Now adding a little colour to life...

For our first March meeting, we decided to play with colouring silk in its various forms. Tricia brought us a selection of silk products to play with, and her landscape dyes. We also brought food colouring to try out.

It’s basically a pretty simple process – mix up some dye in bowls, dump in the fibre or trickle the dye over it, put the fibres in a plastic bag (or in the case of the trickled ones, roll it up in the plastic wrap it was sitting on) and leave it on the grass in the sun until the dye is absorbed. Rinse out later.
Here are the dyers at work:

And here are the treasures in their bags

Obviously, most of the treasures went home in their plastic bags but I can finally show you what wonderful things were made. This is a compilation of Tricia’s dyeing.

Gorgeous colours and textures!
She says, “I really wanted to try out some colours I hadn’t used before.” In a little more detail, we have:

Top – dyed cocoons, and below - silk cap, which has been chained without spinning, just by pulling out the fibres. It’s a lovely silky chain, perfect for all sorts of uses in textile art.

Silk top, dyed with berry and mustard dye. She plans to use this for silk paper

Silk rods and other bits, dyed with turquoise

Silk cap – this one had mustard dripped on it and then crystals of sky blue

Silk cap – dyed with bloodwood

Tussah silk dyed with watermelon

Other Tussah silk

Beverley dyed some cocoons and rods…

And some “other stuff”…

She had also turned some of her fibre into silk paper:

Here’s Prue, busy dyeing, but we don’t have photos of her pieces yet.

Carol spent some time knitting and watching the others hard at work.

Nola painted her cocoons and a rod with food dye…

(The white sheet is the paper towel she used underneath - worth saving!)

… and then with metallic paints.

Paint sits on the surface, while dye or food colouring wicks in, so they look quite different. The paint added some interesting highlights.

Hopefully we'll have photos of the other girls' work soon!

Here is the result of our microwave dyeing merino wool some weeks ago - my wild raspberry and moss colours, from the Landscape dyes range.I seem to remember this was one of the recommended colour combinations that Jenny Hopper mentioned in her workshop years ago.
I like it! Now to use it, I think I will needlefelt it, but you'll just have to wait and see!

microwave dyeing

Adding to Bev's description of microwave dyeing - here she is adding the Landscape dyes to her wool, a spoonful at a time.

Then Carol has rolled her wool wet with the dyes into a sausage.

The plastic rolled wool is in a micowave container ready for some heat!
After microwaving leave for 24 hours then squeeze out and rinse.
Dry over a broomstick to avoid ridge marks.

dyeing wool

Last Fibrecircle day, Tricia showed us how to dye wool in her microwave. I used Sage and Bloodwood Landscape dyes, and I'm pretty pleased with the results - but I don't have clear plans about what I'll do with it. It is always fun to add to one's stash, and I'm sure I'll find a use one day.

And here is Carol's :