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Tuesday 31 January 2017

Cotswold Dyeing

Last year I managed to get my hands on a Cotswold lamb fleece for the first time.  I've had my eye on these fleeces for a few years now, but didn't order initially because there was quite a long waiting list for them.  It's very curly and lustrous, and the (long term) plan is to make a colour-work cardigan with it.


I washed a few locks when it arrived - you can see how shiny these are :-


When I finally got around to spinning, I washed the fleece first (very carefully!).  I don't like the lock structure to be disturbed before spinning, and generally don't wash my fleeces, but this time I think it did benefit from it.  When it was dry, I fluffed it up into a cloud and spun from that.


It was lovely to spin, and wanted to be spun fine - this will be about 14 wpi I think (4 ply).



When I'd filled the first bobbin I decided to dye it.  I'm not sure what colour I'll use for the main part of the cardigan, but thought an onion skin dye would go well with whatever I choose.

There's another reason why I used onion skins.  Before Christmas, I bought a natural dye calendar from Fran at Wool - Tribulations of Hand Spinning and Herbal Dyeing - if you click on the link you can see the calendar and if you decide to buy one you can even have a message on the back from Elinor! There's a dye project for each month and January is onion skins.  There's also a Ravelry thread for the calendar here.

Anyway, I knew I had some onion skins somewhere, but wasn't sure how many I had.  I finally found 2 large bags weighing a total of 190g.  90g of them went into the dye pot and were boiled strongly for at least half an hour.  I normally simmer any dyestuffs, but Fran found out (quite by accident!) that if you boil the skins you get a much deeper colour.


The resulting colour looked very promising, but I wasn't sure 90g of skins would be enough to dye my 130g skein of yarn.


After squeezing out the skins from the dye bath, I replaced them with the remaining 100g and re-boiled for at least another half hour.  The colour had darkened quite nicely after that.


I'd had the skein of wool soaking for a couple of days, so it was nicely wetted out, ready for dyeing.


And here's the final colour after simmering :-



There's still plenty of colour in the dye bath, so I'll probably put some fleece in there to use it up.  I'm sure I'll need plenty when the Tour de Fleece turns up again this summer!

So now I'd better go and check what February's project is.  Don't want to get left behind!

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