Dip Dyed

My kitchen is still struggling with its identity crisis: dye workshop or food preparation area. Not surprisingly, the dye workshop is winning--I've been eating variations on a theme of toast. Oh well!The colours I've been cooking up are a pretty good compensation: This skein of bamboo-cotton yarn is dip dyed. It's been sitting with one end in the dye and one end hanging over the edge of the tub all night. You can see the colour creeping up towards the far end of the skein. Before I finish my breakfast, I'll have to decide whether I'm going to leave the white tip or let the dye travel all the way. What you can't see is that the other end of the skein is much greener than this end. I started with a green dye bath, then I trickled some of the teal colour over the middle of the skein before letting the colours continue to travel of their own accord. I can certainly vouch for the wicking properties of bamboo--it's really sucked up the colour.

Meanwhile in the lounge area, I've made the warp for my double weave bag project. Dyeing the cotton for that was the beginning of this burst of dyeing frenzy. The warp is ready to go on--all 456 ends of it! I spent a frustrating hour or two yesterday morning calculating the yarn requirements using the unfamiliar units we've been told to include in this write up. I was ready to put a hex on Tex (g per 1000m) until I finally found my mistake. We'd been told to weigh 10m of fibre and that's the figure I'd written down. Once I multiplied it by 100 to get the 1000 m measure it all worked out. Normally I do like maths, but yesterday morning I just wanted to get back to the fibre. My task for today is to put the warp on the loom and start threading. If I can manage a bit of multi-tracking, it would be nice to get some of the newly dyeing yarns rinsed and reclaim a bit of my kitchen, but that might not happen today.