This morning I took the remaining two thirds out of the mordant and got ready to dye it. The particular dye that I'm using is an extract, which means that it's very concentrated. To dye the light-medium grey wool, I only needed to use 1% weight of fibre (that would be the wool). That meant that those 29 skeins required 31.9g of dye. The remainder of the wool, which is what I'm dyeing now, I wanted to be a significantly darker colour, so I chose to use 3% WOF. As I was dyeing 59 skeins this time instead of 29, I needed to use 194.7g of dye.
Here I am, weighing it:
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| Almost enough! |
Once the dye had been measured out, I stirred it into a pot of hot water to make sure it was fully dissolved before adding it to the larger container.
The bubbles on top here look kind of orange-y, which they are. The dye, when it's in a really concentrated form, tends to appear red. Apparently this results in orange bubbles.
It definitely looked pretty purple when it got added to the dye vat, though. Here (below) you can see that, thanks to the hose, the container is getting filled up with water while I'm doing all that dye measuring and mixing. You can also see my wool in the background, anxiously waiting to hop back in there!
As I mentioned previously, the 59 skeins does all fit in the container, but without tons of space to move around. So, when I added the wool to the dyebath, I stirred it, A LOT, and am continuing to give it a good stir every half hour. I'm hoping that by the time I leave school this evening, it will have been stirred enough that it should be fine overnight.
It is looking like a very promising colour so far, though! I'll probably end up leaving it in there for several days to make sure that it gets as dark as possible.
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