Sunday, March 18, 2012

Hot off the presses!


I'm not really printing anything but the yarn is hot! You can see the steam rising from the violet yarn which is still soaking in a vinegar bath as it cools down. Blue is very hard to set and takes a lot of vinegar and a lot of heat to get it to fix. You can see some breaking of the violet but I think it is nice and will blend with the magenta below.
The magenta has a spot of blue-violet in it. The color is light in this picture because I used a flash on it. It is darker than it appears. It is also soaking in a vinegar bath but it is a cool bath.
Lastly, there are the yellow and chartreuse. I made the chartreuse a little darker and the magenta a little lighter than my samples so that there was less of a jump between the two.

These were all dyed with Wilton's icing colors. The yellow is straight Lemon Yellow. The chartreuse is Lemon with a tiny bit of Leaf Green. The Magenta (I changed up the formula) is Christmas Red with an almost equal amount of Sky Blue and the Violet is straight up Violet.

I was very efficient with respect to energy. I boiled one pot of water and used it to start the dyeing process. I took 250 ml and dissolved the dye and added it with vinegar to the Pyrex container I used for dyeing. After that, I think I added another cup of water that was boiled on the stove. The rest was just reusing the same water. After the dye exhausted, I took some water out and dissolved the next color recipe and added more vinegar. I had to throw out some hot water at the end as the volume got too much for the dish. That was because of the vinegar. The magenta and violet took a lot of vinegar to exhaust.

I heated for 2 mins at a time at full power, let it rest for 2-5 mins and heated it up again. Tongs were great for mixing and moving the yarn around in the water.

The yarn is Henry's Attic Monty - a fingering weight yarn. I have 238 gms which I divided up into 3 60 gm skeins and 1 58 gm skein. I wanted to dye them all as one giant skein but winding mini-skeins all joined together tried my patience. I am going to splice the colors together so there are no joins.

This will become a lace shawl that transitions from the yellow to the chartreuse to the magenta and finally the violet.

2 comments:

Ru said...

Brilliant colours!!! Can't wait to see the finished project!

Sara said...

Yay! I found your blog. You're bookmarked now!
Sara