Exhaust Dyeing

So you are doing a spot of dyeing.  Normally I use oven bags and boil them in a pot of water but if I want a more consistant dye, when doing a yarn for example, I do a dye bath instead.  This is basically just putting your colour in the water then simmering the yarn in the water.  You soak in your mordant first.  Fibre tends to take up as much dye as it will take up in the first 10 minutes of heating so more often than not you end up with a pot of dye water that would still dye fibre, albeit a little lighter.

I had this problem after dyeing my BFL/Silk and didn't want to waste the water so pondered as to what to put in the pot.  I did bring some raw wools back from SA so thought I might put one of them in.  I chose the English Leicester as it's not so inclined to felt as the xbreeds.  It also has a most lustrous curl.  So how to proceed with wool that is filthy??

I had a bucket with mordant and hot water in it, so in went the fleece.  To this I added a really good squirt or two of dish washing detergent to cut the grease (or I would have if all the bottles in the house weren't mostly empty, in which case I rinse all the detergent I could scrap out of the bottles).  I did add a bit more hot water to assist getting the filth out.

After about 1/2 an hour I put the wool into the dye pot..the mordant water looked like this...

The wool was from the neck of the sheep so not under the protective cover that reduces some of the dust collection...

And here it is going into the pot..

I still had a couple of oven bags in there simmering.

Now I did add a bit more colour to the pot but I'm not going to share exactly what I did.  Gotta keep some techniques to myself.

And here is the outcome....

Again the camera lets me down, there is quite a bit of turquoise in this fleece, and blues, purples and a touch of pink hues as well...  You can see how shiny it is...I did end up rewashing it the next day as it still had quite a bit of lanolin left in it..

I will post some pics of it when I card it as it looks gorgeous..

English Leicester is a unique fibre and very easy to ruin when spinning it.  It has a beautiful lustre and curl reminiscent of Mohair.  On the bright side, it doesn't shed like Mohair.  If you spin it like normal wool your usual result is a kind of string which is quite scratchy when you wear it. 

Luckily the sheep itself has taken care of this by growning a long fleece with a curl rather than a crimp so you can spin it quick, with little twist, thus retaining the softness and loft of the fibre.  It also makes great Bouclé, which is what I aim to make with this particular fibre.