At the last Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival I had immense amounts of fun just wandering around the booths and indulging in beautiful creations sold by talented people, but I also went there with a goal.  To find undyed fiber from a long time friend of mine, and enough of it that I could make my partner a sweater and not have to worry about running out.  

This is three pounds of fiber for that very purpose.  

The spinning and plying took me a good while, especially considering that I've been changing things up and spinning thinner than I did a year ago.  And no, I'm not putting the fiber on a diet, I just like working with a smaller gauge because I like to punish myself and make all of my projects take longer.  I like a challenge.

At the end of it all I ended up with 2,857 yards, which is perfect.  If I run out of yarn for his sweater with that much, I wasn't supposed to have enough yarn in the first place.  I'm so destructively hopeful about this yardage that I'm even hoping I will have enough leftover to either make myself a sweater too, or a matching pair of socks for the original sweater.  We'll see.  

I used the colour Scarlet from Jacquard's acid dyes, and promptly fell in love.  

Not just for the usual reasons either.  This time there was an added perk, but first I need to explain that I am a red snob.  Red is often done dishearteningly bad.  The worst culprits are lipsticks- they almost always have pink undertones or are simply puny and incapable of making anyone feel any emotion other than "eh".  Reds should make you feel something.  Red is powerful and fierce, in the best of ways, and to let it be a dull sizzle of evocation is criminal.  

If you're a snob like me, Scarlet won't let you down.  The photo below does it a disservice by making it look a shade or two on the pink side, but it's not pink at all.  It's red the way red should be.  Bold and strong.  

It will make for a perfect sweater (or hopefully two).  

Stay sweet, stay crafty, and stay tuned.

Like I promised, I'm back again this week with a different dyeing technique that is supposed to keep my colours bright and in their place.

Steam bath.

I followed Anette of Fiber Artsy's Tutorial because I wanted clear directions and to be a little more sure of what I was doing.  I love to improvise and take chances, but there's a time and a place and I for this round of dyeing I wanted to do it right.

Yet, despite following a tutorial that was well documented for being successful, I did get a bit nervous at this stage because of what happened to my colours last week.  

I love this intense dark purple with sunshiny yellow, and didn't want to see them muddy into nothingness like they did last time, because while I do like the look of the yarn, it wasn't what I was going for. 

However, it doesn't do any good to worry at this step in the process so I wrapped it up anyway and let it steam for an hour and cool overnight.

Waking up and unrolling this in the morning before work felt like a special present.  Not that I expected the tutorial to have lied to me, I just expected that some gremlin I forgot to pay off would have hopped in the pot and mixed my colours to the point of hideousness.  I mean, what kind of universe would let my colours turn out so nice?

The steam bath outcome is on the right, and last week's dye bath result is on the left.  As you can see the colour is perfectly preserved and well defined with the steam bath, whereas the dye bath melded the colours together completely.  They were given the exact same amount of dye, had the dye painted on them the exact same way, and the dyes applied were mixed to the same proportions (because science is only reliable when you repeat the steps with diligence).  

I found this to be a fantastic learning lesson, and am also pleased to say that I love both of my outcomes, just for different reasons.  I plan to make sweaters out of both of them, and fondly consider them the sister sweaters.

So until those sweaters come around, or at least until I get another project on the books...

Stay sweet, stay crafty, and stay tuned.

With holiday deals zipping around my inbox in the last week, I decided to get some ready-to-dye yarn and try my hand (at long last) with Jacquard's Acid Dyes and share the experience with you.  So here we go!

First thing's first- Jaquard Dyes' website is LOVELY, and I'm not being sarcastic or paid by Jaquard Dyes.  They did a proper good job.

On the website for the dyes, there is a clear and direct PDF that directly states exactly how to best use their dyes.  I love when you can tell that someone actually put thought into what they create, because far too often instructions seem like the product of being at the wrong end of a bottle of vodka.

Since I was dyeing only a couple of ounces of fiber I used 0.25 ounces of the lilac dye and a dash of silver grey (yes I should have measured but I just wanted to play with dye today- don't judge).

From the very beginning this fiber was immersed in my magical cauldron of swirling purple I started feeling a strong preference for acid dyes over natural dyes.  The natural dyes are fun to use, but I couldn't get over the vague disappointment that the colour was never as brilliant as it looked in the dye pot.  With acid dye, the colour is there and it's there to stay- and that's what I want.  None of this "will we, won't we" nonsense- it's a colour that can commit and I respect that.

And as if this experience wasn't magical enough- I discovered the pure wonder of chemistry that is citric acid in a dye bath.  It creates a process that Jacquard Dyes refers to as exhausting the dye bath, which basically is when citric acid (or vinegar) is added to the dye bath and it makes the fiber soak up all of that luscious colour.  If you look closely at the photo above and the photo below, after the citric acid is added, the water that was once dark and mysterious is suddenly miraculously clear, as if the water had never known the presence of the dye. 

To further my love for using acid dyes, the colour didn't bleed at all when I washed it afterwards.  The water I used to wash my yarn looked just about as clear as it did before I added the freshly dyed yarn.  

This process was so overwhelming positive that I will warn you now, you will be seeing my hand-dyed yarn from me.  I'm hooked and I think there's nothing that can be done to save me, this is my life now and I'm happy with it- so consider yourself warned.

Until then though,

Stay sweet, stay crafty, and stay tuned.