Acid Dyes Day 2

Here are the wool yarns that will be dyed in the next few days.
I am going to start with the one on the left which is Merino wool that came from a donor named "Mama". I had about 4.5 ounces of it which is about 4 times the amount that I started with yesterday. I will have to adjust my dyes accordingly.

I opened the skein and loosely tied off the hank in four places to try and keep it from getting all knotted up in the dye bath.

Into the warm water it goes to pre-soak.

Once it got up to between 185 and 200 degrees F, I added the dye. The first color I wanted to try was a mix of the three primaries to see how my own mix of brown looks.

When it first went in, it looked like a rusty brown but those first 10 minutes can be deceiving.

The second yarn I chose to dye is simply labeled "wool". I will ask for more specifics. It is the same weight as the "Mama" wool.

For this color I want to try combining red and black for a maroon color.

Here are my end results. The brown is a dark chocolate color. Fantastic! Just what I wanted.

The maroon actually came out a deep raspberry which everyone around here loves but I am disappointed. I certainly will keep the color recipe but I wanted more of a blood red.

If I had this one to do over again, I would add a bit of yellow and less black to the mix. What this result tells me is there's a lot of blue in the black. I did not notice that when I dyed the small samples. So noted.

The other really fascinating thing about the maroon dyeing was that when I took the yarn out of the dye bath, there was hardly ANY color left in the water. I had used 1 1/2 teaspoons of dye powder with the brown and a bit more than 1/4 teaspoon with the maroon and used the same amount of wool. The left over dye in the bath was just a blush of pink! Conclusion wool absorbs WAY more dye than cotton and you can actually SEE what has been used when everything is said and done.

Rinsing wool is a dream compared to cotton. While we certainly do have to watch for the temperature difference when rinsing wool, within 1 minute we are done.

With both of these wool experiments, I used vinegar rather than the citric acid and must say that there is no stinky smell. Perhaps when I start using more dye and more vinegar, it will smell bad.

Next session will be about overdyeing and TRYING to shock the yarn so that it felts.