...and now for something completely different

I purchased three skeins of undyed/natural wool to mess around with and to try something completely different for me.  I dyed these with Easter egg dye.  It was a total experiment and turned out pretty cool (if I say so myself and now I can check that off my list of dye techniques to try).

All of the wool was pre-mordant with Alum & CoT  and was still a bit wet. 

For the green/blue: I skeined the wool into a cake and put the blue dye into a bowl then placed the cake of wool in.   It instantly soaked up all of the blue dye so I put a bit more water in and pressed down on the cake to act like a sponge to soak up more.  I let it sit for a few minutes then flipped it over and did the exact same thing with the green dye.  When it was done absorbing as much dye as it could....I should have squished it a bit more to sponge up more of the green as I have some white spots.....I put it in the microwave for a minute 3x...I was afraid of heating the wool too much and doing who knows what to it, so I only did one minute intervals.  

Some in progress pics:

Skeins in cakes & the dye

 the vibrant dye...ready to go

the blue dye

...and the green half

The red/yellow/orange/purple skein was caked and placed in a bowl then I   used a syringe and squeezed red/yellow/orange into segments with the purple being in the middle.  I pushed on the cake like a sponge again to have it absorb as much dye as possible...it also went in to the microwave the same as the other skein.  

In progress pic:  

I didn't take any other shots of this skein being dyed...not sure why?  but as you can see I sectioned each color into segments and sometimes forced the syringe into the caked wool to get the color into the inner layers.  The middle was injected with purple.

...and the last one was on a total whim...I snow dyed this skein.  Yep, SNOW!  I put the skein on a window screen suspended over our basement sink which had a basin in it to catch the draining dye.  Then I went outside and scooped up snow to toss on top on the yarn, which I then poured the dye over this.  Over time the snow melts and the dye runs over the yarn and drips out into the basin....so it can happen slowly then happen fast so the colors are much more muted with a tie-dyed effect.

In progress pics:

The yarn spread out on the screen

the snow dumped over the yarn

the dye poured all over the snow

So from that < to this > was pretty fun and interesting!

Thanks for stopping by!