Adventures in Dyeing - Part 1

Two summers ago, I had some success dyeing wool with Kool-Aid and Wilton food colouring.  I wasn't too impressed with the results from the Kool-Aid (and BTW I will NEVER let my kids drink that dye source ever again), but the results from the Wilton gel dye were pretty impressive.  I needed to use quite a lot of the drink mix to get an intense colour and I just could not stand the fake, fruity smell.

Grape/Lime Kool-Aid

Grape/Strawberry Kool-Aid

Wilton Blue/Purple gel dye

I've been pretty fascinated with the concept of dyeing my own fibre ever since, but have been a nervous about experimenting with the process beyond popping a bowl of dye and yarn in the microwave.

I've finally built up the nerve to start experimenting with colour and have stockpiled about a dozen or so hanks of bare wool from Knit Picks.  My initial plan was to dye the yarn in the heat of the summer in the back yard using a variety of colour sources: plants, veggies from the garden, food colouring, and eventually commercially prepared dyes.   But we've had a really long winter here in Eastern Ontario and with the temperature hovering about 4 degrees above 0C today, the warm, sunny days of summer seem really far off and, well, I can be a pretty impatient person when it comes to wanting to try something (especially when it comes to crafting!)

So, today, I am trying my hand at dyeing some yarn with beets and tumeric, hoping for a peachy colour when all is said and done.  The beets should provide a pink base and the tumeric will (hopefully) add a tinge of gentle orangey-yellow.  As I said, I like to experiment.

I took a 2lb bag of beets, removed the root base and quartered them.  I covered them with just enough water and brought the stainless steel pot to a rolling boil.  They are presently simmering away on the stove in a stainless steel pot with about 1Tbsp of tumeric.  The smell is so earthy and much more bearable than the Kool-Aid.  I'll need to let that simmer away for a while before straining and adding the wool.  In the meanwhile, I'm going to soak the wool for a couple of hours (and decide which weight to use).  The wool needs to be completely wet and saturated before it can take the dye.

Later...

Using Earth Guild's general rules for mordanting as a guideline, I prepared an alum and cream of tartar mordant for the wool. I decided that I would use 2 hanks of Bare Wool of the Andes Worsted Weight from KnitPicks, and soaked them in water ("wetting" the wool).

As the guideline on Earth Guild's website is for dyeing 1lb of wool, I adjusted the mordant recipe as follows.

Earth Guild:  16oz fibre (dry) : 3oz alum : 1 oz cream of tartar

Me:  200g fibre : 37.5g alum : 12.5g cream of tartar

(At this point I was grateful for my mad math skills and my digital scale.)

After removing the beets from the pot, I added the mordant and stirred to dissolve it.  I then allowed the pot to cool down to room temperature as not to shock the wool (I do not want felted fibre!)  

I also dipped a square of paper towel into the dyepot to test the colour.  Pinky-orange as expected.

The wetted wool was added and the pot was then brought back up to a simmer.  My intention was to allow it to simmer for an hour, but life and chores got in the way and I left it for about 1h20m.  No harm, no foul, right?

The dyepot was then removed from the heat source and I put a lid on it.  The colour at this point was more pinky red than anything else.

Out of the dye bath, however, it was showing hints of yellow.

After letting the yarn cool and soak in the pot over night, I was surprised to see much more yellow than pink in the pot.

And the liquid was not a clear as I expected.  Hmm.  All the info I read had stated that the all of the dye should be absorbed into the fibre and the remaining liquid should run clear.  Hmm.  I know that with some acid dyes (eg. food colouring) vinegar and another 30 mins of  heat could take care of this problem, but as I hadn't read anything about mixing vinegar with alum, that was not an experiment I wanted to do.  So after dumping the remaining dye outside on the driveway (we're on a septic tank, so I didn't want to send any leftover mordant down the drain). 

As I rinsed the yarn, it seemed to lose all of its pink from the beets and only the yellow remains.  So what went wrong?

I can only guess that I either didn't use enough alum in the mix for the mordant, that the mordant reacted with the turmeric before the beets, or that there was a conflict of sorts between the beet colorant and the colour in the turmeric.  I suppose that I really should have started out with only one colour source as my first attempt at natural dyeing.  Live and learn, right?  (If you have any idea why the beet colour didn't take, please comment!)

The yarn is now out on the deck drying.  I'm actually really pleased with the final colour.  It's consistent in tone and I have no other yarn in my stash remotely close in colour or tone.  I'm not sure how colour-fast it is, so the next step will be to wash it with Soak and see how much more dye comes out of it before I knit it up.  I'm going to earmark it for a shawl to showcase the colour.