Blue Faced Leicester - turns Rosy!

What a face! This is the Blue Face Leicester sheep. I have 14 -50gm skeins of natural sport weight wool, and have decided to dye the natural creamy colour to a sweet rosy tone.

I used two plastic coffee containers (my usual dying buckets) and mixed up a slightly diluted wine colour dye. Split into the two buckets, I then pre-soaked the yarn in warm water....

this helps the dye to absorb evenly. Then I squeezed out most of the water and dropped 7 skeins into each bucket. They soaked for ten minutes.

Then I dumped the dye bath and rinsed and rinsed and rinsed and rinsed.....

...with a final cold water bath soak for ten minutes. Taking them out and squeezing gently, I laid them loosely on the drying screen....

The natural variety in the tones adds to the hand dyed effect. It is due to the fact that I was not agitating the yarn in the buckets, so it was not completely even dying. I like this.