Friday 22 May 2015

Dyeing combination fibers - Swatches!


A friend of mine had this giant cone of yarn that I think she picked up at a garage sale a while back. Just yards and yards of it,and all in a boring nude colour, so I offered to dye it up for her. The problem? It's about a 50/50 linen/silk blend. which means half of the fiber will want an acid dye, and the other half a reactive dye. So that means experiments!


So I skeined off 1000 yards to set aside for the final dyeing, and then wrapped up a couple mini-skeins to do some tests.


Here's the results, from top to bottom: original colour, Acid dye teal, Acid dye peach, Reactive dye Violet, Reactive Dye Black, and the last one I cooked the yarn with some saskatoon berry preserve, which came out a nice purple, but faded out in the wash.


In the close up of the teal, you can see that the acid dye, which will dye only the silk mainly dyed the white flecks in the yarn. Which means the base yarn is the linen, and the white flecked single it's plied with is the silk.


The peach, also an acid dye hit the flecks as well, but being a red based dye, hit the linnign a bit as well. The fiber reactive violet dyed a bit more uniformly. But since I used almost no salt, it didn't have full penetrance in the linen.


Same goes with the black. The berry dyed yarn faded after washing, and the effect achieved was mainly just to tone down the yellow of the original colour.

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