Dye Lot #2!

A little while back reread my post about trying to dye thread with the pomegranates and it got me into the mood to try dyeing again so I finally pulled out the yellow and blue dyes and made my second batch of dyed thread, this time in green and yellow.  Mostly green and mostly size 20.  I did a few variegated skeins, but since I don’t use variegated thread much I mostly made solids.  For the most part I was just messing around and wasn’t really trying for anything in particular.  Not trying for anything in particular means that I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.  I’ll probably keep messing around with dying thread in the future though I think I’ll probably want to switch to a different dye.  This is a powder dye I got to try out but I think a liquid one would be easier to play around with and mix, though I especially like the way the yellows look.

One of the things I didn’t seem to do well was rinse out the greens.  I thought I’d gotten all the extra dye out, but as I let them dry I saw that some of the green was bleeding on to the paper towels.  So rinsed all the green again and let them soak a bit more and that seemed to take care of it without changing the colors at all.  With the blues and yellows I just held them under running water and the seemed to rinse just fine, but maybe I had more dye in the greens.

Playing around with dyeing has certainly given me more appreciation for the HDT that others make.  I can’t imagine getting to the point where I can consistently get the same color scheme from skein to skein, let alone dye batch to dye batch.  Krystle Dawne has some gorgeous ones she just finished and posted on her blog about.  I don’t usually even care for variegated threads and I’m drooling.

Playing around with the dyeing has been partly to use up a bunch of balls of DMC size 20 white.  I’ve had them for a long time and never really been happy with them because they’re really more of a slightly off-white.  If I want to tat with white, I generally want a bright white, so I figured dyeing them would be a good way to turn them into something I’d actually use.  I’ve still got another 10 or so balls left so there’s still lots of playing with dye in my future.  Unfortunately that means there’s lots of winding of skeins for dyeing first in my more near future.  Ahh well.  All part of the process.