Catching Up

This bottle of dye has been taking up space in my fridge for more than a month. It's the leftover from my "cold pad batch" of the January heat wave. I dyed four balls of lambswool at the time and had two balls left. I'm not expecting any more heat waves this season. Thankfully the weather has changed and we're in for a run of days in the mid-twenties. But I really don't want dye hanging around in my fridge until next summer. So, while my friend Anna was here yesterday afternoon, I skeined up the last couple of balls of wool, added the dye and left them to do their thing. Meanwhile Anna was figuring out her new camera, so we got this shot of the dye bottle ready for action.

Part of the beauty of this type of dye is that it's so forgiving. On a hot day, it will be ready to wash out sooner, in cold weather I can just leave it for a few days until it's ready. So I got to catch up with a friend and catch up with some of my dyeing. That's two less balls of wool floating around on my table waiting to be dealt with, and good company for the afternoon.

On my Drying Rack

Here are the results of my "hot day, cold pad batch" dyeing efforts:
I only mixed up one colour. I had four skeins of off-white wool to dye. So I decided to go for different textures in blue and white.

• The one on the far left has eight tight cotton ties to prevent the dye contacting the wool in just those spots. Then I soaked the whole skein in the blue dye
• The next skein was folded in fourths and dipped in dye
• The next one, second from the right, I laid flat on a piece of plastic. I then squirted lines of dye across the skein with an old sauce bottle.
• The last skein was just folded on itself. Half was immersed in dye and I kept the other half out of the way.

The point of this technique--apart from the relief of "working" with water on a horribly hot day--is that the dye pretty much stays where I put it. So I can control where the colour goes on the skein.