Saturday a friend and I went up to Mt. Hood Fiber in Welches for a lovely day learning to dye yarn.  In the morning, Stevanie of Abundant Yarn and Dyeworks taught us how to dye with natural dyes.  The natural dyes were mostly plants, but we also used ground up beetles – awesome!  In the afternoon, Yvonne of Lavender Sheep showed us acid dying.

The natural dying process really is like chem lab, as we got to see how the color changed as you kept the fiber in longer, and how it changed if you added a base or acid (baking soda, lime juice, or vinegar.)   I found myself wanting a stopwatch and a notebook so I could see how the dye changed the longer the fiber was in the pot.

We each had several small hanks of yarn to experiment with and then we could choose how to dye our large hank of sock yarn.  (There was also roving, but I skipped that in the morning.)  Here are mine, drying.

I soaked my sock yarn in chamomile for a bit, then dipped it into the cochineal to get a slightly graduated deep pink on 2/3 of the yarn.   I thought the skein had too much yellow, so I dipped a bit of the opposite end in madder to deepen it.  It’s on the left in the picture below.

After a delicious three course lunch on the deck, we were turned over to Yvonne for acid dyes.    This reminded me more of pottery class, as you put the dye on the fiber and then steam it.  So, like firing a glaze, you don’t see how the final colors look until you’re done.   But it’s less of a mystery than a pottery glaze, as the dyes do look like the final color – what changes is how the colors blend and soften.   In my skein, above, on the right, I made wild zig-zags on the white yarn with two shades of blue and two of green.  The final result was a wonderful soft blend, what Yvonne calls a “semi-solid.”

Mt. Hood Fiber is a fiber farm with goats and bunnies, and also chickens, whose eggs we had in our quiche at lunch.  It was a beautiful day, and while we were waiting for the dye process we were forced to sit under the trees and knit.

It was a grand day out.

More pictures in the album here:

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