Dyeing for a birthday present!
One thing I love is that while Montana and I share many of the aspects of the Red Hawk Farm property, she has a whole set of her own homestead hobbies and activities that utilize the land. One of those talents is dyeing fabric and yarn. For my birthday present this year, she walked me through the process and let me dye my own wool that she will subsequently spin into yarn for my new crochet projects. Yes, she is truly a magician!
First you start with plain, clean fleece (or fabric). This is wool (purchased, not from the goats just yet.) You have to let it sit in water for quite awhile so that it is nice and soaked through. The entire dye process depends on keeping the material super wet.
Montana has an entire laboratory set up downstairs in the unfinished basement. She purchased an old electric heated buffet chafing dish at Goodwill (as well as an old electric frying pan) that she uses to dye different colors at the same time. The soaked plain wool was separated into the different pans.
Her laboratory includes several dozen labeled jars and plastic squeeze bottles with a wide assortment of colors.
While her artistic talents must have come from somewhere else, Montana definitely inherited her mother’s obsession with organized labeling systems. These are her dye color test swatches.
The beautiful variegated yarn she spins is based on mottling the wool with a variety of colors and shades. So you first take some of the concentrated dye out of one of the jars/bottles and pour some of it into a smaller empty jar and then dilute it with water. Then you suck some of the diluted dye into a plastic syringe and start squirting it into place! The dye in the jar above looks brown, but it’s actually yellow.
You can see why rubber gloves are a necessity with this project. You add dye, more dye, more dye, continually patting it down into the layers of wool. You don’t want to disturb the strands of wool too much or they can become matted, making it difficult to spin later.
Birdie loves the dark, dark colors!
This concoction looks a lot like melted butter and brown sugar on cream of wheat! It will (hopefully) produce a nice, bold, golden color.
This one will have a nice pale teal color to it.
There’s the little Mad Scientist Magician herself!
After giving everything a good coloring, you turn on the heat (still keeping it pretty low), and let it sit until the liquid is absorbed. Sometimes you like the result, and sometimes you want to go through a second round with similar (or different) colors. Montana uses a salad spinner to remove excess liquid before letting them dry on her pellet stove.
And voila! Here are the results of the two colors I dyed yesterday. Gorgeous! These are going to make gorgeous granny squares.
All braided up so they stay neat until Montana spins her magic!
The yarn that Montana spins is really just incredible. She has dozens and dozens of hand-spun skeins in an entire rainbow of beautiful variegated colors. Apparently this is a common situation for the spinning community - you end up with A LOT of beautiful yarn. Montana says that’s why so many spinners are also weavers, because weaving can easily use up a lot more yarn than knitting. A few pictures from her current stash:
