Blah!

I am not sure what went wrong. These all started out blue (you saw it in the last post!) but then faded to gray. The silk hankies and the wool are the worst. The cotton/silk/tencel was a little better (I actually like the color). I have read that if you heat the leaves to over 70 degrees c you will get tans. I had a thermometer and I don't think I ever went over 70. Also, Tara suggested that maybe the chemicals (washing soda and color run remover) were old. This is true. I should have gotten fresh chemicals. Maybe that was it. Something was definitely off. Dyeing must be one of those things that takes a lot of experience and a sort of sixth-sense about when things seem right or not. Ah well. Now I will have to think of a way to over-dye the wools and silk. I do have those elderberries that Hal picked for me a while back taking up space in my freezer...

Japanese Indigo

Hal asked me to harvest my Japanese indigo so that he could plant some lettuce. The plant was HUGE. I got it at MD sheep & Wool and it was about 4 inches tall. It had thrived in the spot we planted it and had spread to about 5' x 5' and was covered with pretty hot pink flowers.

So I yanked the whole thing out. It had sent out roots to different areas so it seemed like several plants even though it was only one. I was able to fill a bushel bucket.

Then I had to pick off as many leaves as I could stand to. I filled my crockpot with the leaves and cold water and slowly started to heat it.
Until it looked like this with a kind of oily surface:
Then I drained it and added washing soda and whisked it to add oxygen to the dyebath. It was supposed to get all frothy and blue, but it only got a bit blue and a bit frothy. So I was kind of worried that I had done something wrong...
But then I put it back in the Crockpot and added the color-run remover which is supposed to remove the oxygen from the bath. And right after that, I tried to dye some silk "hankies" (processed cocoons) and some handspun yarn and some cotton/silk yarn. Before:
And this is how it looks on the bath:
And here is a video of the dyeing magic:



It worked!!!

A Sock Challenge

I'm still working on my herringbone socks. As you can see, one is finished except for the toe. The other one I'm having more of a challenge with because of the color pooling that's happening. All the colors keep repeating at the same place, hence the concentration of browns and blues.

Here's another view. See how the sock on the left is nice and evenly striped, even at the instep. The sock on the right is not as even.

So, there's no choice but to rip back, from this:


To this:
Since this is color knitting, I had to tink rather than rip, which I did over 21 rows, back to the instep decreases. Then I started at another place in my ball, hoping to get to a place in the yarn where the dye was closer to making even stripes. And now the pooling is worse:

It figures this is happening at the top of the foot, where it's most noticeable. I'm not sure what the solution is. Maybe I'll put these aside until our SnB and hopefully get a good consult.

Ideas??