Friday, June 25, 2010

Summer is Dyeing Time!

Last weekend I taught a cotton and linen dye class and amazingly enough we had two days of fabulous weather. Here are Marsha and Alison getting the indigo vat ready to go. We set up two different vats...one the lye-hydrosulfite...my personal favorite ....and the other was the copperas-lime vat. That vat is especially good for dyeing cotton and linen a very dark blue without having to dip too many times.
Here is the lye-hydrosulfite stock solution all ready to go.....the color of a nice homebrewed ale!
Marsha's first dip of her cotton yarn in the hydrosulfite vat. Since the temperature was in the 80's this vat was working like a charm. We dyed many pounds of yarn plus a few other things....
Alison's tank tops with a little tie dye effect...
and even Peter got in the act with some new white tee shirts!
Here are some of the colors that we had by the end of Sunday afternoon: some great reds from madder and cochineal, lots of blues and greens from the indigo vat, yellow from osage orange and fustic, a gorgeous brown from cutch, and some interesting oranges from iron buff.
My favorite palette of linen skeins! Stay tuned for an upcoming post on the great urine vat collaborative. It's almost ready to go.....

1 comment:

  1. Fantastic colors! Just found your blog and the school via "rugtalk". What a great place! I will be following.

    ReplyDelete