Two Pots of Dye

While running errands yesterday, I found some Easter egg dye kits 75% off -- or about twenty-five cents each. I grabbed four.

Each kit contains six dye tablets, so the price works out better than Kool-aid, and the technique is pretty much the same. Put the dye in the crock pot (the fiber crock pot, not the food crock pot) with a little vinegar. Add water to cover the fiber. Then add fiber. Order is critical -- if you dilute the dye after the fiber is added, you will end up with areas of very intense color and poor dye distribution over the rest of the fiber. Once the fiber is in and wet, cook the fiber on low until the water in the crock pot clears.

I did two pots of dye today using some fawn suri that's been sitting around the house for a couple years now. It's not great suri fiber, but it takes dye well and spins up softer than it feels as raw fiber. I thought the first pot of dye was blue, but it turned out to be green. I have some brilliant green suri fiber. The dye pot took about five hours to exhaust the color and there was very little bleeding when I washed the fiber. I'm really pleased with the color and the luster of the fiber. It's going to be fun.

I thought the second pot of dye was blue and I made the mistake of adding the fiber prior to diluting the dye. The result was I have a patch of lightly dyed fiber and a small area of very intense color. I'm not so sure the color was blue, because when I washed this fiber, it bled red -- quite a bit of red. The resulting fiber has one really intense patch of blue, some bluish areas, and some red areas. I'm not happy with the results. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the fiber, but a second trip through the dye pot isn't out of the question.