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.