dyeing yarn

Yarn and color: using yarn color cards made with actual yarn

Yarn and color: using yarn color cards made with actual yarn

If I had an Olympic-level talent, I think we could all agree it would it is for collecting yarn that might be useful for tapestry weaving. I justify this to both myself and the IRS as an exceptionally important teaching tool. If I have some idea of at least some of the commercially available yarns out there that work well for tapestry, I can pass that information on to my students which makes them more successful in their learning.

One thing I love to have in front of me when evaluating a potential material is color cards made with actual yarn. Many companies use printed color cards and it is impossible to really know what color that yarn is until you order some of the it. In tapestry weaving, the color of the yarn matters a great deal and so yarn cards are a fantastic tool if they’re available.

I had the idea for this post when Gist Yarn sent me these beauties with their new Array tapestry yarn. These may be the most beautiful yarn cards I’ve ever seen. Turns out they do these for all of their signature yarns.

Nothing rhymes with orange

Nothing rhymes with orange

I’ve been making red-orange yarn this week. According to my dye book, it has been over a year since I did any dyeing and I’ve enjoyed being back in the dye studio (my garage) a great deal. I’m dyeing some yarn for a friend. She might be the only person on the planet who I’d do this for, though no one else has tested it yet. I’m trying to match a naturally dyed yarn that she needs a lot of. Because it is so hard to replicate naturally dyed colors (and she is a master dyer of natural dyes), she asked me to make her this color using synthetic dyes. I can replicate colors without much difficulty and I have a great big pot that I can dye the whole lot at once. I think it will be about four pounds of fiber.

The color is red-orange. I’m pretty happy that I did a lot of sampling of oranges several years ago when I was working on a commission because I learned a lot about orange. I struggled to make it back then, but this time around I felt inundated with options.

All the yarn-y joy... and getting just the right color

All the yarn-y joy... and getting just the right color

On my studio Fridays I have been working toward getting a big tapestry on the loom. Because dyeing takes so long, I’m still working on that part of the puzzle though my fingers are itching to be weaving. I am finding that having some space between the days I’m making color and dye decisions has been helpful. The yarn I pull out of the pot dripping wet and prop in the corner of the living room to dry* might not get assessed until the next Friday. Somehow that lets my brain relax around those decisions and I’ve found myself much more willing to accept what came out of the pot even if the small swatch I was dyeing from feels different in the larger amounts of yarn.** So colors that I didn’t like when I hung them the last Friday actually seem great by the next Friday. I suppose that could be mostly the realization that if I don’t go with those colors or keep fussing with the formulas, I may never actually start weaving… but we’ll go with the first idea that space allows acceptance.

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I'm in the dye studio.

,
I'm in the dye studio.

I've spent much of the last week in my dye studio. I will likely spend another couple weeks there. I do love the dyeing and putting together colors for a new project is a whole lot of fun. And global warming has hit Colorado and it isn't even that cold for January. This particular tapestry will need about 25 pounds of yarn, but since there are so many colors and I hate running out, I always make enough extra that I won't. I suspect in the end I'll have dyed about 50 pounds. I don't like games of yarn chicken and the extra yarn is always welcome in the tapestry classes I teach or for my next piece.

How to make beautiful yarn out of poorly dyed singles

How to make beautiful yarn out of poorly dyed singles

Mistakes in dyeing can be messy... but sometimes there is a happy outcome even when you think it is all going to crap partway through.

I made a measuring error while dyeing a violet/blue yarn and as the dye was already in a jar with water in it, I couldn't easily save it. I wanted to use this large volume of dye so it seemed the right moment to try some overdyeing.

A friend recently gave me quite a lot of churro yarn that was dyed by someone else. The colors weren't quite what she wanted and she asked if I could use it. And not being able to say no to free high-quality yarn even when the colors were a little bold, it came to live in my studio.

Not afraid to dye

Not afraid to dye

On social media I often use this hashtag, #notafraidtodye

I've been waking up in the night the last few days with a lot of pain in my back. This is unusual for me and in my middle-of-the-night confusion I couldn't figure out how I could suddenly feel so old and creaky. In the morning I remembered. I've been dyeing yarn for almost two weeks now and that is enough to make anyone's back ache.

Maybe this visual will help.

A string (thread? yarn?) of dye mishaps

A string (thread? yarn?) of dye mishaps

Oh my.

It has been quite a day in the dye studio thus far. There was the leveling problem with the lightest gray and the attempt to fix it went horribly wrong...

Let me back up. I've been working on a large dye project. I'm dyeing yarn for a big tapestry a friend is weaving and while I'm at it, I'm dyeing the yarns I need for my upcoming workshops. The first pot I wanted to get going this morning needed special care. It was a pot of the lightest gray I dye, DOS 0.03. This yarn frequently comes out quite spotty, so I used some of my tricks to try to get it level. Unfortunately, I didn't use all of them because it was clear before the pot even started to heat that this yarn was not going to be remotely all one color. Severely blotchy darker grays with spots of almost white yarn. This will never do. Perhaps the students won't care, but every time I see that ball of yarn on the yarn table, I'm going to cringe and kick myself for not using Abegal Set and for putting the acid in before the yarn had a chance to sit in the levelers for awhile.