Dye Experiment: Hand Painted Gradient

So normally I kettle dye but that can have unpredictable results, especially in the little pot I have until I get into my own house. Today I decided to try something different - hand painting my fiber.

Making sure I have enough plastic down to cover my entire length of roving.

The first step was to lay out plastic to protect my working surface. I chose slightly over 4 ounces of romney wool top. Romney is my go-to fiber as it's pretty inexpensive and easy to work with. I also decided to go with a blue dye. Blue is always a bit finicky to dye but I love blue so even if I totally screwed it up, a few runs through a blending board and I'd be happy to spin anything that came of this. I got these squeeze bottles from the dollar store - they're meant for condiments but I checked them out before hand and they're *mostly* water tight.

I prep my fiber by soaking in in a hot water and vinegar bath before I dye it. This removes the air pockets from the fiber and changes the pH a bit to make it more conducive to an acid dye. I leave it to soak for atleast half an hour before I work with it. While my fiber was getting good and acidic, I prepped my dyes.

Cat for scale?

I filled each of the squeeze bottles with 1 and a half cups of warm water, half a tablespoon of white vinegar, and then a measured amount of liquid acid dye - see the pictures for the measurements that went into each bottle. The far left one I just squeezed some dye in to get a very light colour. The others all look the same, dark blue, but they definitely have different amounts of dye in them.

After that I laid the fiber down on the plastic and squeezed the dye onto it, going from light to dark along the length. I used about half the bottle along the section, then flipped it over to dye the underside too. A little bit of handling and patting the fiber (wear gloves!) seemed to help the dye penetrate evenly, but I'll have to see how the length turns out. Once I emptied dyed the whole thing, I wrapped the plastic wrap up to trap the dye inside.

You can sort of see the gradient here, inside the plastic. Acid dyes need heat to set - I had a large pot of water on the oven. I brought it to a boil and then turned off the heat, putting my blue plastic fluff inside. The fiber will sit there until the water reaches room temperature, then I'll rinse it and we'll see what we have. Wool hates rapid changes of temperature so all that will have to wait for the morning.

There -was- a snag in the process. I bought a bunch of cheap, off brand plastic wrap because if this works I'll want to do it a lot. Unfortunately, it didn't wrap securely so my roving sprung a few leaks. I tried to patch them up but it make ruin my perfect gradient.

It also made a huge mess. Gonna get some funny looks tomorrow at work. :)