A Day in the Kitchen, and Not Cooking

Yay, the dye and the yarn I ordered arrived.  I was busy in the kitchen all day today.  Nope, I didn't cook.  I'm really a horrible cook.  Every time I mentioned that I'm going to make some food, Paul would immediately head to the kitchen and start cooking, that's how horrible my cooking is.  I was playing with yarn and dye.  This time instead of finding things in the cupboard to use as dye, I actually bought some natural dyes from Botanical Colors, and some yarn from Dharma Trading Co. 

I really like natural dye and how organic the colors do look.

The yarn I used were the  Wildfoote Luxury Socks.  I ordered 2, and each order was actully 2 skiens (and  430 yards each.)

I used alum as mordant.  An,d for the first time I used iron to chancge color.  Wow, how fun was that seeing the color changed and deepened instangly.

Here are the results.

From left to right:
The two dark reddish brown are first mordant with alum,  then dye with cutch for 2 hours, then added iron, and then threw in madder for the red and dyed for another 20 minutes.

The yellow one was mordant with alum, dyed with weld for an hour, then after I fished it out, I wanted it more intense, added more weld and dyed for another 30 minutes.  Dumped the bath, and pour a bit of the cutch/iron/madder dye water into the pot and dipped the yarn in for about 15 seconds.

The greenish yellow was mordant with alum, dyed with weld for an hour, then dyed with osage orange, weld, logwood gray for 15 minutes, then put in the same more weld pot with the previous skein for 30 minutes.

 I am addicted even though the process does take a long time.
Now I have to come up with some project ideas for these yarns.