I Dyed and Went to Heaven

Sometimes I start with a pattern, sometimes an idea. A few months ago, I had a picture in my mind of a warm, graceful, shawl in very pale blue, blue-green, and blue-violet. Although I shopped like a determined professional, I couldn't find exactly what I was looking for, and finally admitted failure--I would have to dye the yarn myself.

I wanted something between, say, Zephyr and fingering weight, something luxuriously soft. After rummaging through my stash, I decided on Shakun's (a.k.a.China Cashmere) 2-ply silk/cashmere, mainly because I had a lot of it in white. (The reason why I suffer from an over-abundance of 2-ply silk/cashmere was explained in the previous post.)

I hate dying yarn. I hate the smell, the mess, the drippy, stringy, floppy skeins. However, I am well-acquainted with the process, having spent years studying color and dying--both natural and unnatural. Believe it or not, I used to crawl around the woods scraping lichen off woodsy objects and grinding poisonous little insects into red powder. After several years of this silliness, I threw Nature in the trash and invested in little bottles of premixed Jacquard dyes plus a nice set of food-coloring paste.

Being now forbidden to lift anything heavier than a grape (well, a bunch of grapes), I had to design a dying system that minimized neck stress.

It occurred to me that instead of using a heavy pot that had to be shlepped to the sink, the stove, the sink, the stove, ad nauseum, I could just use my twin stainless steel sinks and heat the water with an immersion coil. This concept worked out fantastically. I didn't have to lift anything but the yarn, and it was easy to push the skeins aside to drain the sink for soaking and rinsing.

I suspended the skeins on wooden thingies (parts of a Japanese embroidery frame, actually) and rested them on stacks of cat food cans (on the left) and a small cooler (on the right). I put the dye in the sink, raising and lowering the yarn by adding cans of cat food to the stack and situating the other end of the wooden bars on parts of the cooler.




When I had enough of one color, I raised the yarn, drained the sink, refilled with clear water, and added the next bit of dye.


Towards the end, I immersed all the skeins and added vinegar as a fixative, rinsed, and dried.


In the next post, you'll get to see this lovely stuff transforming into a warm, graceful shawl.