okay, it's like this...

You may have read on Emma Jane's blog that she had me over for a dyeing party Friday night. It was amazing.

First, this woman is well stocked. She gets her goods from THE dye people in town and knows her stuff.

We sat down with the following:
- 3 skeins natural colored 100% cotton, approx 1500 yards.
- 2 skeins thick/thin cotton that I'd ordered online and hadn't liked the color once it arrived
- 1 skein pale grey silk, obtained the day Jenna cleared out her stash
- 1 skein natural silk/linen, from Habu.

Okay. So first off, I really wanted a chocolate/cherry sweater. Emma fiddled with the dye, going for the deepest brown we could get, and then punctuated it with screaming magenta and deep violet. We saran-wrapped her floor, the skeins soaked as best they could with the appropriate mordant [read Emma's entry for more details] and I got to work. I squirted bottles of dye and squeezed with my gloved hands and when we were done, they were absolutely gorgeous. Deep, rich chocolate with nearly edible warm hints of pink/burgundy and purple here and there. Just right. We wrapped in saran wrap, microwaved to set the colors and then offloaded them into ziplock bags so I could wait to rinse till the next morning.

Next, the grey. It was already wound into a cake from my ballwinder, so we decided to just set it down in a vat of pure turquoise dye and see what happened. It soaked the dye up pretty well, and at the end, Emma poured a little more dye down the centre so it would be covered reasonably equally all over. We weren't going for full coverage, just an interesting effect.

The blah cotton got a direct sprinkling of dye powder in order to intensify what was there. Add water, let soak and then mordanted and heat set.

The final one was the Habu, and I left the color choice to Emma. She chose brilliantly. Look:


Both this and the pure silk were easy to rinse the next morning. Here's the pure silk. Yummy, non?


And then. The blah cotton? Well, it's still being rinsed. The dye won't stop coming out and my back can't keep up with it. No pics just yet.

But the chocolate cherry, I couldn't stop working on. I rinsed and rinsed and rinsed for most of yesterday morning. By noon, I was worn out, but there was still pale-sienna-colored dye water coming out from the skeins. The deep chocolate brown was long gone, but I had hope that I would still like it and really, just wanted to finish already. So I got desperate stupid. I disengaged my brain and thought, hey -- these skeins are tied up. I can put them in a lingerie bag in my washer! I machine wash my cotton sweaters, so why not give the yarn the same treatment.

This is why.



The three skeins came out as one, sorta. I was able to separate them into three again, and they're hanging to dry the rest of the way. There will be an untangling party one of these days, and since we're talking about cotton, I know it's totally doable. [With silk, it'd be a write off.] But it is a little disheartening. I should have taken a shot of the skeins as they came out of the ziplocks...they were gorgeous. Emma says we should have washed the skeins first so the dye would have taken better, and clearly she's right. But we didn't know!

Emma has also reminded me that Rit makes a dark brown dye and I can give that a shot, in spots. And I will. But just not yet.

So my conclusion: I love the act of dyeing. I was pleasantly surprised at how I didn't have to fight to get the look I wanted as I squirted the stuff here and there. It felt really creative and very finger-paint-y, in the best way.

I am, however, quite impatient and honestly a little lazy about the followthrough, and I don't think you can fudge that. So maybe stuff that doesn't fully exhaust [like silk does] isn't something I should be dyeing.

But what's more important -- I had a hell of a time with Emma, caught up on all sorts of stuff in her life and had amazing falafel and lentil rice from her favorite neighborhood place. Very good.