Wrapping it up

A lot has been percolating here in this brain of mine.

I know this will seem like an abrupt reversal, but I have decided to discontinue the Fiber Dyeing Workshop project. It just was not that satisfying to me or useful and I want to streamline things in my life.

Thank you so much for your interest in the project.

Sincerely,
Baba

Dyer Interview: Christine Eschbach of Into The Whirled

I was first attracted to Christine Eschbach's Into The Whirled hand painted yarns and spinning fiber by the wonderful photographs on her blog. Each one is a little gem. The colors are vibrant and juicy and saturated and satisfying.
So I reached out to her to see if she would be up for an interview. I was nervous, because I know from her blog that she is busy, and I was basically approaching her from out of the blue (well, she is not the only one of my interviewees that is true for). But I needn't have worried: She responded enthusiastically and (you'll see below) she put a ton of love into the interview.

How would you describe your method - hand painted? Kettle dyed? Jackson Pollack? :) Has it changed since you started dyeing?

Hand painting is my primary means of dye application. Time and time again I have tried to explore other techniques that are a little less restricting but always return to the predictable nature of hand painting. Let's just say that my obsessive tendencies get in the way of free style dyeing.

How do you apply heat to your product - microwave? Steam bath? How many pots do you have? Anything else about your setup that you think is interesting and don't mind sharing with other dyers?

Having taught myself from various tutorials on the Internet I have collected a wide variety of heating tools; many are still in use today, others sit at the bottom of a closet. As you might imagine each technique requires a specific tool, so it is safe to say that I have amassed at least a couple dozen 'pot-like' receptacles. These days I find myself favoring crock-pots for larger projects, steam baths for busy nights when I need to stray from the restrictions of the studio and the microwave for testing and quick dye projects. Oh and turkey roasters - lets not forget the roasters, they are great for larger crock-pot type projects.

Something interesting about my setup? Aside from being overcrowded, my studio and current production setup is pretty random. One of these days the dream of industrial steam tables and a wall of ovens will be realized. Ask me the same question in a couple years...

Where do you work? Do you have a special studio or do you use the kitchen, or work outside?

I would like to think that I work exclusively in my studio which once doubled as my office. However, that is often not the case - especially on dye day, oh and day after dye day. Have I mentioned that I dye four days a week? Let's just say I have a tendency to spread out into the kitchen, living room, guest room, porch, and, well, you get the idea. [My husband has the patience and tolerance of a SAINT!]

What made you want to start dyeing yarn & fiber?

As a spinner there seems to be a natural progression of the obsession...

Purchase drop spindle and fiber. Research and choose wheel. Join a fiber club. Attend festivals and buy lots of colourful fiber. Purchase four to eight pounds of raw fleece to hand wash and spin. Buy more colourful fiber. Grow curious and decide to try your hand at dyeing. It goes without saying that I followed that very path. I spent endless hours on the Internet, read every book published on the topic, and purchased some acid dyes. As it so often does, life got in the way and I tucked the dyes into my closet for another day.

After my father passed away in the winter of 2008 I found myself a little lost. The affairs of the estate were dealt with and I had a long winter, promising to be filled with grief, to contend with.

The passing of a parent or any loved one affects everyone differently. I found that reorganizing the entire house brought me some peace. I imagine that a therapist would have declared that I was taking stock of my life and determining what matters and how I fit into it all.

One night it hit me. Among other things, I had inherited dozens of canning jars, four crock-pots and a 3000 yard roll of plastic food wrap. Add to that the dye I had stuffed in my closet months ago - my grief-filled nights quickly turned into colour filled mornings.

Your photography is striking and appealing. Do you photograph your yarn & fiber outdoors, or do you just have enviably fantastic lighting in your home?

Thank you! My setup is simple. I work inside; in a corner of the studio are a couple windows, three lamps with daylight bulbs, a light tent, and a simple point and shoot camera. Eye catching photographs can be achieved with practice, time, and a whole lot of discarded photos.

What part of dyeing is the most satisfying to you?

Oh, tough choice! I would imagine an answer like "everything" would be a little boring for the reader, so let me think a moment. Time and time again I tell my customers that I simply fill the spinner's palette and they are the true artists; hands down, the most satisfying moment is Show and Tell! On the Into the Whirled Ravelry group, sharing is strongly encouraged for somewhat selfish reasons – I love to see what folks create with the tools I have provided!
 
Does any part of dyeing freak you out a little or irritate you?

Once I was able to move past the word "ACID" in "acid dye" I quickly realized that there really is little to fear when it comes to dyeing. However, not being afraid does not translate to throwing caution to the wind! Pardon me while I step up on a soap box and take this opportunity to add a small public service announcement for aspiring dyers: While dyeing is a relatively safe pastime, please take every precaution prescribed by the dye manufactures and protect your health!!


Lastly, do you have any heroes or guiding lights who you have learned from or been influenced by?

Perhaps the group most deserving of recognition are the unsung heroes and guiding lights who stand by my side every day of the week. Words cannot describe how much I appreciate all the friends and family that gave me the confidence and support I needed to launch and grow ITW.

There are two very talented individuals who have been a tremendous influence, especially over the past year: Jill Draper of Jill Draper Makes Stuff and Cal Patch of Hodge Podge Farm. Together they are known as Double Knot Studio. The talent, the knowledge, and the commitment to living as successful working artists is truly inspiring. Needless to say, I have endless amounts of respect for these ladies. After undergoing bilateral Carpal Tunnel release surgery I found myself unemployed with a choice: find a new job or focus my energy on ITW. With the encouragement of these two ladies I found the confidence to make the decision to leave the life of corporate America in my past and dedicate myself to a completely creative lifestyle.

Thank you so much, Cris, for putting your heart into this interview. I loved reading about your process. Your work is so lovely and you are so tremendously prolific. It's wonderful to see your business grow!

You can find Into The Whirled on the blog, in the shop, and, of course, on Facebook.
 

Some dyeing log entries

3/19/11
Lavender pink:
Tied 8 oz BFL in knots, did not presoak.
1 tsp red
1 tsp blue
1 tsp yellow
1 tsp citric acid
1/2 hour near-boil.
It came out nice.

While still in the dyewater in the pot. I didn't get a photo of it after drying.

3/22/11
And I probably screwed up the above.

I put a tsp of red in the pot with 1/2 lb of dry BFL tied up, heated it for over half an hour, took that out and let it cool in the sink.

The dye water was not exhausted so I added 1/2 tsp of yellow, ~1/8 tsp blue, and some more squirts of red liquid. It's a nice avocado green, based on the sample I put on the coffee filter. I tied up the lavender-pink-white and put it in the green. I don't know how this will come out. I don't expect a good outcome.

4/1/11
So the avocado over lavender actually did come out quite well.

ETA: I like how there are still plenty of bits that are pink; and it's a really nice pink, almost like a young rose. And the greens are good too, not too kelly or anything. And I like the parts that almost remained undyed. They got a little color in them, but pale enough for my taste. I wasn't sure about this when it first came out, but I'm happy with it now. I wonder how it will spin up? I would like to keep it to spin myself, although I'm listing it on the Etsy shop; but I can't say how I would spin it, or especially how I'd ply it.

The red, meanwhile, was a bit plain. The parts I tied up were hardly white at all, as the dye was so strong that it seeped in and there was very little masking.

Tonight I mixed 1 part red and 2 parts yellow, and separately 1 part red and 1 part blue (of the premixed liquid dyes), and put them on the red after soaking it. Then I microwaved it (3 min on, 3 min off, times 3). I did it in 4-oz lengths so I alternated the two pieces in the microwave. It's in the strainer now, and it looks (in wet form) like it will be quite pretty. Hard to tell when it's wet.

Dyer Interview: Lynne Vogel, Twisted Sister

A couple weeks ago, I interviewed Tricia Hunt of Spinning Wheel Studio. At the end, when I asked her who she'd love to see interviewed here, she directed me without hesitation to Lynne Vogel. I contacted Lynne and somewhat timidly asked her whether she'd be willing to do an interview with me; she replied right away that she would! So I started to research and as I did so, I realized that her book, The Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook: Dyeing, Painting, Spinning, Designing, Knitting, was not only already on my bookshelf but was one that I had used big time when learning to dye yarn & spinning fiber. I re-read the book so I wouldn't be asking dumb questions, and realized that the book is so comprehensive, she had already answered a lot of the questions that I had already prepared! But this was cool, because I was able to ask her some follow-up Q's about things that I had been wondering about...

In your book, you describe learning wonderful things by accident - is there any experience you wouldn't mind relating in detail?

In my Harrisville dye class every year, we save every ounce of unused dye in a big kettle we call the "soup". Everything we pour down the drain there goes into a holding tank that has to be pumped out and the thought of dye in there really grosses me out. So we save it all up and at the end of the week I go down to the dye area and exhaust the soup. Last year, even though we had the soup in two big canning kettles, we had no heat source to heat the kettles because we'd been using the microwaves exclusively! And there was tons of dye in that soup.

So I just started plunging dry superwash bfl wool roving into the soup (with big gloves on, of course). I heat set each one in the microwave. Dye strikes superwash wool to some degree even when the dyebath is cold, and I figured that putting the fiber in dry would give it a little more absorbancy, and it did. For the first pound of fiber I ladled some of the soup into a ziplock baggie with the fiber and stuck it in the microwave, getting dark teal and peat brown. About 3 pounds of fiber later I could see that the soup was really exhausting and I had a lot of beautiful mid-range browns and teals with some really fun bleeds. The lighter colors were even more interesting, especially because putting dry roving in the solution caused the dye to strike very unevenly. As the dye exhausted and the resulting colors became lighter, the bleeds were even more obvious. This translated to teal roving with pale rose pink bleed and brown with silver grey green and a touch of orange! And the browns...straight from the earth browns, browns it would take me an entire day to match. We ended up with over 5 pounds of gorgeous muted colors from the soup and everybody went home with some. Some people spun them for socks and hats (really great guy colors too). I've since spun some of them into art yarns. I love the fancy textures of art yarns worked in understated colors and neutrals. I wouldn't have chosen to handpaint rovings with these colors because they are too subtle to look enticing online, but when people see the yarns I've spun from them, they always want more.

Why did the soup give such a variety of colors? Was it because the dyes separated out as the heat was applied?

The dyes separated out even before heat was applied. You can see this happen especially with dilutions with the cold pour technique. This happens most readily with washfast acid dyes, not so much with sabraset. The reason being that different colors strike at different rates. Yellow strikes first or at lowest temps, red (pink) next, then blue last. That's why it takes the longest time to exhaust a blue dyebath. No matter how you mix the colors, in powder, stock solution, direct application, or immersion, this is still true to some degree. Also, when I put the fiber in, I took 4 ounce hanks and grabbed them, pressing them in dry. Where I was grabbing the fiber I was forming a resist, so less dye struck at those points. The fiber can resist itself too when it's in tight coils. Those resisted areas were the ones that showed the bleed from the separation of the dyes.

What made you want to start dyeing yarn/fiber? Was it simply that you had become a spinner?

Photo: Jim Ann Howard
(from The Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook)

Actually, I learned to dye before I became a spinner. Back then I was selling my knitted pieces in galleries, combining handspun and millspun yarns. I could never seem to find the colors I wanted in the yarn I wanted. I'd been a painter since I was a kid. My dad taught me how to mix any color under the sun in paint. In the early 80s I had a job painting custom needlepoint canvases for a shop in California. It used to frustrate me so to try to match yarn colors to the canvases they carried in the shop, because no matter how many colors they had, and they had tons, there were never enough. So I would pull the yarns for my designs and match them with my paint when I painted my own designs. So you can imagine how hard it was for me to try to find yarn colors in knitting yarns.

When I lived in Taos, I worked primarily with La Lana Wools' beautiful naturally dyed yarns. I also spent a summer as an assistant to a local weaver who taught me natural dyeing. But those colors are like found objects, often very muted and difficult to repeat. I had watched Rachel Brown dye with acid dyes in Taos, but it was daunting. She had huge cauldrons set up outside over an open wood fire, with pulleys for the skeins (often pounds at a time) hung from massive logs suspended over the dyepots. Once the water came to a simmer, she would throw in a carefully calculated spoonful of dye powder and lower her weighed skeins into the color. Her calculations were always perfect, and the skeins would completely exhaust the dye, whether she was dyeing solids or partial skeins. She would always end up with clear water in the cauldron between dippings. Of course it would be prohibitive to change the water in those cauldrons, so she had to be right the first time. And that's not to mention feeding the fire with cedar logs. It seemed like alchemy at the time.

So when Twisted Mother Sandy showed me how to work with acid dye stock solutions I was back in native territory...paint. Before long I could get any color I wanted and my work at the time usually combined both natural and synthetic dyes in perfect harmony. An example would be my Tree of Life Jacket in Knitting in America (now called America Knits) and the Chinese Tree of Life in Twisted Sisters Knit Sweaters. Luisa Gelenter, master natural dyer behind La Lana Wools, once told me that few ever attempted to combine natural and synthetic dyes in a single work, as they were so difficult to combine. I guess I took this as a challenge! Learning to dye with acid type dyes completely satisfied my color glutton.

One thing that really jumped out at me today was this: "Twisted Mother Sandy invited me into her kitchen to learn her pour-dye methods. In my mind I felt like I was being dragged kicking and screaming to perform some horrible tedious task...." I really related to this! I have all kinds of creativity-related fears. Do you have these? How do you get past the fear of failure?

In any creative endeavor, each new project requires risk. Many folks are uncomfortable with risk or don't have the time it takes to sail into uncharted waters, so they stick to tested patterns and yarns and this is fine. But trying something new requires risk. Will I have to do it over? Will this color match something I already have? Sometimes this element of risk is exciting and drives me to experiment, other times it stops me dead in the water. It helps to determine the exact nature of the fear especially because that fear can come for a different reason every time I start something new.

Photo: Jim Ann Howard
(from The Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook)

Fears can sometimes just be dislikes disguised as fear. For instance, I hate to waste materials. I can be very tight that way. Not having enough fiber to properly experiment with a colorway or trying to work something out perfectly with very little time is a limitation I regularly inflict on myself. I often come out on top which only encourages me to do it again. But if I know I'm not going to run out of fiber or yarn, if I know I have plenty of time, stress subsides.

Another fear comes from performance anxiety. Who am I trying to please? Myself or the world? Are people watching me, as in a class demo? Again, it's important to keep my intention clear. If I please myself with my work, then there is joy in it and everyone that sees it responds to the joy. If I'm in front of a group of people, I focus on my love of sharing rather than my nervousness at being watched or judged. If I approach a project with anxiety, it's never going to be as strong as if I approach it with a positive intention. Often I find that I backing off, trying again later, waiting for the perfect moment only leads to procrastination and cold feet and this snuffs out the flame of invention. I get around this by setting up a work area with care, collecting my materials, cordoning off my time, and sometimes, just sitting and meditating for a moment before I start (which sometimes manifests in the form of a big gulp of air and a swan dive). Even if I only have one talisman of my comfort zone, (good music for instance), I have something positive to help me along, something to help me relax and focus. I never have enough room, enough time, enough energy, so if I waited for that kind of comfort I'd never do anything.

For instance when I first tried to learn to spin, I was selling my work in galleries and couldn't learn to spin fast enough, well enough to make spinning worth my while. I had to have yarn I could sell at a good price. It took so long to complete pieces that time was money, something I wouldn't let myself have to learn a new tool. But when I finally decided to spin that yarn for myself...my own sweater? I was spinning in no time. Pressure off. I think that dealing with anxiety is like tempering a flame on a gas stove. I need enough heat to get myself going, but not so much that I'll boil over or burn out. Removing some, but not all, of the pressure of risk seems to work best for me.

Handspun Bound Boucle Yarn in "Black Hollyhocks," 122 yds

When I teach workshops I feel that my most important job is to help class participants to open to their own muse. It's not about "do as I do". It's about "if you do it this way, you'll get this". It doesn't matter if we are spinning, knitting, dyeing. As soon as people start paying attention to what they are actually doing, the relax into themselves, start to see what they actually can do and their vision sprouts from there. It's like having both feet firmly planted. Fear of failure is really just a belief that one is incapable of performing a task, but it can feel like one is about to leap off a cliff. If you start with what you know you can do and build on that, every moment you spend increases your experience and ability. Your "failures" are really just mistakes of a sort and only increase your knowledge. Cuz they tell you, "if I do that, I'll get this". As my friend and fellow dyer Mary Ann Pagano of Three Waters Farm says, "If you don't make mistakes, you don't learn". And I have definitely learned more from my mistakes than my successes.

Is there any technique you would like to learn how to do (related to dyeing)?

Can you believe I'm still an Indigo virgin? Sure, I could try it by myself, but I want to do it with somebody who has done it before. Why? It's one of the oldest and most revered dyeing techniques in the world. I look at indigo dyeing as an art form in itself. I think I'm waiting because I'd rather use indigo on fabric than yarn or fiber, because it does rub off when you spin and knit with it. And it's so beautiful on fabric. Soon....

Lastly, I know you do sometimes purchase fiber from other dyers; is there an indie dyer out there whose work you especially admire?

There are lots of them. First I'd like to say that I consider any handpainted or handdyed piece (fiber, yarn, whatever) to be a found object. The most beautiful ones can't be replicated. And yeah, I could remember their colors and go home and copy them to a great degree (though never exactly...I can't even do that with my own work), but that wouldn't be right either. It's important to appreciate the work of others and reward it accordingly. Also, when I purchase someone else's work, it isn't just the colors that are important to me. The handle of the fiber, whether it's soft or harsh, whether it smells good, whether (in the case of fiber) it drafts easily, all of these elements go into my ultimate appreciation. So although I've seen a lot of work that looks beautiful online, if I haven't held it in my hand I can't recommend it to others. So, my first choice is Three Waters Farm. Mary Ann dyes my colorways as well as her own beautiful creations and furnishes the fiber for my workshops. I can always count on the draftability, the softness, the sweet fragrance as well as the beautiful colors, both radiant and subtle. I'd also like to mention Woolgatherings, now in its second generation. Twisted Mom Sandy started Woolgatherings in the late '80s and her daughter-in-law Kate is carrying it forward with her own totally different color sensibility. I love what Carol Larsen of River's Edge Fiber Arts is doing with totally unique fiber blends. There are so many wonderful dyers out there who don't dye full time who sell their work at fairs or on Etsy. Enjoy the hunt, it's half the fun.


* * * * *
Lynne Vogel's latest book is The Twisted Sisters Knit Sweaters: A Knit-to-Fit Workshop. You can follow her doings as she blogs at Handspun Central. And finally, be sure to check out her original patterns and gorgeous handspun art yarns at http://lynnevogel.etsy.com.

New Dyer Interview coming, I promise

I was lucky enough to score an interview with Lynne Vogel of The Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook: Dyeing, Painting, Spinning, Designing, Knitting and now The Twisted Sisters Knit Sweaters: A Knit-to-Fit Workshop fame. She answered my questions in glorious detail, but I have been so swamped with work and dealing with contractors on my house that I haven't had one moment available to finish putting the interview up. I'd like to prettify it with a few pics, etc. I promise it is coming and will be worth the wait!

Book Review: A Dyer's Garden, by Rita Buchanan

File this one in the "New To Me" category; this book was published in 1995. Late last summer I bought it at the bookstore and read through it casually. I was attracted by its beautiful section in the back of the book, with pictures of swatches of various yarns dyed with the plant combined with different mordants. I have a garden in my back yard where I grow mostly vegetables for our consumption, but have long wanted to try growing some dye plants.

At the moment I am strictly a non-natural-dye dyer, but the thought of growing my own dye plants is appealing to me, especially framed by the back to the earth conversation I see happening everywhere I look.

This winter, as I gathered my notes, drew up plans, and made the list of the seeds I was going to order for our vegetable garden this coming summer, I took A Dyer's Garden out again to figure out what would be a good plant to start with. I need to start slow, as I know from experience I tend to get overwhelmed if I jump in with both feet. Again I turned to the back pages with the rainbow of swatch pictures, and looked through all the descriptions of the plants, their growing needs, and how they are processed to dye fiber. This section is truly excellent in the depth it examines each plant. You get a lot of information crammed into two pages devoted to each plant.

After looking through all the plants listed, I decided on Black-eyed Susan. They'll be pretty as well as useful. What I especially like is I can collect the plant parts and flowers and save them for later. Many dye plants you have to use right away, and I know I'm not going to be able to do that reliably, so I need to be able to save the plants up.

I also found myself drawn to the indigo-bearing plants, so I turned to the section on how to dye with plants, in the middle of the book. This section is great. Indigo dyes are processed in a totally different way than the others, so that part is set off at the end. After reading through it, I realized it was a process that was way over my head at the moment and I crossed those plants off my list. (Sometimes, finding out what you don't want to do is just as important as what you do. And apropos of which, there is a super helpful "plants not to grow" section in this book.)

One great tip that the author offered, about the timing of mordanting, completely set my mind at ease about trying to use plant-based dyes. I kept thinking how many steps there are when you add in the mordanting before everything else, and that seemed to make this a prohibitively work intensive method. But she points out that you can do your mordanting all at once, in a separate step, and store the yarn/fiber pre-mordanted, rather than having to do it at the same time as you are doing your dyeing. She also offers some terrific and "green" tips for disposing of many mordants; I had always heard that the mordants are the most dangerous part of natural dyeing (and some really are), which had put me off it as well. Rather than give away those tips, I'll let you find them out for yourself in the book.

This is not an exhaustive resource for dyeing plants; in my seed catalog I found dozens of additional plants for sale for dyeing. It is more aimed at newcomers to the craft, and as such is very encouraging and gentle. The book starts with a FAQ, for heaven's sake!

This quote sums up the style and attitude of the book: "If you follow my general directions, I'm sure that your colors will be pretty and you'll have a lot of fun." Highly recommended!
 

Amazing color resource: Kuler

A designer friend put me onto this resource for color work. I am in the process (I swear) of having a professional redesign this blog, but she wanted me to provide her with color scheme guidance. My buddy sent me here and my head almost exploded:

You can browse through other people's color schemes and edit them to make new ones, or start from scratch and create your own. For trying out color combinations or getting ideas, this is a really fun and useful tool.
 

Dyer Interview: Tricia Hunt of Spinning Wheel Studio

I met Tricia Hunt of Spinning Wheel Studio last September at Maker Faire NYC, where I had a booth at the BUST Craftacular. Meeting Tricia was the very best thing that happened to me that day! She gave me terrific tips on marketing my Etsy shop, and she was so friendly and encouraging, and it was just great for me to make friends with another indie dyer. (It's easy to feel alone when one is all by oneself in a basement studio space, not knowing a single other dyer.) So I was thrilled when Tricia agreed to be interviewed for Baba's Fiber Dyeing Workshop!

What made you want to start dyeing yarn/fiber?
First, to be honest, I was spending an awful lot of money on other indie dyers' hand dyed/ painted fibers and, although I LOVE supporting other people like me, I also kept thinking that I could be getting a lot more "bang for my buck" if I dyed my own. I still see fibers dyed by other folks that I just "must have" so I still do support indie dyers, but I have to say that dyeing for myself has been a huge boost to my business.

Second, there is such creative possibility in dyeing. I could describe a colorway I have in mind to another dyer, but there's NOTHING like doing it yourself, getting exactly what you have in mind. There's also nothing like just letting yourself go - a little of this, a little of that. I love being creative in my dyeing, picturing the different yarns that could result from this or that wool. I love that I can plan exactly what I want or I can wing it and see what I get!

"Autumn Winds" - 4 1/4 oz hand dyed BFL wool top,
roving fiber for spinning and felting

Do you have a favorite book or learning resource? Are you a member of any guilds or groups in your area that you learn from?
I'm not a member of any guilds or groups. I'm busy at home homeschooling two teenagers (and in the car driving them hither and yon!). I do imagine a day when my circumstances will change and look forward to becoming part of a fiber community at that point!!

But, books - YES! I have a growing library of books and magazines. Spin Off magazine is really fun. I pore over it and make a list of websites to check out. I get ideas for colorways, fibers, new sources for wool/dye/etc. Such an inspiration! I also love the book Color In Spinning by Deb Menz. She covers using a hackle, a drum carder, dyeing... you name it. Great illustrations, too. I think my favorite book is The Twisted Sisters Sock Book. The author, Lynn Vogel, is one of my Facebook friends which gives me some serious warm fuzzies! :) I love her photos and ideas. Her book, more than any of the others on my shelves, inspired me to dye for myself. I would love to meet and learn from her some day!

How would you describe your method - hand painted? Kettle dyed? Jackson Pollack? :) How has it changed since you started dyeing?
I have evolved into two main ways of dyeing, which I'll describe below. Both result in space dyed combed top. I tend to like really saturated colors, but not overly wild combinations. I use what I know about the color wheel to make what I think will be pleasing colorways. I am also always noticing new 'colorways' in the world around me - the sunset, the woods, my daughter's dance class, a a snow storm... you name it - then 'copying' them in fiber. I THINK in colorways! I imagine most of us dyers do!

If you hand-paint it, how do you apply heat to your product - microwave? steam bath? How many pots do you have? Anything else about your setup that you think is interesting and don't mind sharing with other dyers?
I dye in crockpots. I have three of them devoted to dyes. They are in a little row on TV trays on an extension cord. Although I do experiment and try different things, I generally dye one of two ways.

ONE: The easiest, neatest, most easily repeatable way that I dye is sort of a combination of kettle dyeing and dip dyeing: First I soak a length of 4-6 ounces of fiber in room temperature water for a bit (at least ten or fifteen minutes, sometimes as long as overnight). I put a little water in the bottom of the crock pot and place four wide mouth pint size canning jars in the crock pot. In each of the jars I squirt a little dye from dye stock which I keep mixed up (I have quite an assortment - more on this below). Sometimes I measure in ml using syringes, other times I just eyeball, depending on what I'm going for (something one of a kind, an exact replica of a previous colorway, something that will match something else, etc). I put a glug of white vinegar in each of the canning jars w/ the dye stock, then pour room temperature water into the canning jars to about 2/3rds full. So, I have four jars with dye/vinegar/water in a little square in the crock pot - they fit just right. Then I wring most of the water out of a piece of soaking fiber and place one end of it in one of the canning jars, mushing it down with a plastic spoon. I decide how much of each color I want along the space dyed fiber and, accordingly, place fiber from one jar to another around the crock pot. If I want white in the final roving I wring the water out extra well and leave white fiber sticking out between jars (propped up by the edge of the jars).

If I want the colors to blend together I add extra water to the jars once the fiber is distributed between them and 'moosh' a little extra. Sometimes I will use small amounts of accent colors squirted on white fiber propped up above the tops of the jars. I then mist the whole thing with white vinegar in a spray bottle and turn the crock pot on low for 2 to 3 hours. Once the water runs clear and the crock pot has become very steamy, I turn it off, uncover and let it cool before rinsing it well and hanging on a drying rack to dry. This is a very NEAT way to dye. I do wear rubber gloves and an apron, but very rarely do I come in any serious contact with the dye stock/dye. It is also a very easy way to do predictable, repeatable colorways.

"It Matters" - Handspun yarn, 272 yards worsted weight,
hand dyed superwash corriedale wool top

TWO: The other way I tend to dye is a la The Twisted Sister Sock Book. I use Lynn Vogel's 'cold pour' method. I rarely keep a record of how I dye fibers in this way... I just consider these fibers 'one of a kind' and let myself go nuts and have fun. For this method I soak the fibers in water with white vinegar for a couple of hours. Then I spread a couple pieces of saran wrap out on a folding table, wring out the fiber pretty well (again, 4-6 oz at a time) and snake it back and forth along the saran wrap. Then I make little plastic cups with a bit of dye stock, a glug of white vinegar and a glug of water. Then I just pour either straight from the plastic cups or from a plastic spoon into whatever pattern the spirit moves me to create. With plastic gloves on, I smoosh the fiber around after each color is poured to be sure the fiber is quite saturated with color, then mop up with a rag so there's no excess water/dye on the saran wrap.

I do this down the length of the fiber, spray the whole thing with white vinegar, then fold in the ends of the saran wrap, roll it up the long way and wrap the whole thing up like a snail. This saran wrapped snail goes into the crock pot on a steaming rack with about half an inch of water underneath. Again, it steams for a couple hours, then cools and gets well rinsed before heading to the drying rack. I love how these come out, but the process is more time consuming and messy by far than the 'four canning jar' method!

Do you use acid dyes, "natural" dyestuffs, or for that matter Kool-Aid? How did you decide what you wanted to use?
I use Jacquard dyes. They are protein dyes (which works for me because I mostly work with wool and wool blends) and the only acid they require is white vinegar. Kool-Aid -- Yes, I've played around with it with my kids, but when folks tell me they are thinking of starting with Kool-Aid because 'acid dyes' make them nervous, I tell them to skip the Kool-Aid (unpredictable results, expensive, few colors, weird sticky smell and nasty powder in the air/lungs) and use Wilton gels (like folks use to color cake frosting). Wilton gels come in tons of colors and you can get pretty reliable dyeing results using them with white vinegar in the same ways I describe above). HOWEVER, these dyes will 'break'. Some of the Wilton dyes are made from other colors - black, for instance, will become black with purple and pink edges... If you don't have something specific in mind, though, or if you experiment and figure out the breaks, you can have a lot of fun with Wilton cake dyes without having to deal with 'professional' dyes. A fun way to get your feet wet.

That said... I LOVE the Jacquard dyes. I currently have 33 Jacquard dye stocks mixed up in my studio. That means an absolutely ENDLESS number of possible colors as they are wonderful to mix to create new colors. They are a little intimidating to mix up, but once you've done it, you've got a jug of dye stock that will last for ages! I mix my dye stocks over a bathtub wearing a face mask, gloves and an apron and have never had a problem. I mix one little tub of Jacquard powder to 32 oz of hot water in plastic GatorAde bottles. All my dyeing liquid is made from these stocks.

So that I can reproduce colorways I have a recipe file box. Each colorway that is reproducible (not one of a kind) has a card with the colorway's name, the method used for making it and then the actual recipe (i.e. 'four jar method'; jar 1: 20 ml spruce with 5 ml gold ochre, etc.). When I think of it, I wrap a piece of yarn made in that colorway around the recipe card and label the type of fiber used for that particular yarn.

Do you buy your fiber/yarn from local farms or online? What fibers do you like working with the best?
BOTH! We live near Canterbury Shaker Village which has a 'wool day' each spring. We also live less than an hour from the grounds of the NH Sheep and Wool Festival which takes place Mother's Day weekend each year. GREAT sources of local fibers at good prices! I love putting a face/farm with a fiber when I work with it! I also order online from both online fiber shops and from indie sellers on Etsy. Beyond buying wool, wool also just 'finds' me... I grew up raising sheep and, although I no longer have sheep myself, my brother's family does. And from my former 'sheep girl days', I know lots of 'sheep people' and it's amazing how many people have bags of wool in their barn that are looking for a happy home.

My very favorite fiber for both spinning and dyeing is Blue Faced Leicester. I don't know anyone w/ BFL sheep, so I tend to buy my BFL from The Spunky Eclectic in Maine. LOVE IT! It takes dye beautifully and is very soft, fluffy and crimpy. Makes a gorgeous 2 ply yarn, which is my favorite thing to spin. :)

Where do you work? Do you have a special studio or do you use the kitchen?

I'm SO lucky. We have a finished basement, half of which is carpeted with a futon/tv/etc for the family. The other half is laminate flooring and is MINE, all mine! A nice big studio work space with windows and everything! I have a wall of shelves to hold all my fibers - dyed and to-be dyed, an area for drying racks (and a big fan for humid days), a table for winding, carding, etc., a big bulletin board for posting new ideas and color samples, and an area for packing, photographing and running my business. It is heaven! Sometimes I just stand and look at it... so colorful and such a dream come true! There's a full bathroom just off the studio which I use for dyeing. The sink and bathtub will never be the same. :) In the bathroom there are TV trays w/ my crock pots on them, a set of shelves with all the dye stocks, a cupboard with rubber gloves, rags, saran wrap, plastic cups, syringes, white vinegar... all the necessities. A small hallway connecting the studio to the bathroom is just the right amount of space for a folding table where I paint fibers (using the second method described above). At first I did that in the bathtub, but it is no fun at all to lean over a bathtub for any length of time! There are some photos of my studio - I think - on my Facebook page.

What part of dyeing is the most satisfying to you?
The creativity of it! It really makes you look at the world in a different way. There are colorways everywhere!

What part of dyeing freaks you out a little or irritates you, and why?

The mess. Really... my bathroom will never be the same. I am very fortunate to have an extra bathroom I could destroy. :)

The smell. My studio (and therefore my family's tv room) smells like hot wool soaked in vinegar. :)

And that there is not enough time in a day. So many possible colorways... so little time... so much to do that does NOT involve fiber... :)

And lastly ... if you could read (or hear) an interview with another dyer, who would it be?
Definitely would like to hear more from Lynn Vogel. She is amazing to me. I love the colors she chooses. She's teaching a class at Harrisville Designs in NH in August that I would LOVE to take - all about color/dyeing for spinning. If I can save enough money before it fills I'm going to take it, but I really doubt that will happen. I don't have anything in particular I'd ask her, I just have a feeling she is something special when it comes to dyeing and would be quite an inspiration!

* * * * *
Thank you again, Tricia, for taking the time to answer my questions and clearly devoting so much thought to your answers. I'm so glad you are in my crafting circle of friends!

Please don't miss Spinning Wheel Studio on Etsy (also check out Spinning Wheel Studio's Facebook page)!

Dyeing yarn vs dyeing unspun fiber

I recently found my way to Becoming Art's colorways page via a designer whose blog I occasionally peruse. I found myself charmed and engaged by the page of colorways, mostly sampled in yarns. The color blocks shown on the page of her hand dyed colorways were mostly solids, mostly saturated and mostly all of a close range of variation in a band of color - for example, a whole slew of variations on a theme of warm, orangish browns, or cool greenish blues. Which I liked.

When I clicked through to the Fibers page, I was a bit disappointed. The spinning fibers were mostly heterogeneously painted, with wide swings in a single braid among a bunch of disparate colors, kind of disunited blobs of hues, some warm, some cold. I was expecting the same array of dyed options, but the two sets were wildly different in style. It was like Helen Frankenthaler did the yarns and Jackson Pollock did the fiber bumps. I didn't get it. Why would somebody want to do the latter when they can do the former so prettily?

I don't want to give a negative review of Becoming Art - based on the colorways page I have to say I love the hues displayed. I just was moved to comment on the trend that this brings to mind.

I know this is definitely not true of all dyers, but I do get the impression some think they should use color differently on yarn vs unspun fiber. It's possible the slight difference in the medium might result in a difference in how the artist puts color onto it. But I suspect many dyers feel like they are supposed to use a whole bunch of different colors in the same bump when working with unspun fiber. I see this a lot on Etsy. I think there are very few artists who can pull this off (Pigeonroof Studios being one of the rare artisans capable of it).

While I'm on this topic I'll just say, I think the best way of perusing a dyer's wares would be for them to have a colorway page (a la Becoming Art's) except in all the same fiber or all the same yarn. Then, they should have a fibers or yarns page with all the different options shown, each dyed some neutral but not too light hue to best show the texture and hand of the fiber and spin. Finally, you could simply order whatever fiber or yarn in whatever colorway, or even get different fibers and yarns all in the same colorway! I think if I ever came across a dyer's site organized like that, I'd never stop talking about it.

Once I get some colors I want to stick with and make repeatable, I'll do it myself.

* * * * *
Per my musings last time, I did go ahead and mix up four bottles of concentrated liquid dye, using the new colors I received from Dharma. They are much nicer red and blue, but I'm not so convinced about the brown - it's too cold (and the other is too warm).

It's so scary to mix up concentrate! When I use a little dry dye in the pot, I don't feel like I need to worry about it too much - I just measure it out and put it in and that's that. But it's super quick & dirty. But when mixing concentrate, I feel like I do need to observe all the safety rules: I put a mask over my nose & mouth, I wear gloves, and I wear an apron. My hands don't shake, but I do feel nervous and uptight. It's not like working with hydrochloric acid or anything, but it feels intense. Especially the notion that exposure is cumulative, meaning a little at a time adds up to it eventually having an effect on one. (In fact ... I probably shouldn't be lax about safety even when just measuring out tiny amounts into the pot.) But I did it, and I now have concentrate that I can for a while now. Let's see how long it lasts me.

Anyway, I already used the red and the yellow to augment a pot of pink and really liked the effect, which was like peonies. Very pretty!

I'll post a shot of it once my camera battery recharges ... grrr.
 

Some issues with methodology

When I was making sculpture I had a method for getting the effects I wanted, but I was working with oil paint on plaster. TOTALLY DIFFERENT than working with dye on fiber. So now I am trying different things, but so far I don't feel anything like a comfort level and I don't feel like I can get the effects I am envisioning. I have a picture in my head and I just can't get the fiber to come out like my mental picture.

I don't know if I have a setup that is conducive to really Getting Things Done in the dyeing department. I have:
* one large pot
* a really good hot plate (I read all the reviews on Amazon on a whole bunch of them until I found the one about which people had only positive things to say)
* a large folding table, covered with a clear plastic shower curtain
* five colors of Jacquard acid dyes, in cherry red, brilliant blue, sun yellow, chestnut brown, and black. Recently I decided I don't like this red and brown so I ordered crimson and regular brown, and sapphire blue as well to shake things up. Sun yellow seems to be the only primary-ish yellow they have in Jacquard. I don't know whether it's a good idea to mix dyes from different manufacturers, and I'm guessing not, so I'm going to stick with these for the time being
* beakers and squeeze bottles and sponge paint brushes and little eye droppers (none of which I currently use)
* a scale calibrated in grams and ounces. It doesn't measure the tiny quantities I'd prefer to measure, and it turns out that the scales I have used in organic chemistry lab, which are calibrated to much smaller measures, cost A LOT MORE.

When I mix colors, I currently measure out dry dye and mix it in hot water. Lately I have been using tiny amounts of dry dye in a pot of hot water on the hot plate. I began with acid dyes from the start (rather than, say, Kool-Aid) because I wanted deep intense colors, but lately I've been going for pastels. (Of course, when I say pastels, I mean washed out hues, but not baby blue and pink and Easter lavender and yellow and green.)

One thing I've heard from several dyers is they mix a bunch of dry dye into big jars of concentrate, which they then use to mix the colors. One of the members of my spinning guild told me to do it this way, so I went home and mixed up a jar of each of the dye colors I have ... and then I didn't dye anything for over a year, because I was so intimidated by the jars! By the end of that time, by the time I worked my nerve back up to venture into the studio, the dye had gone moldy in one of the containers, and solidified in the bottom of two others. I was able to use up the other two, but it was a failed experiment. So I decided to go back to my tried and true method.

Lately I've been feeling like I should try again with the liquid concentrate, but maybe I'll use a much less saturated concentrate than I did last time. Since the guideline I've been going by for saturated colors is to use a teaspoon of dye for a pound of fiber, and since I only dye 8 oz of fiber at a time, I try to keep the total amount of dye I use to a half-teaspoon per batch. I was thinking lately that I could try dissolving a teaspoon of dye in 32 oz of water (one for each color) and then use those concentrates to mix colors with. So if I want an unsaturated pale green, for example, I could mix a half-cup (4 oz, or 1/8 teaspoon of dye) of yellow and a half-cup of blue (and then mix in a little red or a little black to make it less of a pure color, as is my wont).

This would also allow me to begin to create reproducible dye recipes. So far I have just been eyeballing, and my record keeping is terrible anyway, but even if I kept meticulous records I would never be able to reproduce a previous color. And ultimately it would be desirable, I think, to be able to have a set of recipes for colors that I can make again and again.
 

How I came to fiber dyeing

As I've described, I studied art in college and then kept trying to work as a "fine artist" after I graduated. I wasn't dedicated enough, and I was too easily discouraged, and I was busy being self-destructive for most of that time as well, and eventually I just stopped making art. But then I got obsessed with knitting. I knitted a million sweaters and hats and coats and things, many of my own design, and it sort of scratched the art-making itch, and sort of didn't. For one thing, it felt kind of like it didn't really cut it as an artistic outlet.

And then we went to Rhinebeck, my boyfriend and I. Now we are married and he feels no need to join me on my fiber expeditions, but at the time he was courting me and he drove me up to the fiber fair and walked all around the grounds with me. As we ate fried pickles and funnel cakes we strolled around the stalls until we came to a woman who was spinning yarn. This was my first time ever seeing a woman spin yarn; Adam was actually accustomed to it as he'd previously dated a girl whose mother used to spin (and weave as well), and he was fond of watching someone spin. So we stopped and talked with her, and she showed me how she was doing it, and we were completely and utterly transfixed.

Eventually we walked on, and Adam said to me, "I'm going to have to buy you a spinning wheel for Christmas, aren't I?" I honestly had never considered trying to spin before that. My friend Debbie had let me try out a spindle quite a few years before, and I had failed at it and hated it and handed it back to her disgustedly after less than a minute of trying. But this, the wheel, it looked friendly, and accessible, and I thought, I could maybe do that! And with some encouragement from Adam over the next couple months, I accepted the extraordinarily generous gift of a Louet S75 from him for Christmas.

Here's the video my husband took of me learning to spin.

As soon as I got the hang of it (which was surprisingly quickly, especially considering the spindle debacle) I started buying spinning fiber. And buying it, and buying it, and buying it. And I read blogs about spinning. And pretty quickly I discovered the gorgeous hand painted bumps from wonderful sellers on Etsy. One of my early favorites was Sock Pron, whose author had a feature on Fridays about various amazing finds she'd made on Etsy, and she pointed readers to several amazing fiber dyers. And the more I looked at them, the more the ones I really found myself drawn to reminded me of the painterly effects I was fond of making when I was making sculpture. And gradually I began to think maybe I could make art this way too!

I'm definitely not at the point where I feel like I have any facility with the medium. It's frustrating to me, quite a lot. Downstairs in my basement studio I have a picture of some lovely roving that one of my favorite dyers had for sale online; I saved the image and printed it out as an inspiration. More than once I have tried to imitate this roving, and have completely failed. In the process I've discovered ways I like to work, and the fact that overdyeing with brown will save a vomitous mass quite nicely. I wonder if I will ever feel like I really know what I am doing.
 

I See It There, It Comes Out Here

One major reason I started this project is because I want to learn how the fiber dyers I admire do what they do. I'll never make work like theirs, because I am a different person than each of them, and that materially impacts on what work can come out of me, but when I look at yarn by MadelineTosh and I literally can not deconstruct how the yarn gets its multiple layers of color, I am just dying (heh heh heh) to know how they do it.

When I was a working artist after I got out of college, I had an experience that really gave me a lot of insight into how I, at least, learn a new technique. I had been working as a sculptor since my junior year in college, but in the extremely messy medium of plaster. Without a dedicated space where you can confine the plaster dust and mess, when you live in a small apartment in New York City, there's just no way to work in that medium and not destroy the rest of your possessions - records (yeah, records, at that time), clothing (90% of it black back then), bedding, food - so I began trying to find an alternate artistic medium. I was fascinated by wings at the time and I had done some interesting sculptures that I liked of them. I started doing paintings of them, but it just wasn't gelling for me.

Somebody in my family had given me this giant pastel set a little while before and I'd never really been able to do anything with them. I just couldn't get the hang of them for some reason. Then I went over to my friend John Otte's place and watched him use pastels to make these extremely goofy, beautiful drawings. He called his subject matter "clown sex," to sum up the opposition of goofiness and gloss they explored (no actual clowns, as I recall). I would never have been interested in doing work like those drawings, but they were charming and intellectually irritating in a great way. I loved them.

I don't have any pictures of the pastels, but I do have this small ink drawing from Otte from the same time period.

Something happened while I watched him work: I just GOT IT. I saw him draw with the stick and blend with his fingers and I comprehended what to do with my own hands in an instant. I didn't even try it in his studio. I didn't need to. I went home that evening and pulled out my 800 pastel set and started a new "portrait" of one of the wing sculptures.

A week or two later I began using black pastel paper (where that idea came from, I'll never remember, but it was the other half, for me, of the perfect recipe), and one of my truest artistic metiers arrived in my life. Other than when I was in college doing the plaster sculptures, I've practically never had a medium that suited me so well before that or since. And it really came out of watching my buddy use a few pastel sticks, and the light bulb in my head came on.

[Soon after that I stopped doing portraits of actual sculpture and began doing portraits of imaginary objects, and then I also found a way to use color photocopies of the pastel drawings to render large pieces on stretched canvas. I spent a few years refining my work. Eventually I had a meeting with Bill Arning of the NYC gallery White Columns. I brought slides, a few drawings and a wall piece. (I was terrified.) Bill looked carefully through the work I had brought and eventually asked me, "Have you ever heard of an artist named ... John Otte?" Now, in my opinion, my work was really different from John's, both in its subject matter and its appearance, and yet Bill was able to see something in it that told him there was a familial relationship with Otte's work. I've always really admired Arning for being able to spot that.]

* * * * *
There's more to my story, as must be obvious. How I got from there - a reasonably promising initial meeting with a very well known and highly respected gallery director - to my present career as a software developer will remain an undocumented mystery for the time being.

But I share the above to illustrate what I think can happen for artists when they see other artists engaged in their craft. That light bulb can snap on. And what results is sometimes the discovery of a metier perfectly suited to an artist.

One final note. I never worry about "copying" or "stealing" for two reasons. One, it's a ridiculous waste of valuable energy, and two, each artist brings their own self to the process, and that simply can't be copied.

Even if I were to show you the exact methods I used to create some piece, and even if you were to imitate my methodology exactly, once you integrated it into your own mode of working and infused it with your own style, your work would be completely different from mine. I never worry about sharing methods, because I know that the results are always going to be unique to the artist who has done the work. There's just some magic that happens between the artist's mind, hands, and the physical materials she works on, that is different for each person.
 

My new fiber blog, and Hedgehog Fibres on Etsy

Hi all!

As you may already know, I have an established blog at Baba Black Sheep Yarns, where I post about knitting, spinning, a little gardening, and the occasional picture or two of food (my husband is turning into a great cook). I've been posting there for a few years, not as regularly I might have liked sometimes, of course.

This is a spin-off from that blog. No pun intended... Anyway, that one is a more general-topics blog. This new blog, though, is intended specifically for talking about dyeing fiber and yarn.

I've been working on learning how to dye fiber for the past few years, and I definitely plan to pass on some lessons I've learned. (I'm thinking this is the perfect excuse to buy that Flip Video Camcorder, finally!) I'm starting to get a handle on what parts of dyeing feel most comfortable to me, and what are more challenging. I was an art major (painter and sculptor) in college, and I always thought the "canvas" of fiber would be a great place to do color work for me. Well, I have a long way to go before I will feel like I can lay down color the way I see it in my head, so it aint as easy as just painting the colors I picture.

But what I've really been studying is the work of other (wonderfully adept) colorists. At work, when I take a break from programming to read the RSS feeds from my favorite Etsy shops, as I gaze at pictures of hand dyed and hand painted fiber and yarn, I'm simply lusting over the gorgeous images. I do occasionally buy yarn and spinning fiber, of course, but looking at the pictures is itself a wonderful activity that gives me no end of pleasure! Sometimes I save an image of an amazing brown or red that touches a chord in me.

This is "Nutmeg" silk yarn, dyed and sold by Beata of Hedgehog Fibres on Etsy. To my mind it only adds to the romance, that she is hard at work making these lovelies in her kitchen in Cork. Someday I may have to make a studio visit ... wouldn't that be a perfect excuse to head for Ireland?!

This is also by Hedgehog Fibres - she doesn't name her spinning fiber colors, only her yarn colors; I don't know why. So it's an unnamed, but still gorgeous palette of brown, olives, and deep rose shades that just blow me away.

Those are both long gone (although she does repeat her yarn colors, so you will probably find Nutmeg again if you keep checking), but this spectacular vision in orange is still available:

Honestly, though, I don't know whether I can keep from snapping it up myself, so you better act fast. The only thing that stops me is my already-GIANT fiber stash and the fact that I'm in either two or three spinning fiber clubs this year (I'm not actually sure) so I have a lot of other fiber coming my way, very soon.