So, I've been really busy with midterms and stuff this week, so I haven't been keeping up with posts like I should be. I took pictures of my newly dyed roving, and so I'll finally let you see those!

This was dyed with all the shades of red/pink/purple I currently have. I really like how it turned out, and I can't wait to spin it!

This roving is just as bright in person as it is here! It's a combination of greens with chartreuse on top. A little brighter than I thought it would be, but still nice.

This is salmon and pumpkin. I wish the salmon was more pronounced and the pumpkin was more subdued, but we'll see how this looks once spun.

I tried to get big white patches when I dyed this roving. It's violet and emerald green. I hope the white stays once spun.

This is some roving Liz dyed that didn't end up working for her collection. I'm going to spin it up for her to knit with later.

Acid Dyeing

Today I did some dyeing with Liz, and it was awesome. We each ended up dyeing two pounds of wool roving with acid dyes. Acid dyes are really easy to use, and pretty readily avaliable, so they are a really great dye to use, plus they are not very toxic at all! All you need is some vinegar, foil, and saran wrap, and you can dye any protein fiber. We first split our roving into one ounce sections, which made it easier to work with and will ultimately let the wool dry faster.

After the wool was split into one ounce sections, we folded them in half three times and then wrapped one of the free ends around the bundle to make a little bundle. Don't they just look like adorable little bows?
We then took the bundles and soaked them in a water-vinegar solution for about 15 minutes. I added enough vinegar to the water so that it smelled slightly like vinegar, but you don't need to be precise about this at all. The wool only needs to soak for 15 minutes, but I just left them in there until the big pot of water we had set up for steaming began to boil.
While the wool was soaking and the water was heating up, I mixed the acid dyes. Acid dyes can be mixed to any concentration, but 1/2 tsp. of dye per 8 oz of water gets a good medium concentration of color.
I used a funnel to get the dye into the bottles, and poured hot water down to mix it. As long as the water is hot enough to dissolve the dye, you don't need to worry about the funnel clogging or cleaning the funnel between dyes, the hot water will do that for you.

Me mixing the dye.

After the water is added to the dye, you want to shake the bottle to make sure its all dissolved. Once the dyes are mixed, let them cool until they are just barely warm. You don't want them too hot because it will felt the wool.

Next, we lined trays with saran wrap and placed a few bundles of soaked wool on them. The wool had the excess water squeezed out of them before being placed on the tray, but they were still damp. This is going to be where the dyeing takes place, and the tray makes for really easy clean up.
Then, we squirted the dye on to the wool, making sure to press the wool down in order to ensure that the color made it all the way through the bundle.Once the wool bundles were completely saturated, we wrapped them in the saran wrap, and then again in two layers of foil. They look like giant burritos! We put the wool burritos into our steamer and let them steam for 30 minutes. I probably should have rotated the burritos halfway though since the dye seemed to pool down on the bottom, leaving the wool at the bottom darker than the ones at the top.
Once the steaming was done, we took out the burritos and let them cool a bit. We then rinsed them out with warm water around the same temperature as the wool (again, to prevent felting). Once the water ran clear, we squeezed out the bundles and hung them up to dry.
And here are the fruits of our labors! Liz dyed the oranges and greens on the left, and I did the four on the right, ending at the insanely bright chartreuse color. That one didn't turn out so well... As usual, once the roving is dry I'll post some pictures!

Yarn!

I finally have photos of my spun yarn and dyed roving! Now, these photos aren't perfect, and I still have to work on my photography skills, but they are a good start at least!

This is my silly little photo studio set up for now.
This is the cornflower and mouse gray corridale wool I dyed with the acid dyes.


This is the golden yellow and pumpkin corridale I dyed, also with acid dyes.

Chamomile dyed wool.
Green tea dyed wool.
Beet dyed wool.
Paprika dyed wool.Spinach dyed wool, the epic failure.Achiote, chili powder, and beet juice dyed wool.

My favorite yarn I've made. I'm not sure why the picture turned out blueish.

Obviously these photos are not the best, but I'm working on it. I think that I need to use self timer to reduce the shakiness, and then I'll probably still have to mess with the brightness a bit to get the colors to match up with what they are in real life. I just white balanced them, and then did an auto-correct on the photo to get the gray out.

Playing with Birds

I didn't get a chance to check on my roving yet, but I will be able to pick it up tomorrow, so I can take pictures and post about it then for sure. I'm really excited for more dyeing this weekend, and because my honey is coming up to visit. I have been going down there for what seems like the past million weekends, even though our trips are basically split evenly. I guess I just like feeling dramatic or something.

Today was pretty normal, minus the fact that I didn't get internet back until now. It's crazy how much I rely on it when its gone, and not just for entertainment, but all of my classes and forms of contact seem to be online now. I at least didn't have too much free time in which to be bored today, instead I went to my volunteering shift at the raptor center. I actually brought my camera, so I got to take a few pictures of the birds, but I'll take more of my favorite ones to show you.

The highlight of my day though was holding a bald eagle to feed it. He had been found in a field somewhere and isn't eating, so the boss had to force feed him fish. I got to not only hold my first eagle, but it was a wild bald eagle, so that is practically the best thing ever! He did get fish all over my windbreaker though, so I really need to rinse that off.

Anyways, here are some pictures!These are the three Red Tails we keep, also known as the Bacholor(ette)s, depending on the person. It is very hard to sex birds sometimes.
This is one of our taming birds, Grasshopper. He is super adorable. He's a Swainson's Hawk.

This is another Swainson's, and Grasshopper's cage mate. Her name is Evita (Evi). This is how we take out the taming birds, which are used in education programs.

Adventures in Dying

The other day I tried out dyeing some roving for the first time with my friend Liz. I had been meaning to try it for awhile now, but crazy things have been freaking me out. I kept reading books and websites that talked about how you need pots that can only be used to dye, crazy chemicals, and all that crap. Plus since I'm a spinner, I wanted to dye things like wool roving, which every freaking article about dyeing says that wool is like, the pickiest type of fiber in the world. So needless to say, I had been quite terrified about dealing with it all. Liz, however, is very comfortable with dyeing things, so I was more than happy to experiment with her by my side.I had gotten a ton of free fiber from a coworker, so I had plenty of stuff to experiment with, and since Liz knew what she was going, I didn't mind the fact that there was a slim possibility of me screwing it up (I'm special like that). Liz found a website that talked about using natural dyes, which was pretty awesome, and it all seemed really easy. A good chunk of natural dyes require mordants, which are basically horribly toxic chemicals needed to make the dye work, which in my opinion seems to kind of defeat the purpose of using a natural dye instead of a commercial chemical brand. We ended up going to the grocery store down the street, and we bought spinach, beets, paprika, chrysanthemum tea, green tea, and this weird spice called achiote to dye with.

For the plant dyes, which in our case was the spinach and beets, we took our wool and yarn and simmered them in a mix of 1 part vinegar to 4 parts water. We let this go for an hour or so while we got the other dyes ready. For the vegetable dyes, we just chopped up the veggies and let them simmer in a huge pot of water for an hour in order to get the maximum color out. The spice dyes were much easier to prepare. The fiber needed no preparation other than soaking them in water before placing them in the dye bath, and the dye baths we just dumped the spice or tea in a big pot of water and let them simmer until the color was distributed.

Once the dye baths were ready, we stuck the fiber in and let them simmer for an hour, and then turned them off and let the sit overnight. The dyebaths turned some really awesome colors, but it was weird how the fiber didn't always pick that up. The next day, we took the fiber out, rinsed them until the water ran clear, and hung them up to dry. My roving is still a bit damp, but as soon as its dry I'll take some pictures and post that. I can, however, say a few things about the whole dying process. The natural dyes are pretty awesome, and I do want to do them again, but in the future I might leave it just for yarn and not the roving. Some of my roving seemed to felt together a little bit, but I think I can get it all out with carding it. The spices also kind of got everywhere in the fiber, or at least the ones that didn't dissolve in the water. I'll stick to ones that dissolve (like tumeric) or just forget them and use dyes that are larger and easier to fish out. I'm going to dye this weekend with the knitting instructor at my work though, and she knows how to dye roving so I might be able to figure out how to get it not to felt. We'll see though!