed 6 Juniper Moon CSA cormo skeins and dunk them in the pot.

For a while, I was conflicted about whether I should just do them plain indigo, or go for spaced shades of blue, or tie them up to get white spaces in the blue. Wait. Three techniques into six skeins divides evenly--I could do 2 of each! Hope the teacher agrees...

Heavenly Net Loft

I recently made an extremely brief trip to Cordova, Alaska, and fulfilled a longtime ambition of visiting the Net Loft handcraft store there. Not just a visit, but a one-woman private browse. Wow. If this place isn't heaven, it's at least the waiting room. Such a stupendous store in such a remote place!

I first made the acquaintance of the Net Loft when I was scouring the internet for the last skein or two that I needed to complete my Winter Sunset cardigan. I tried them all--local stores, the giant web sites--nada. Then I saw this little place down at the bottom of my search. Cordova, Alaska? It's not even on the road system. Still, I had to try or abandon the whole project. Of course, you know the end of the story. They had my 2 skeins, saved my sweater, and were super nice into the bargain.

Then this spring I heard about an utterly fantastic knitfest being held at the Knit Loft in June. It's over now, but if you're quick, the info is still up on the web here. It wasn't just a little weekend do with a big name instructor; the list was full of knitting superstars: Bonnie Marie Burns, Donna Druchunas, Gudrun Johnston, and Mary Jane Mucklestone, to name a few. And there were more, some lesser known and some local, but all very very talented. Nor was it just sitting and knitting for a week. There were early morning walks; there were hikes and art tours; there was special yoga for knitters; there was weaving, spinning, felting, needlefelting, and more, and more, and more! You can see why I was seriously put out that I heard of this so late when all my travel time and budget for the year was committed elsewhere.

When I made my visit, Dotty, the principal organizer of the whole thing, was still recovering from it all. How does such a genius and major maven recharge her batteries? By taking herself to Shetland for Shetland Wool Week, of course!

But back to my browse. I took some pictures, but there are more and better ones on their web site here. Seriously. Click that link and at least watch the slideshow. Besides some stunning Alaska scenery, you will also glimpse some of their yarn displays, and let me tell you their yarns are truly unique.

Three Irish Girls dyes a whole lot of custom colorways just for them. Some reflect the scenery, the rocks, berries, and animals. Some reproduce exactly the colors and pattern of watercolor paintings by local artists. Here's a sample, and here and here.

And then there's the local librarian who dyes yarns in colorways inspired by books.  Skeins in the Stacks even have Dewey Decimal-inspired numbers indicating weight. And the Peter Pan color actually twinkles with fairy dust!

Snow Capped Yarns are works of art created by local dyer Shelly Kocan. The seasons, the landscape and its inhabitants all inspire her. There's a special range of New Zealand yarns in big skeins. There are selections of international brands like Shetland's Jamieson & Smith and Dale from Norway.

There's beautiful and unique jewelry, chocolates, teas, cards, knitting bags, fiber for spinning... If this were the waiting room for heaven, you just might have so much fun that you'd never actually go in!

On the right above is one of my eventual purchases, a big skein of New Zealand dk called "Copper Sunset", not reproduced here true to color, but good-looking this way, too. In daylight it's fuschia and a very rusty brown. Gorgeous!

One more thing to show you. Across the street from the store is the city library and museum. The anchor outside has been very thoroughly yarnbombed. (7-year-old grandson added for scale.)

Intentionally off the beaten path and definitely worth the journey!

Snow Dyeing Again

What could be more appropriate for an all-Alaskan yarn than to dye it with 100% Alaskan snow? And so I did.

Base yarn is the Alaska Yarn Co. 100% Alaskan Grown Wool, DK/light worsted weight from CommuKnitty Stash in Homer, AK. Remember when I bought it last fall? Here's the nest I plucked it from, all pale and bare down in the corner:

After the vinegar soak, the skeins went into the tub laid out on racks, then covered with snow. Sky blue dye powder sprinkled on top of the snow:

and the whole thing left in the heated garage overnight to let the snow melt and the dye seep down into the yarn. Next morning, this is what I had:

Pretty pleasing that for once,  I got something like what I was expecting from a crazy dye technique, a cloudy blue Alaska sky. Last layer was a sparse sprinkle of yellow powder, for sunshine and to meld with some of the blue to form greenery.

 Then a half hour's steam, a rinse, and what have we got?

The yarn for a very Alaskan hat.

Exhausted! (Almost)

The sun shone. The dye dyed. Solar dyeing works! But, as with any of the wild non-standard dye methods (see snow dyeing), Forrest Gump tends to get involved: you never know what you're going to get.  Here's what came out of the jars after a day in the sun:

 On the left, the wool DK dyed with the blues. On the right, the angora/wool fingering sprinkled with red and blue dyes. But take a moment to check out the liquid left in the jars. That's exhaustion, folks. As in all the blue dye was taken up in the yarn, leaving none behind in the water. Curiously, the blue in the red-and-blue jar did exhaust, but the red did not. Hmmmm. Was the difference in the dye? In the fiber? We'll never know. But what we do know is that setting a jar of yarn and color out in the summer sun makes the yarn turn amazing colors! Fantastic!

The skeins above were still wet from their experience. After a few hours drying in the shade, you can see for sure what colors you ended up with.  Let's go hang them up on some moose antlers and see what we've got:

For sure what I got was not quite what I intended. The blue is pretty much all blended in one hue, but has darker and lighter areas according to contact with the dye powder for a kettle dyed look that I quite like. The red-and-blue skein all blended to a fairly even shade of purple. Not my favorite shade, but I can live with it. Let's take a closer look:

See, there are little teeny pinky areas around the ties in the purple skein, and I'm glad they're not a major feature, because I'm not too crazy about that shade of pink. It does provide inspiration for another dye session--causing resist areas by tying the yarn in more places. And here's another curious thing: the red apparently seeped under the ties, while the blue did not. Ahhh, the mysteries of the dyepot!

All in all, this was great fun and I'll maybe try it again before the sun goes away for its winter vacation. It's a great bookend for the Alaska dye experience, dyeing with sun and snow. Now, what to knit with this lovely stuff???

A Good Day to Dye

Alaska's been crazy sunny and warm this June. June's the month of solstice, the longest daylight. To actually have sunshine with the daylight has turned my fancy to an attempt at solar yarn dyeing. Hey ho, let's go!

In the dawn's early light I laid out a black garbage bag on the deck--both to protect the surface and, according to at least one solar dyeing account I read, amplify the heat in the dyejars. Two yarn bases: a superwash wool DK weight and an angora/wool fingering blend. The KnitPicks Bare yarns are really easy to use. They come skeined up with loose ties, so they're almost ready to go. Almost. For acid dyes, you need to soak the yarn in some acid. A cup of white vinegar in a bucket of water, and in they go for a half hour soak:

Now for the dye! I used some of the Jaquard powders I had left from my winter snowdyeing fun.

The angora/wool was lightly sprinkled with vermillion and sapphire blue in the hope that the result would be blue-ish and red-ish and blended shades of purple. Darkest where the powder directly hit the yarn and lighter and purple-ier in between as the powder dissolved in the water.

The DK wool was treated to sprinkles of sapphire blue on one side of the skein and sky blue on the other, hoping for shifting shades of blue in the finished product. So into the jars they go!

As you can see, the yarn/jar/water ratio was about right. All the yarn submerged and fairly loose in the solution. Now Let the Sun Shine In!

Another Snowdye Day

Before all the snow melts away, I wanted to try snow dyeing one more time. (Actually, no danger in all of it melting away overnight, but it would be harder to find clean snow.) This time the base yarn was grey rather than, um, snowy white.

KnitPicks Sugar Bunny in Platinum, a beigy-light-grey. Not a particularly exciting color on its own, but a good non-white background for other colors. What I had in mind was adding black and other shades of grey according to the intensity of the dye coming through the snow.  So into the tub go the vinegar-water soaked skeins, laid on racks and ready to go:

Now on goes the snow and sprinkles of the black dye powder:

I also wanted to see what happens when you use a liquid dye solution with the snow, so I mixed some of the same dye up in a squeeze bottle and squirted it across in stripe fashion:

Then on goes the lid, bring tub into the garage, let melt and marinate overnight while the magic works. Upon the morrow, what to my wondering eyes should appear:

RUST! Yikes! Not that the yarn rusted, or that the racks rusted, but the dye came apart into its constituent elements, a major one of which, apparently, is a rusty gingery color.  You don't have to be a vastly experienced dyer to know that there really is no such thing as black dye. Black is achieved with a blend of intense dark colors. If you go back and big up one of the pictures that shows the dye powder on the snow, you'll see wee spots of yellow and blue and purple. That, I thought, would be kind of cool if it came through the snow--little spots of color amid the grey and black. But this is really waaay too much not-black and not-grey. So I grabbed my trusty black squirter and splashed some more of that straight onto the wet yarn:

The hope was to break up the long stretches of rust with more black and grey. Then into the plastic wrap for a half hour steam bath, a rinse, hang to dry overnight, and let's see what we finally got:

 Wow. (automatically bigged up to show color detail) Not at all what I thought of when I set out to do this, but that's the fun and amazing part of DIY (Dyeing It Yourself), and most especially of snow dyeing. Lots of blue tones I didn't expect, and the rust was a total surprise, ratcheted down a little, as hoped, by the black squirts. Y'know that this reminds me of? A tortoiseshell cat's coat. Even more so when it's knitted up. Can't wait to cast on! Here, kitty kitty....

Snowmelt

This is an interesting way to dye. Instead of messing directly with dyepot and fiber until you get what you think you want, this method has a Christmas morning effect, where you go to bed full of hope and anticipation and jump up with excitement the next morning to see what Santa brought/the dye did. And here it is:

Whoa. Not what I expected. The dye was a lot stronger than I thought. A whole lot stronger. I was expecting to see a sort of medium blue. Instead, I got navy blue with some slight tinges of other colors. [Note to self: this dye is waaaaay stronger than I realized. Use less next time.] Let's turn some yarn over and see what the underside of a skein looks like:

Oh dear. We've got dark blue on the top and pastel/white on the bottom. Yikes. [Note to self: snow dyeing colors mainly the exposed top surface. The color doesn't penetrate through the yarn much, even though it's soggy with vinegar water.] Better take the skeins out and see what they really look like:

Kinda like if Holstein cows were navy-blue and white instead of black and white. I really don't want this much dark/light contrast in the knitted fabric.  What to do? I could overdye it all by immersing the skeins in a vat of lighter blue, but that might overwhelm the little tinges of purple, aqua, and yellow that show up in the current state. They're neat. I like them. (Click on photo to enlarge it and see them better.) So here's what I did instead:

Poured off the dye juice from the bottom of the tub into a pot. Arranged the skeins one at a time white belly side up on the rack. Using a cup, poured the dye runoff onto the white areas of the skein. (I had realized that my fears of muddy brown sludge were unwarranted here because of my overuse of the strong blue.) Here's what that skein looked like after The Treatment:

The poured runoff gave a faded denim color to the white areas. The pouring also allowed me to direct the light blue away from the tinge-y areas and to keep the unevenness going because it's one of the hallmarks and my favorite things about yarns dyed with these sorts of methods. So here are all the skeins after their light blue addition:

There's contrast, but it's less stark. Refer to the blue Holstein picture for comparison.  At least it's closer to what I had in mind at the beginning. Now to wrap 'em in plastic and steam to set the dye:

(It just so happens that I had a surplus of blue plastic wrap that I used for this. I like blue, OK?) They were steamed for half an hour, then busted out of their plastic cocoons and rinsed. And now here they are nearly dry and ready for their closeup:

(And I do suggest that you click on it to see the detail of a bigger picture.) Eight sibling skeins. There's a family resemblance, but each one is distinct in its range of colors and the amounts of each. The result is a surprise, but a very pleasing one. I had no idea such tiny spots of yellow would yield big patches of green, nor that there would be very little purple, and what there is turned out a dark eggplant, nearly (dare I say it?) brown.

Next time (and there will be a next time) I will start with yarn that is a base color, not white. Snow dyeing seems best to me as an embellishment of color, not a full dye job. Definitely a lighter hand with the dye powder; a little goes a long way! Might be interesting to experiment with applying a strong dye solution in squeeze bottles to the snow and see if it diffuses and blends more than the straight powder. I'd better get cracking if I'm going to do it--this winter's giant snowbanks are melting in the 40 degree heat!

Snow Dye Day!

I've been contemplating doing this ever since I saw the post of another blogger who did it. What to do if life gives you snow rather than lemons? Dye your yarn with it!

Here are the materials: KnitPicks Bare Superwash DK Wool and some dye, a dedicated plastic tub, some metal racks, and (out of frame) a plastic bucket and white vinegar.  First step: soak the yarn in a vinegar solution.

 This was, as I recall, 1/2 cup vinegar per gallon of water for half an hour. Then the hanks were carefully hauled out and gently squeezed to be wet but not drippy.

Wet hanks were arranged on the racks so as to have even exposure to the rain of color to come.

 4 inches of clean snow gets packed in on top of the yarn.

Next, the dye powder is sprinkled on top of the snow layer. I used 2 shades of blue plus dashes of vermillion and sprinkles of yellow.  The goal was to achieve a mainly blue result with purple areas and some tinges of aqua.

Here's the side view of the layer cake. You can see the dye already soaking through the snow, the yarn layer, and the space under the racks. Although my example blogger laid her yarn straight on the bottom of her tub, I found that some quilters who snow dye use racks to keep their fiber from soaking in the mix of dye colors and snowmelt in the bottom. As you probably learned when you rinsed your watercolor brush in school, miscellaneous colors tend to muddle into muddy brown, a result that delighted my blogger, but wasn't part of my plan.  And on goes the lid and the tub and its cargo move into a heated garage to melt and dye overnight. What will the morrow bring?