Not so long ago I found out that hibiscus petals make for a beautiful dusty rose colour, and because it's such a hard colour to find I decided to take the liberty of getting a bunch of alpaca yarn, and dyeing it such a splendid colour to make something magical.

This fiber is 45% Alpaca, 25% Merino Wool, and 30% silk.

And yes, it is positively luscious.

Since I've already worked with this dye, and have been doing a good bit of natural dyeing in general, I thought for this blogpost I would talk about how the different fiber made for a very different experience than the 100% wool I've been using before.

So here's how it varied

To start, the alpaca blend absorbed the colour far more quickly than the wool. With the wool I was letting it sit on heat for about 5 hours and then let it cool with the water over night to get the dusty rose colour, the alpaca blend soaked up this colour within 3 hours of being on heat.
The smell of this dyeing process was far less pervasive than the times I dyed wool. Its smell was fairly mild throughout the process whereas the wool left my entire home smelling.... questionable.
The colour turn out was also far more bright with the alpaca blend. Comparing the two side by side (alpaca blend to wool) made me realise that the wool created a bit of a browning effect, whereas the alpaca blend didn't have any muddying undertones.
Lastly, the alpaca wasn't as surprising when I gave it a rinse. The wool bled out a lot, making it so that I lost a lot of the beautiful colour, where the alpaca blend didn't fade much at all after the post-dyeing rinse.

I will say that the alpaca did get slightly lighter after drying for a bit (as would be expected), but still was fairly consistent in how I thought the colour would turn out.

Now I have six skeins of beautiful dusty rose alpaca blend yarn that I'm positively dyeing to knit into something fun and springy!

Stay sweet, stay crafty, and stay tuned.

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Dusty Rose Alpaca