Saturday Dye Day

We appreciate when our customers remind us of what we forget.  Thank you MaryLynn for reminding me that we needed more BFL/Silk dyed.  Yesterday was the dye day.

We have five functioning burners on our 6 burner set-up so we can do five different colors at once.  Yesterday we did five colors of BFL/Silk and five colors of Polwarth/Silk.  It was a great dye day!  The temperature started out downright chilly and ended in the afternoon at very comfortable.

The rinse tubs were full of water and we were ready to go.

Our approach to dyeing fiber is sort of "seat of the pants."  We make no attempt at reproducibility so each dye pot is one of a kind.  Of course, we each have our favorite colors so we do tend to come close to reproducing colors but not enough to be a dye lot.  Knitters would never think of our efforts as reproducible.

You never know by looking at the dye pot what the final outcome will be.  You can guess the range sometimes - it will be red or orange or blue - but we so often mix colors that the dye pot can look pretty muddy and still produce stunning colorways.

Once the fiber has cooked in the dye pot for about 30 minutes it is pulled out and rinsed, then spun out in our oversized salad spinner.

My husband's workbench does yeoman's service as a drying rack for the fiber.  Then the fiber sits draped over chairs and looms in the studio for a day or two to finish drying.

These wonderful new colors will be up on the website in the next day or two.