Fabric: 100g wool
Dyestuff: 50g (50%) onion skins, mixed yellow and red
Mordant: 8g (8%) alum (aluminium potassium sulphate) with 7g (7%) cream of tartar
Colour modifier: 1.5g (3%) iron (ferrous sulphate) used on only one of the hanks
Since this is my first dye job, I'll describe it in detail. Future posts will be less verbose.
To start with, I took my two 50g balls of wool and tied them into hanks. The first step is 'scouring' which means getting all of the oils and grease off the yarn. To do this, I put a little splash of washing liquid (non-bio) into a big pot of cold water and soaked the yarn overnight.
After draining and rinsing the yarn, I measured out 50g of onion skins, which is a lot! It nearly filled my stockpot.
I then poured boiling water over the skins (enough to cover, plus a pint or so more), brought it to boiling point and simmered for 45 minutes.
After it had cooled, I strained off the onion skins and threw them away. Note to self: don't squeeze out the water with your bare hands unless you want yellow-brown fingernails for several days afterwards. Marigolds are your friends.
After this I ended up with something that looked rather like a prop from Carrie.
Now to mordant the yarn. This bit is boring, and next time I will do it at the same time as the dyebath preparation. I simmered the yarn in alum and cream of tartar for 45 minutes at 82 degrees. You have to be very careful not to 'shock' the wool by subjecting it to sudden changes of temperature - so bring the temperature up from cold at the beginning, and let it cool slowly again at the end before draining and rinsing.
Next I plonked the mordanted yarn into the dyebath and brought it back to 82 degrees for 45 minutes. This bit's actually quite interesting because you can see the colour come out of the dyebath and go into the yarn, so the water begins to clear.
Next I fished out both hanks of yarn. Note to self: buy some tongs unless you want to burn your fingers doing this. I wanted to try using iron as a colour modifier, but only on one of the two hanks so that I could compare the results. I tried to measure out 1.5g of iron but my scales aren't really sensitive enough, so it might have been a bit more than that. It certainly looked like I'd gone a bit overboard when I sprinkled the iron into the dyebath - below you can see the colour of the bath before and after stirring.
That second photo isn't clear, it's black, but hard to see.
I then returned one of the two hanks to the dyebath and simmered for five minutes longer before fishing it out and leaving it to cool.
Once cool, I soaked both hanks together in new fresh water to help get the last bits of dye out. I suspect this might have been a mistake but am not sure yet - see for yourself:
Now, part of that rather startling colour change is likely to be because I took the first photo under the crazy halogen lights in my kitchen, and the second in natural light. But there was definitely a significant transformation from saturated orange to a kind of tobacco/ochre during the soaking process. There are two possibilities here: either it just always happens - the colour matures for a few hours after it's left the dyebath - or it's because I sat it in water with the iron-modified hank. After all, there was bound to be some ferrous sulphate left on the darker hank, which could well have made its way over to the lighter hank while they soaked. The patchiness of the lighter ball would support this theory since maybe bits of it that were closer to the darker hank picked up more iron... maybe? Not that I mind since I like variegated yarn, but I wasn't expecting it since I did lots and lots of stirring throughout the whole process.
My other main observation is that the yarn did shrink an awful lot, both in length and width. It started out as... erm... DK I think, possibly aran weight, but now it looks like 4-ply. I think I might try to get superwash chunky wool for future experiments. Maybe cotton wouldn't shrink as much?
Next time I will soak and dry the hanks separately. I will also bother to put on my rubber gloves more often - to avoid the stained fingernails - and I will buy a pair of tongs. But I am pleased with my first experiment. I think I will twist the two yarns together and knit a hat, when I next have a free couple of evenings.
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