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Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Dye-ing Weekend

The fruits from the weekends labors:



Hand dyed silk hankies; these are a very labor intensive dye project.  The hankies are weighed out into half ounce stacks and then need to be soaked for a good long time to be saturated.  In order to "speed" the process I added a bit of  Synthrapol (a wetting agent).  Next day they were wrung out and then unfolded into a stainless steel pan and each stack dribbled and massaged with dye and then steamed in the microwave for two minutes.  I generally do a minimum of two stacks of the same colors because you have to clean up between colors.  They always end up incredibly vibrant and intense!  They are a lot of work but very pretty in the end.




I also dyed 19 skeins of sport weight Polwarth and Silk (85:15), and 8 skeins of worsted weight Polwarth and Silk (60:40).  Duncan and Lila both helped out here; Duncan did the vibrant blues on the right bottom, and Lila the purple/salmon skeins on the upper right.  There are a couple skeins missing that were in the dye-pot at the time of the photo that are a lovely plum color.  This yarn was a mixture of hand painting and kettle dyed.  All of this yarn and the silk hankies will be going down with Lila and I to the Northern Michigan Lamb and Wool Festival at the end of the month. 
Join us there if you can!  :)

5 comments:

  1. Some beautiful colours happening in this post! Sure wish I could be at the festival. Hoping you have strong sales and great weather.

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  2. I'm very late to this post. Those hankies are beautiful, I occasionally buy such things for my jacket's top pocket; very 'foppish'.

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  3. Just saw your blog. Wow, that looks AMAZING!!!! Love all the beautiful colors you created. Hope you sold it all:)
    Jessi

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