Natural Dyeing Escapade: The End Result

Well, since the last post not only have I had an overwhelmingly large amount of school work to do, but it also happens to be "Fall Festival" season, which usually keeps my weekends busy--the only time I have to write.

Fall festivals also mean more fiber crap to buy, which also means more stuff to write and rave about...but for now I'm simply going to focus on what I left off on-- that yarn I naturally dyed a couple of weeks back!

On the left is a skein of yarn I spun from Aggie's wool, in it's natural creamy white. To the right are two similar skeins, naturally dyed with alkanet root chips and with alum as a mordant.

While dyeing it I kept worrying that I under-guesstimated the amount of alum and cream of tartar that I mordanted the wool in, so I mixed up some more and poured it into the dye vat. I also let the yarn sit in the dye vat for a couple of days-- not so much to be sure that the dye took, but just because I wasn't able to finish dyeing during the weekend and got busy with school and work.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the colours; it's like a light lavender-grey.

I took one of my alkanet-dyed skeins along with a lot more fiber-related things on a demonstration I did with my sister over at Smithgall Woods for their "Fall Celebration". Yep, another topic that I'd LOVE to write about right now, but I feel that it deserve a post all of its own, along with all the pictures I took.

So for now all you get is a picture of my alkanet skein along with some more handspun yarns I had on display.

More to come soon.

-The Bloated Ewe