Hand Dyeing

I’ve not been keeping up this blog because I enrolled on Ravelry and found that it made it easier to keep track of my projects than the blog. However, now I’ve been working on some hand dyeing so here is what I did and how it worked out.

Firstly I went on a dyeing course at The Handweavers Studio (the course was fabulous - I'd recommend it). Each person tried different dye recipes and at the end we compiled all of the recipes and samples into a reference:

The next step was to try the process myself at home. The Handweavers Studio sell both Acid Based and Fibre Reactive Dyes. However they do not sell Glaber’s Salts ( leveling agent) so I found it at Fibre Crafts website.

I dyed 5 gram samples of yarn and then scaled up to 100g hanks.

For the 5g samples, I put each sample in a plastic bag (a cook-in-the-bag) with the ingredients:
5ml Glauber Salt Stock (stock is 100g gs to 1000ml water)
5ml Vinegar
3ml Dye Stock (stock is 5g dye powder to 500ml water)

then 100g hanks:
100ml Glauber Salt Stock
100ml Vinegar
300ml Dye Stock

What I found was the colour was stronger on the 100g hanks. I’ve no idea why – I suspect the plastic bags might be semi-permeable so maybe some dye was lost. 5ml is difficult to measure accurately so maybe I put less in. also 3ml dye stock is more than required for a saturated colour.

Also, despite the glauber salt, I got a bit of streaking at the lower concentrations.