Intensifying dye formulas

Had a special order this week for a variation on my Dancing Leaves formula. This is a picture of the spot-dyed wool using the original formula. As you can see it is a nice mix of light greens, tans, and golds. My customer asked for gradations of this wool, so the first thing I did was double the formula. That definitely darkened the wool. But then she asked for an even darker piece. I tried tripling the formula, but it resembled the doubled formula piece. I realized that the wool was only going to take up so much of the dye. In order to get my darker version, I had to turn to darker greens and deeper tans. I also added 1/128 of black to two of the cups of formula. Here is the darkest of the variations.

In this shot, you can see the deeper green areas, and although it is hard to tell, the golds are richer.












I started the dyeing process for this color with a yard of Dorr yellow wool. I soaked it in synthropol for an hour.











After it soaked, I drained the excess liquid and scrunched the wool up with lots of nooks and crannies to give the wool a super mottled look.













After that, using a criss-cross method, I put the dye on the wool.








The next step was to loosely cover with foil, and steam in a 300° oven for an hour. When I took the wool out, here's what it looked like:

After the wool cooled, I machine washed and dried it. The finished wool is shown above.

By the way, it was 90° outside the day I dyed this wool. Thank God for air conditioning!!

A HUGE THANK YOU

I'm sending out a heartfelt thank you to April DeConick for helping me to make changes to my blog. She took the time to sit down and type up many pages of instructions to alter the .html in my blog layout. Because of her kindness, I have been able to expand the possibilities for getting information out to readers.

Although I've been meeting online hookers through the Internet for years, it still amazes me that perfect strangers will take the time to help you out. For all the complaints we hear about the Internet, I try to look at all the positives that can come from it. Meeting such wonderful and helpful people is certainly proved to be a great benefit.

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

I'm stepping up and taking the ten-minute rug hooking challenge that April DeConick proposed on her blog last week. Ten minutes, it turns out, is very doable, and doesn't require a big effort. I often find myself hooking a bit longer and am making progress on my garden rug. What a great idea!!!