Dye-O-Rama

Took some time off work this week and indulged my craving for color.

Tuesday was Gaywool dye in Paw Paw

resulting in this buttery, mango-y gorgeousness

Wednesday I did another Gaywool shade- Raspberry. I dyed both white yarn and also a couple of Tuesday’s Paw Paw skeins to achieve peachy and salmon colors-

also overdyed some medium grey fleece to exhaust the dye bath, and found that grey+raspberry = violet purple! yay!

With those two fairly straightforward batches behind me, I started to get myself organized for the grand finale- the indigo vat.

I’d collected all my materials ahead of time- I had to order more thiorea dioxide (thiox) online and pick up flavorless gelatin at the grocery. But I already had the Lye on hand, and quite a bit of indigo powder, so I thought I was all set.

As it turns out, The last time I dyed with indigo was longer ago than I remembered (time flies!), and lye apparently loses some of it’s potency over time (go figure!). So getting the stock solution prepared was a bit of a trial. I had to use quite a bit more lye than the recipe I was using specified, which made me rather nervous.

I eventually resorted to using the large vat that was heating over the propane burner as a water bath to get the stock solution to clarify and reduce. It was still kind of the wrong color (more of an amber yellow than a yellow/green) when I added it to the vat, but i felt like as long as the solution was no longer opaque, I was on the right track. And once I added the solution to the bath it started adjusting toward the green shade. The Man help me out with capturing the magic indigo color change for posterity:

I found that by the end of the day, I had gotten a pretty good feel for telling if the vat was properly reduced or if it needed a bit more thiox. But pH can be hard to judge accurately with paper test strips, because of the color of the dye! Would have been nice to have a pH meter. Put that in the list for next time.

I was so pleased with the nice saturated shades I got out of the vat! (green is indigo over a sharp yellow, and purple at bottom is indigo over a light shade of raspberry) ((ignore the bright purple at left- that’s next week’s show and tell 🙂 )) And the gelatin seems to have been successful in protecting the wool cuticle in the alkaline bath.

At the end of the day I added a little bit of soda ash to the pot to bump the pH up a bit for the last items I’d planned to dye- a pair of cotton cargo shorts and a linen top that I’d sewn a few years ago, both a rather blah shade of beige

but look at them now!

Love, love, love the indigo.

And it isn’t exhausted yet. I’m letting the vat sit for now. Perhaps I’ll have another chance this summer to do some more blue-ing.

Here’s the whole assembled array of dyed goods

My kind of staycation.