Back at the beginning of June I went on a dyeing workshop with Fiona Morris.

The first three samples are mini-skeins of 4ply superwash bluefaced leicester. They are all dyed in a pot on the stove, you sprinkle the dye powder in as the mood takes you but don’t stir while it cooks, creating a (totally unrepeatable) multicolour effect.

It was fun to do, but my control freak personality doesn’t really gel with this method 🙂 It is quite hard to predict how the colours are going to come out, and in fact they often change as the yarn cooks and more dye is absorbed.

Next I had a go at dyeing with fibre reactive dyes. These are the kind of dyes you use for plant fibres, and you use a cold dyeing method.

First some cotton dyed as a semi-solid in a plastic bag. You just measure out your dye, bung it in the bag, stick the yarn in on top, squish around for about 10 mins or until you have had enough, then leave it for half an hour.

It came out rather paler than I was expecting. The fibre reactive dyes don’t seem to exhaust as well as the acid dyes. I found it rather worrying how much dye ran out as I was rinsing.

Finally, using the fibre reactive dyes again, this was dyed in a tray, pouring the dye on and then leaving it. I was surprised at how well this one took the dyes. The yarn is 50% merino, 50% tencel, so I was expecting it to come out a lot paler as the merino wont take the fibre reactive dyes as strongly as the tencel.

A fun day.  I enjoyed trying some different techniques, and being able to play with the fibre reactive dyes without buying a whole load of colours myself. I haven’t worked out what these are all going to become but I’m sure I will think of something soon 🙂