I heard about kettle dyeing in multi-color but I wasn’t sure how well it would work. My thought was that the colors would just move about in the dye solution and muddy colors would be the result.
I finally decided to jump in and try it. I took 2 4oz lots of superwash roving. The first one I wet in water with dish detergent like I would any other wool before dyeing. I wrung most of the water and put it in my dyepot which I filled to only half full of water with a splash(about 1/4 cup) vinegar. I wrapped the fiber around my hand and placed it carefully in the dyepot. I then added my color peach on one side and purple on the other. This was my control as the only thing different I did was use 2 colors.( I forgot to grab some pics as I was doing this, so here are the gratuitous cute animal pics)
For another test I left my fiber dry and prepared another dyepot half-ful of water and vinegar. I wrapped the fiber around my hand and placed it carefully in the dyepot, letting the fiber soak up the water vinegar mixture. I then added 3 colors of dye peach, green, and purple.
I wanted to see if the colors would be clearer by adding dry fiber to the mix even though I added the dyes after everything was wet.
We are doing fine after dealing with Irene’s remnants. As I said on Friday my major concern was losing electric as that would make water a problem so here were my solutions. I filled the tub with drinking water for us. Filled a new trash can with rainwater for the alpacas and goats. Then filled every empty vinegar container for the rabbits. I think we were pretty well prepared.
