Dyeing all kinds of plant based fibres using Dylon cold water dyes

I've had a full day in the kitchen playing with a variety of plant and cellulose fibres and some cold water dyes.  My usual Greener Shades Dyes are not suitable for this kind of fibre and I now have quite a lot of it thanks to the two years of Advent Calendars and the occasional purchase by me, like the lap waste bags and a sample pack. 

I've bought some small packs of cold water hand-wash dyes by Dylon, they also do dyes you can use in the washing machine, I don't want those.  It doesn't say on the packets but working things out logically you can actually just use the amount of dye you need to use for the amount of fibre and keep the rest for later, you just need to be able to seal the packets up in between uses.  I have some food packet clips from Ikea which are really good and provide a nice tight seal.  You can also mix the dye colours to make new colours and shades, like my usual dyes, again it doesn't mention this on the packets but it does work. 

Each 50g packet dyes up to 250g of fabric or fibre.  The instructions say to weigh and then soak the fabric or fibre and to dissolve the whole pack of dye in 500ml of warm water.  Weighing the fabric seems like a daft instruction amongst the rest of the instructions to me, other than to make sure that what you are dyeing is less than 250g, because you would only weigh the fibre if you are weighing out the dye to achieve a specific depth of colour and these instructions are assuming you don't care about the finished shade or depth of colour, just shove all of the dye in and hope for the best.  It then says to fill a bucket or sink with 6 litres of warm water.  Next you have to add 250g of salt followed by the dye and then the fabric or fibre.  Stir for constantly for 15 minutes followed by regularly stirring for 45 minutes.  Rinse in cold water and its done.

My revised instructions for enabling these dyes to be used in smaller amounts is as follows: 

• use 1g of dye for every 5g of fibre
• Dissolve the required amount of dye in 10ml of warm water for every 1g of dye
• use 5g of salt for every 1g of dye
• add the dissolved dye to a further 120ml of warm water for every 1g of dye
• add the fibre and stir
• rinse in cold water after being in the dye for about an hour

So, the fibres that I have dyed are:

I also planned to dye a 10g sample of Egyptian Cotton, which I don't have a before photograph of and I have over-dyed two pink fibres that I have in my stash, 11g of pink Bamboo and 75g of Pink Soybean/Soysilk.  The pink soybean isn't too bad a shade of pink but I do have quite a lot so I have split it into 3 lots, keep one in the original pink and dyed the other two lots.

My "dye pots" are re-cycled plastic take-away tubs and these hold enough dye to dye roughly 30g-35g of fibre.  The dye colours that I have used are Vintage Blue, Deep Violet, Tropical Green and Sunshine Yellow.  The results are not always what I expected but I am dying this fibre purely to put into my "ingredients cupboard" in a variety of colours.  The fibre base colour will have an affect on the final result, especially the Soybean.  The Mint fibre is a kind of pale mushroom colour in real life so that is likely to have a bit of an affect on the results too.

There were 16 "dye pots" throughout the course of the day and most of them had 3 different types of fibre in them.  All of the fibres were soaked in warm water with the addition of a small amount of Synthropol prior to being put in the dye to remove any finishes that may have been on the surface of the fibre. 

The Soybean, Trilobal Nylon, Hemp and Faux Cashmere/Bio-Nylon are larger amounts and have been pulled into lumps of about 10g each.  The other fibres that I am dying from scratch are 25g samples htat have been split roughly in half to be dyed two different colours.  I will let the following photos tell you all need to know.  Where there is no percentage figures on the dye photos means that it was 100% of that colour.  I have only put percentage figures where I mixed the colours in those proportions.

I'm pretty happy with my dyed fibre.  The Soybean/SoySilk fibres didn't take the dye too well on the first attempt and I went back through and re-dyed them in the same colours as the first time around but this time it was on its own in the dyepot.  I also over-dyed the Trilobal Nylon and the Faux Cashmere/Bio-Nylon blend that had turned out bright pink from the Deep Violet dye.

I will write a separate post to discuss the results, as this one is long enough already.

A full day of dyeing stuff

I had quite a few things that I wanted to dye or over-dye so I set aside a full day to do as much as I could, time and available space to get it dry depending.

The first thing that I tackled was a shawl that I finished crocheting at the beginning of the year but was not happy because the yarn was darker in one part than the rest and this dark stripe ruined the shawl.  I had to buy dye specifically for this as my usual dyes don't work on cotton.  I have already blogged about the shawl and updated the post to show the finished dyed version and you can find that here.

I used a cold water Dylon dye in shade "Burlesque Red" and followed the instructions.  The water isn't properly cold, it has to be hand warm to begin with but doesn't require any further heat.  The shawl has come out pretty good though, I'm happy with it.

What I did do, whilst this shawl was having a nice soak, was to take a clean empty jam jar and scooped a small amount of dye water out of the dye pot and then pull off a 5g clump of undyed trilobal nylon from the 100g clump I have and pushed it into the dye water in the jar.  I made sure it was fully submerged and just left it on the side for about half an hour.  

The colour is nothing like the shawl, not even close, you would not think it was dyed using the exact same stuff at the exact same time.  It has come out a pale purple colour but evenly dyed though and this will now go into my "ingredients cupboard" for use to add a bit of shimmer when I make my own fibre blends.

The next thing that I dyed was some bright yellow cotton yarn that I would like to tone down a lot to make a more usable and appealing colour.

I have chosen the same cold water Dylon dye but this time in shade "Ocean Blue", fully aware that over-dying something yellow with blue will no doubt make it become green.

I'm happy enough with the result of the yarn, not ecstatic, but it's fine.  I also tried to dye some wool using the left over from the dye pot as it is supposed to be able to dye wool, just a much paler shade than you get from dyeing plant based fibres.  It didn't work, barely touched it, so I laid it to one side to dry until I could get around to using my usual wool dyes.

I done the same thing with this dye pot, I took a clean empty jam jar and scooped a small amount of dye water out of the dye pot and then pull off a 6g clump of undyed trilobal nylon and pushed it into the dye water in the jar.  I made sure it was fully submerged and just left it on the side for about half an hour.  

The colour is nothing like the yarn, but then I don't expect it to be given that I am dying something white with blue dye so of course it will be blue.  Again the result is evenly dyed and this will also now go into my "ingredients cupboard" for use to add a bit of shimmer when I make my own fibre blends.

The final thing that I wanted to dye today was the last of the white Jacob fleece that I have had a number of years, since 2014.  I had already chosen a dye and despite the poor results from trying to dye some Whitefaced Dartmoor wool in the left over blue dye I decided to still give it a go with the cold water Dylon dye in shade "Olive Green", given the fact that this is fresh unused dye and not left overs.  I have to say that it didn't work.  The results were poor and actually looked like it had been stained with urine.  Not nice at all.  However, the clump of trilobal nylon that I had dyed in the jam jar came out a lovely shade of very pale olive green.

So I now have two decent-ish amount of wool that is wet from a failed dye attempts.  The Whitefaced Dartmoor I am happy to allow to dry because its kind of a pale silver colour right now but the Jacob needs to over-dyed right now.  I dig out my wool dyes and shade book and I get to doing some complex maths and weighing out the dyes I need.  I chose a dye depth of 1%, that is 1g of dye for every 100g of dry fibre so its a good job I knew how much it weighed before I put it in the dye pot earlier, 427g.  I made the 4.27g of powdered dye up using 45% River Blue, 45% Sunshine Yellow and 10% Ruby Red and got cooking - the wool dyes require high temperatures.

I am happy with the results and can't wait to see what it will look like when it is combed and made to look nice and fluffy.

I also dyed some Trilobal Nylon with this dye by scooping some of the dye water into a jam jar with a small clump of the Trilobal Nylon pushed down into it.  This dye normally requires heat but I gave it a go with just it being stood on the side for about half an hour and it kind of worked.  Its not evenly dyed but it did take up some of the dye anyway so that's OK and I have some Trilobal Nylon from an old supplier that is just like this, not evenly dyed, and she gets away with selling it like that so I'm happy enough.

Yet another new design - A360 in pure cotton

I'm getting back into making new things again and this time yet another new design for the shop.  Its a comfort style shawl, roughly three-quarters circular so the edges don't actually meet at the front but the shaping makes it hug your neck and the increasing makes it sit on your shoulders and then it just gets more full from thereon down.  I've had the pattern for some time but I have so many it will take years to get to some of them.  This one was published in 2009 by a well-known American yarn company, again with the freedom to sell what you make using their patterns, as long as you are not going to make thousands of them, obviously and the pattern instructions themselves are copyrighted to them so can't be shared, photocopied, distributed, blah, blah, blah the standard legal blurb.

I've had this one in my queue of projects for a while now and I am using some cotton yarn that I picked up second-hand off Ebay sometime ago.  The lady selling it didn't enjoy working with it, it didn't work up as she hoped and so she had "frogged" what she had started making and put it up for sale.  To frog means to rip it back/undo it and is referred to as frogging in the knitting/crocheting community because the vocal sound of "rip it" sounds like a frog.  There are other dictionary meanings of "frog" or "to frog" but those don't apply here.

Ah, I don't have a photo of the actual yarn from my stash so here is one I pulled from the internet of what it would have originally looked like.  It is Garnstudio Drops Paris in shade Apricot and is 100% Cotton aran weight yarn.  Not all of the yarn I bought has yarn labels, a couple missing, that's OK as she had started using it, it's one of those things as not everyone keeps the labels until they've finished making something.  In natural daylight all of the yarn looks the same, no obvious differences in shade or anything so we're good to go.

I make a good start on the crochet and it takes me a couple of days to get to finish line.  A nice pattern, soft cotton yarn, very happy and I've even got some leftovers that I can use on another project or two, depending on what I make.  And then I throw it out open on the floor to take some pictures before I wash and block it.  My happy heart sank like a tonne of lead.  Oh dear, ermmmmm, let's just wash it and see what happens, maybe any excess dye might leak out and then it might look more even in colour.  

No, that didn't happen, that was just wishful thinking.  What did happen though, after quite a while of putting it off and procrastinating for over 6 months, was that it went into the dye pot in September 2022 with some dye that I bought in specifically for plant-based fibres, my usual dyes aren't suitable for plant-based, and I changed it's colour.

Do you see it? I've marked it on the close-up photo.  It was more in-your-face in real life that what the photo suggests.

Burlesque Red, sounds a little risqué and certain glamourous images spring to mind, think along the lines of Dita Von Teese... apparently this particular shade of Dylon dye has since been renamed as "Plum" and no longer features a feather - boring! What's wrong with being a little risqué every now and then.  I love the film Burlesque that stars Cher, Christina Aguilera, Stanley Tucci, Cam Gigandet (James from Twilight) and many others.  Brilliant film, if you've not seen it and like films where the girl down on her luck finally fulfils her dreams then it might just be worth the 2 hours it plays for.

Anyway, its a cold water dye, so other than warm water to start with I didn't have to keep it on the heat or anything and I kept checking on it to make sure it was taking, yes, but I could see a few patches where the dye hadn't been taken properly or at all in a couple of places so I moved it around in the pot and made sure to get as much dye into a much of the fibre as I could.  Its turned out ever so slightly patchy where some little areas are slightly lighter than rest but I think it looks good and I actually love this shade of red, obviously the original start colour of the yarn has had an affect on the final shade and tone but there is no longer any obvious stripe across it.

I will be making this pattern again in the future, I have a couple of yarns in mind for this that I have in my stash.  I just need to find the time to make them, which might not be until early 2023.

Combing more of the natural dyed Jacob

After that spinning session I just needed a day to do something different so I combed the Jacob that I dyed using carrot tops last year.   I started out with 160g and ended up with 78g of combed top, quite nice but not nice enough as it is right now.  It needs something adding to it but I need to sleep on it and make some choices.

Trying more plant based dyes

After harvesting the homegrown carrots, I have once again made some dye using the carrot tops but this time I am not waiting to use it at a later date, I am using it straight away.  I am also going to try a couple of dried goods for dyeing that I bought from a supplier, marigolds and logwood.

I mordanted the entirety of the white parts of a Jacob fleece in Bichromate of Potash first.  Its not a safe chemical and certainly not eco-friendly, which is a shame as by using plant material for dyes you would think that the whole process would be more eco-friendly than other dyes, but sadly not.  For plant dyes to take effectively you need to mordant the fibre and it is the various mordants that are not eco-friendly.

The fleece came from a friend of an ex-work colleague, you can read about that here.  This one was fleece No.5.

The first thing I dyed with was the carrot top dye that I had just made.  The tops had been chopped and soaked for 3 days, boiled up and simmered for about an hour.  I strained the greenery from the dye, which went into our compost bin, and put the dye liquid back into the dye pot and added 160g of mordanted fleece into it.  I don't think this is as vibrant as last time I used carrot top dyes but I am using a different fibre as well as maybe different strength of plant material relative to the amount of water.  I don't know, its often guesswork with me.

The next thing to go in the dye pot was some dried logwood which had been soaked in a little container of water for 12 hours.  This then had to be simmered for about an hour to obtain the dye.  Logwood produces dark grey dye but interestingly the water turned red when it was simmering.  I had read that if you add about a tablespoon of powdered chalk to the prepared logwood dye before you add the fibre then this produces blue fibres, rather than dark grey.  I gave this a go and put 247g of mordanted fleece into the dye pot.

I'm happy with the results of this one, I have a wonderful mix of dark blue and blue-grey fibres, this will be interesting once its combed.

Logwood can also be used on non-mordanted fibres and it is supposed to take.  The dye bath was clearly not exhausted so I ran and fetched some mohair fleece that I had had sitting around for some time.  I didn't dye all of the mohair but I did grab and good amount, 184g actually, and dumped it into the dye pot.  It didn't seem to be taking any of the dye at all until I added a good glug of citric acid to the dye pot, where it suddenly turned a mushroom kind of colour.  Not the best but not really nasty, I can use this, but I was hoping for some kind of blue-grey like the Jacob wool produced.

The final batch of dye was made using dried marigold flowers, which I followed the instructions for and soaked them for about an hour before simmering them for an hour.  I put 64g of mordanted fleece into the dye pot and hoped that it turned out the colour I had read about and that I hoped for.  No such luck.  Its quite boring to be honest and certainly does not have any orange colouration to it that my natural dye book said it produces with this mordant, as different mordants can affect the final colour produced and this is why I chose to mordant with Bichromate of Potash.

Making natural dye from carrot tops and using it

Today I've boiled up the chopped up tops of the homegrown carrots.  The strained greens were added to the compost heap and then I prepared the fibre for dyeing.  The problem with natural dyes is that whilst the dye itself is eco-friendly the mordant that you need to use to make the dye fix to the fibres are all metal chemicals and far from eco-friendly.

With carrot greens you can get a range of colours depending on the mordant that you use so you can get yellow, bronze or green.  I decided to try and obtain bronze which means using Chrome as the mordant.  I had to leave the dye to one side whilst I mordanted my chosen fibre in Chrome at a rate of 4g Chrome to 4.5 Litres of water.  I have some washed but unprepared white fleece so I used 55g of Falkland Merino, 40g of Alpaca and then a chunk of Mulberry Silk that I had left that weighed 6g.

Once they were mordanted they all went into the dye pot at the same time, keeping them in their own little section of the pot, trying not to let the fibres mix at this point.  They simmered in the pot for about an hour then left to cool before I took them out and rinsed them in salt water, washed it, rinse again and then put them on my hanging drier to dry.

In the photo below, from left to right is the Falkland Merino, Mulberry Silk, Alpaca with the top row showing the unprepared but dyed fibre and the second row shows the combed Falkalnd Merino, which was reduced to 33g after combing, the Mulberry Silk which didn't need anything doing to it and finally the Alpaca, which was reduced to 28g after combing.  The last photo shows all the fibres together, looking wonderful.  I'm very happy with the results.

I have ordered a blending hackle, as this was the right thing for me, so I am just waiting for that to arrive and then I can get blending all these fibres together.

Working on a Romney fleece

I need to be quicker at processing fleece and spinning it up because I actually bought this fleece back in August 2012 and I am only now working on it 5 1/2 years later.  That's a crazy amount of time to have a fleece and not do anything with it.

Romney, which used to be called Romney Marsh Sheep is a long-wool breed of sheep originating in Kent and is often referred to locally as a "Kent". 

When this arrived all those years ago it was rolled up and took me some time to figure out how to open it out.  It had lots of sheep marker on it in different colours.  I'm not sure if this was spray marker used for marking sheep that are pregnant/how many lambs they're having or whether some of this was from the raddle that is strapped to a Rams chest and marks the Ewe during mating.

Its a Ewe fleece and weighed 3.4kg before skirting and washing.  After washing it weighed 2.175kg.  I'm not sure if its because it's been stored for so long or whether its just me being so much more experienced and picky about the fleece that I am prepared to put the effort in make into yarn but this is far more coarser than I recall.  This is another fleece where I ended up binning most of it and only keeping the best fibres from the fleece so from the 2.175kg that was waiting to be combed, I only actually have 362g of hand-combed top for spinning.

By the end of sorting out all that fleece and only coming away with such a small amount of swag I was quite disappointed and fed up with the whole thing so I spun it up very quickly and quite thick to get it out of my sight as quick as possible.  Three skeins of Aran weight yarn that I forgot to take photos of as this point.

I tried dyeing the yarn with the natural liquid dye kept from the boiled up carrot tops from last year and using the appropriate mordant it should have dyed the yarn green but it didn't work, it smelt rancid and stunk the house out.  I had to open doors and windows to try to vent the house and I also used one of the wax melts that I had for Christmas to make the house smell nice again.  I can't find anything anywhere about how long natural dyes from plant material will store for other than the statement "store until ready to use", but clearly 10 months is too long and I would imagine it needs to be used within about a month of making it.

I had to rinse the yarn really well and over-dye it using my Greener Shades Dye and I chose Ruby Red.

I love the colour these have turned out.  These are all aran weight and this one 128g/137m

This one is 117g/148m

and this one is 106g/105m

Elford Jacob Fleece No.9

Way back in 2014 I helped a friend of a friend out by taking a number of Jacob fleece off her hands, see this post for more details on that.

I numbered all the fleece and kept fleece's 2, 5, 9 and 16 for myself, along with a rubbish one that was only good for binning or making into a rug.  This is what I did with fleece No.9, a predominantly white fleece with very little black, a large section of cotted fleece in the middle and weighing 2.1kg but the rest is very long stapled and lanolin rich, a spinners dream.

It washed up really nice and I began combing this fleece in January 2017.  After combing I have 816g of lovely hand-combed white fibre waiting to be spun.  I will get to the black fibres at a later date.

I worked on the white parts of this fleece on and off between January and August, finishing off with the dyeing in August.  Its a large amount of fleece to work on and I've had a lot going on this year with various hospital appointments and major surgery.

I spun one bobbin up in February and this got put to one side until I had time over the Easter break to get back to spinning and then I completed two skeins in less than a week.  In total, I made 4 skeins of yarn from the white part of the fleece in different yarn weights and I after I cooked some homegrown beetroot I transferred the liquid from my cooking pot to my dye pot and dyed all four skeins at the same time, the same colour.  They have all turned out a variegated yellow colour which I am reasonably pleased with.