Well, I just about dyed....

So, for the second time, a road trip to Shelridge Farm for a yarn-dyeing workshop got called off.

I decided to take matters into my own hands, and did a remarkable job of not painting the kitchen in Pollack-reminiscent splatters of icing dye.

While my very first "dye jobs" are hardly masterworks, 2 of the 3 were mostly what I meant to do.


Oops, sorry about the rotation....

Here's the next:


I'm mostly happy with both of those. The first was done via a "hot pour" method in crock pot and took a second dumping of dye to get even the coverage I got. The second was a graduated dye, where I slowly removed the skein from the pot, while slowly adding more dye to the remaining skein.

This was the accident:



I'm not even going to try an explain what I was going for here, but the end result was nothing like it. Still a perfectly knittable yarn, but the colour... well, I have all kinds of names for the colourway in mind but they involve the word "bruise".

There was actually a 4th item dyed, but in the same colours as the first yarn, and it looks messy but should recover:



This is a roving, not yarn, and the reason it's hanging all over my shower like a technicolour squid is that I got worried about how much handling this fibre, though it's "superwash" was getting. So I didn't want to squish or spin it to dry it, and I just draped it there to drip away. I think I've done a bit more reading and wouldn't dye a roving via the exact same process as a yarn again - I'll go with the wool sausage method (pantyhose casing!) next time, as per That Laurie's guest spot at the Yarn Harlot blog in 2005.