05 April 2011

Easter egg colour

I needed something fun to do.
Today is rainy and windy and spring is nowhere to be found. So I decided I go and dye roving! With easter egg colours!

I loved it and I'm pretty happy with the results.

I had three different kind of rovings - BFL, BFL/Tussah and Merino/Tencel. All about 100mg, so a total of 300mg
I had five colours: yellow, orange, red, blue, green
I mixed two additional ones: a blue-green and a purple.

I followed the process described here

Soaking in water and vinegar:

Soaking in water and vinegar

Preparing the dyes and workspace:

Preparation of workspace

Preparation of workspace

I started with the BFL/Tussah mix:

First round of dyeing

After I dyed all three rovings I steamed the living daylights out of them, in total for about an hour.

Steaming

After a cool down period (which I spent answering the postmen twice, once for my neighbours, once for me, preparing and eating some food and setting up a date with a friend) I unpacked the parcel in the sink. It's already interesting to see how the different rovings took the colours! The BFL is vibrant while the Merino/Tencel is seriously muted. It's difficult to pick a favourite!

Unpacked

And hanging in the shower to drip dry!

Hanging to dry

I had no colour bleeding at all.
The next time I will wear gloves, though. My fingernails have a rather interesting hue ;-)

And now I go and unpack my parcel from Fyberspates!
I ordered myself a lucky dip and Sparkle Lace merino, silk and sparkle in "water colour"

Tata!

2 comments:

Catherine said...

those colours look wonderful. Beautiful as roving but I bet they will be so pretty when spun. I saw a u-tube clip of dyeing fabric with some sort of instant fruit flavoured drink (not sure of the name you can't get it in the UK) and that was brilliant too

WyzWmn© said...

beautiful work!

and if either you or Catherine are looking for instant fruit drink crystals for dying send me an email and I'll send you some from Canada!

WyzWmn at gmail dot com