Month: February 2019

Silk Yarn Dying

This week I decided to do some yarn dyeing. I bought some ends of cones someone brought in to the guild. They are perfect for me as I don’t need large amounts of any yarn.

I couldn’t find my niddy noddy so I just wrapped the silk around a plastic box of curls. This is the largest cone I got. There was only one so I guess that’s why no on else wanted it. It is quite fine and it is a single yarn. I liked it because has little nubby bits. The other cones I got were almost empty.

I did 3 kinds of silk or at least I hoping the other two were silk. More on that farther down.

You can see the other tow yarns in this close up; there is one with slubs and one that is super shiny and has little loops.

I planned to use MX or fiber reactive dye for these. I wanted to do them with more than one colour so I soaked them in a soda ash bath. I was surprised at how dirty they were.

Next I made up small amounts of dye and dipped the yarn into them.

I made sure they were wall soaked in the dye then squeezing the excess out with a gloved hand. Then they are places on some plastic wrap them up.

They need to sit a couple of hours before rinsing. Two of the ones with purple on them took a lot more rinsing, one of the silk noil and one of the shiny ones. Not sure why.

This is the silk noil. The grey areas were turquoise. I am assuming it is grey because of the original colour of the yarn. You can also see it got some twist energy back and has little twists now. this is the one from the first picture. The other two were very white.

This is the one with the slubs. I was not sure this was all silk. I think that one of the ply’s is not silk. It must be a cellulose fiber but it did not take the dye quite the same. The fluffy slubs are definitely paler.

This is the last one. I really like the lavender that happened because I forgot to wipe the purple off my gloves before squeezing the excess dye out the turquoise part.

Last night with the help of guild friends I put them all into center pull balls.

All in all a very satisfying dye session. I am sure they will look very nice on some felt. I may use some of the silk noil to ply with something else. I am not sure I will have to see.

 

Little Pot Finished

As promised here is the finished pot. It did work, as if there was any doubt. All the problems I had were to do with the size of the pot and me.

The first problem is that I cut the whole in the top much to big. I think it would have been better pot if it had curved in at the top. it is much to open making it more up and down. Part of that is the size of the piece. It is only about 2.5 inches tall. Also I should have to cut the holes sooner so I can work on the cut edges, or at the end so the edges would be cleaner.

Here are the silk cocoons I put in. I did not position these well so on is to high and one to low. Again the size of the pot limited my options. The cocoons did work well. They were crushed., but that didn’t really matter. After it was dry I cut open the cocoons and then steamed them to reshape them. It may have been better to do those sooner so m=perhaps the cut holes could have been made smoother. All in all not a great pot but it was a good piece to remind me of all thing I really already new but didn’t think about. I think I will make another one but bigger.

 

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