Playing with Acid Dyes

Some wool blend sliver dyed in acid dyes

I need some dyed fibres, some in larger quantities and different colours than the commercially dyed ones I picked up a while ago. I set about mixing up some stock solutions to play with colour mixing.  It was right then that my scale decided that it was no longer going to measure out small quantities.  It used to, though the last time I used it it was getting fussy and I thought changing out the battery had done the trick of getting it back to rights.  Obviously not.   In the end, I had to wing the stock solutions and really didn't get quite the colours I'd had first envisioned, although they will work quite admirably for their purpose.


I'm unhappy with the yellow though as the dye didn't exhaust properly and I had to rinse it several times.  Luckily, I'm going to have to card everything to blend the colours before spinning, so I wasn't too worried about compaction.  Now to decide how I want to blend this.  I could easily put it through the drum carder or hand cards, but for hand cards there is a lot of fibre.  I'm thinking perhaps the hackles or even the blending board would work for this fibre.

bleached tussah silk

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 I dyed up a bit of tussah silk to add in, although I'd hoped it would be a darker blue.  It is the colour of a lovely rich summer sky, that or horrible icky icing on a birthday cake that turns one's teeth blue when one has to eat that piece at the party.  I'll take the sky colour.

The brown is still in the pot.  I love the colour!  I had to blend in a bunch of yellow dye to make it a warm colour as I really didn't like the original brown.  It was much too cold, lifeless and dull looking.  I hope I like it as much when it's dry!    In total, there is about 400 g or a bit more of fibre in this dye experiment.   It's fun, easy but sheesh, keeping those dye vats at the required temperatures does take a lot of watching and time!