Wool dyeing days over......at least for this season...

Whoo-Hoo! I've put away the acid dyes for the season. The dyeing from the past week is now braided, weighed, labeled, photographed and most of it now listed in my etsy shop. All the merino and falkland are now up for sale in my shop, the corriedale cross will start going up tomorrow. I've finished spinning up samples of the merino and falkland, pix still need to be taken...then will start on the corriedale cross - very fun to see how they spin up.
 

Another dye day....

Perfect weather for dyeing today, sunny and around 70 degrees. I finished up the last of the Falkland - that taupe colorway doesn't show off to it's best in the photo but it's beautiful - I might have to spin some up myself. I also had 10 skeins of laceweight 75% merino/25% silk yarn that I dyed. What's with all the blue???  Then I weighed out the next roving to dye - 12 pounds of merino.

Cool weather = Dye weather

Today was a perfect dye day - cool and overcast - sun finally showed it's face late afternoon

I like the days efforts...especially those seaglass colors on the left (whoops, forgot to say that this is Falkland wool)

I love it when the pampas grass blooms....well, it may not be called blooming but that's what I'm calling it - these 'blooms' are around 10 ft tall

Latest hand-dyed roving for sale............

Pix of recently dyed Falkland Roving - some are already in my etsy shop, others will be up before the week is out. Several colorways sell out shortly after I dye them, two not pictured sold out last week before I could even get them up in the shop. Falkland is a pleasure to spin.

Another dye day

This is where I do my dyeing - it's in front of the 3 car garage and under the deck so I'm in the shade for everything except the rinsing of the roving. I have the painting table, the dye mixing table, another table for supplies and when I'm also kettle dyeing I have a table for the roaster. Below is my 2 burner propane cooktop with canning pots that I have vegetable steamers sitting inside to hold the rovings up off the bottom of the pot. I also have many 5 gallon buckets and am thinking of getting even more.

Here's the Falkland roving I dyed today. Look at that green - yeehaw! For each of these 3 colorways I dyed a lighter shade to coordinate the main color. On the far right is a small bit of roving I dyed vibrant colors - there's enough to spin and knit up a pair of fingerless mitts, possibly a pair of sox, need to weigh it once it dries and see.

And here are the two sock blanks I dyed - are they crazy or what - they'll make great socks. It's a stockinette stitch blank knit with 2 threads at a time (from Knit Picks). When I start knitting the socks I'll knit both at once and they'll be identical.

 

Dye Day

My mental health therapy since Tuesday has been to fondle fiber. I spent a quiet day weighing out fiber to dye as well as around 25 pounds of Ashland Bay colorways that needed to be weighed, bagged and labeled. Since the weather was lovely today I decided to start dyeing the 22 pounds of Falkland I weighed out - this is around half of it. Of course the day started out with not being able to find any of my 5 gallon buckets - took 45 minutes of digging around the garage and storage areas to find them. These colorways are special orders, although I dye more than what I needed for the orders, these are popular colorways that keep selling out. From the left is Bering Sea, Purple Sage and then on the rack that the wind knocked down is Penelope. I took this picture from the deck because I was way too tired to walk down the stairs again and what do I see but the rack on the ground......I thought about walking down to set it up again but I knew Sam would be home within 15 minutes and he would do it when he saw it! Tomorrow I'll dye the rest of the Falkland - not sure about colors yet, might have to go bright after the subdued colors of today. There's much more to dye but the temps are supposed to head up close to 100 so they may have to wait a bit: Polwarth, BlueFace/Tussah, Merino/Bamboo, Merino/Tencel, Merino/Tussah and Panda which is Superwash Merino/Bamboo/Nylon.

Falkland Hand-dyed Roving

Here are pix of the Falkland roving I dyed yesterday. Various amounts of each are available for purchase. I have a little piece of the center bottom roving (loden colorway) to spin up as an example. The bottom left is my harvest colorway that I spun and knit the convertible sox out of in blue face leicester. Tomorrow will probaby be another dye day, the rest of the falkland, some silk scarves and a couple of sock blocks.

I so enjoy playing with dyes, I'm getting good at predicting color outcome except the bottom center roving - it looks nothing like what I expected. When I painted the dye on it was 8" of forest green alternating with 3" of dusty purple - it's like the colors did something strange on their own in the steamer!

Falkland Hand-dyed Roving

Here's a sampling of the Falkland roving I dyed on Monday & Tuesday. Sure am glad I finished that up because today it's way too hot to be outside working. There are anywhere from 1-4 pounds of colorways. All of these will eventually be making their way to my etsy shop over the next month.

I've been working on plying the last couple of nights - why does it seem like it takes forever to ply two bobbins??? I know I'm spinning thin but.........it's sooo boring to ply. Anyhow, one bobbin of plied yarn is full and I'll get it wound into a skein tonight.