Dyeing yarn and fiber

Messing around with natural dyes

Messing around with natural dyes

I had another Bluebird dye day this week, quite literally. I’ve been taking some dye classes from Laurie Hall of Bluebird Dye Gardens. The day was beautiful with blue skies and there were bluebirds all around her studio!

Before going back for more shibori and resist dyeing, I had to mordant more fiber. I had to order some supplies from MAIWA and by the time it all came together, it was the day before the dye day. So much for having time to do some shibori stitching before getting there! But I was able to get the fabric mordanted and felt quite happy that I did it successfully.

Natural Dyeing on Bluebird Days

Natural Dyeing on Bluebird Days

I’ve spent the last three Mondays taking a natural dye class at Bluebird Dye Gardens with Laurie Hall. The class was specifically about shibori and we practiced various forms of it. It was wildly fun and I’d do the whole thing over in a heartbeat. We spent some time in her huge dye garden to get a feel for the work that goes into producing those marvelous dye plants. It also just gave us a moment to get our hands in the dirt. Laurie grows a wide variety of flowers and has a healthy madder bed.

If it isn’t obvious, I think it is definitely true that natural dyeing is far more complicated than the synthetic dyeing I do in my work. There are so many details with natural dyeing and things change with every plant and fiber being dyed. This post is full of pictures and I don’t even know all the names of the dye plants much less the details about the chemistry.

Washing the fields out of the fiber

Washing the fields out of the fiber

There might not be anything better than turning a really dirty fleece into a white fluffy cloud of fiber. It never crossed my mind when I became interested in spinning that I’d actually purchase raw fleece. That is until I met Maggie Casey. I learned to spin from her in her shop in Boulder and she loves using fleece so she teaches her students to use fleece as a fiber source. Of course I still learned to spin using roving and top and whatever other commercially prepared fiber is available, but getting your hands into actual fleece sure taught me a lot about the material I weave my tapestries with: wool.

It only takes one time of seeing that pile of often grubby, sticky fiber turn into a fluffy cloud of curls and crimp to get you hooked. Apparently Maggie knew this when she brought fleece to her spinning classes at Shuttles, Spindles, and Skeins.

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Weaving circles with hand-dyed tapestry yarn

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Weaving circles with hand-dyed tapestry yarn

Making circles is a tricky thing in tapestry weaving. To weave a circle we believe is round, you have to trick the eye or make it really big. Tapestry is woven on a grid and to make a form perfectly circular means you basically take a square and cut the corners off. If your tapestry is huge, then this illusion is not as hard to make, though it IS still quite difficult to make a perfectly round circle given fiber’s propensity to squish and move about.

If your circles are small, it is all the harder because you don’t have very many warps to convince us that what is a shape with steps is really round.

What materials and equipment do you need to dye your own yarn?

What materials and equipment do you need to dye your own yarn?

I love dyeing my own yarn and fiber. In many areas of my life, I’m not the most precise person. I’m a bit sloppy and probably a little difficult to live with sometimes. But when it comes to dyeing my tapestry yarns or fiber for spinning, I love using measurement and a little math to create custom colors.

I have a new online class this summer all about dyeing with acid wool dyes. If you’ve ever wanted to dye your own yarns, create unique palettes, or just get colors that commercial yarn lines don’t contain, dyeing the yarn yourself is the way to go.

Simple Procedures. Reliable Results.

Why dye your own fiber and yarn for your projects?

Why dye your own fiber and yarn for your projects?

In my blog post a couple weeks ago, I talked about how I learned to dye my own tapestry yarn and how dyeing the yarn and learning to weave tapestry went hand in hand. I enjoy dyeing my own yarn so much. And I’ve branched out into making variegated yarns for tapestry and knitting, painting roving for spinning, and dyeing fleece that I blend as I spin.

Color! Finding ALL the colors for fiber fun this summer

Color! Finding ALL the colors for fiber fun this summer

When I first started learning how to be a tapestry weaver, I took a semester-long college class about dyeing protein fibers. I never questioned that there was any other way to get the colors I wanted for tapestry weaving. In the weaving curriculum we were using a commercially dyed yarn and only had about 20 colors available to us, most of which were not ones I wanted. I was so excited to learn how to dye my own yarn.