Saturday, February 6, 2010

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.

2 comments:

crazycrafter said...

Ooh-ooh! I LOVE the color that you dyed the yarn! And 14 skeins! I would be in heaven!! What are you planning to knit with it? Blessings,
Hannah, age 12

crazycrafter said...

I just yesterday dyed some yarn peachy-pink with kool-aid. Dyeing is so neat. I love the color you chose!