mama-of-purl

My head's been hurting for the past few days and when I went to the pharmacy yesterday, I saw they had natural easter egg dyes- sandalwood, rosewood, logwood and mate tea. I still had mate at home, so I bought a little pouch of logwood and thought I'd try dyeing some wool with it.

You've all been extremely generous in your comments on my first dye job, so thanks for encouraging me!

Also, this sock yarn diet is really making me creative;-)

Well, I've gone on and on about this horrifying yarn I'd received from someone, and I've been thinking about selling it on ebay, but since I can't buy new white yarn, I thought I might as well use yarn that could only get better.

I wound it into a hank and prepared the dyes- I put 50 grams of each mate and logwood plus a teaspoon of the metal salt Alum in a liter of water and cooked it to a boil, then let it steep for almost 30 minutes. That's the yerba mate

that's the logwood- some POTENT stuff! Just one little spot on my stovetop was pretty hard to remove!

This is my little setup.

I soaked both yarns in the pots for about 45minutes and kept the solution close to a boil.

Then I rinsed it in warm water and then some water with vinegar, just to make sure.

Then I washed it with shampoo and rinsed it a bunch of times as there still was a lot of the purplish blue dye coming out- I could've easily dyed a lot more fiber with this solution!

Here's the yarn coming out of the dyepots- much better already

Here it is all dried and pretty- I'm so impressed with the logwood, it's a very rich purplish blue that somehow gave an extra shine to the yarn. And the mate still shows the former dye, but transformed it to more delectable colors. The white turned into a bright green-yellow and there's some aqua and bright greens, very nice! if I looked at this part of the hank VERY enthusiastically, I could say the colors reminded me of some koigu colorways.

Of course, I had to knit up a swatch in form of a sock cuff;-)