Fun with Color

Last Friday’s Fiber Spa day ended up being very little about fiber, and a lot about dyeing. Easter is coming up, so we had fun coloring eggs. I haven’t done anything like it in years, it was lots of fun, and took most of the morning and most of the kitchen. We tried dyeing with silk waste, with food coloring, and with vegetable stuff (onion skins, red cabbage, and beet juice). The eggs look pretty amazing, too!

Oh, dang, lettering too small. OK, clockwise from top left are waste silk plus onion, waste silk alone, onion skins, wax resist with food coloring, leaf print with food coloring, red cabbage, and beet pickle juice. 

We also tested a microwave dyeing apparatus, which basically looks like a square with rods sticking up from it, 3 to a side, to wind yarn around. Someone showed us a picture of one, and that was enough for our hostess to set her husband on to making one out of CPVC from Canadian Tire. You wind the yarn around the uprights, and apply the dye, then set it in the microwave. I was curious to try it as another method of getting a skein shaded from one end to the other, and am happy to say it worked pretty well. Wound yarn from a solid pink skein around three groups of three uprights until each set in turn was full and I had used up about 2/3 of the skein, then draped the remaining third around the fourth group of three. I used three different dilutions of blue food coloring, so that the first three sides got dark, medium and light blue overdyeing, and left the fourth section plain. Result – a skein shaded from pink to blue-purple, and very pretty.

Oh, and the garbage can came back. It must have been the landlord, but where he hid it and why are still a mystery...