Dye job

Being a rug hooker is being a recycler. It fits very nicely with my personal philosophy of re-using and making do. There's nothing so satisfying as finding a new and unexpected use for something others would throw away.

The other day, I was reading Gene's blog about dirty salt and was inspired to try it, too.

When I mix the dye colors, I have to clean off the measuring spoons after each color. How I do it is to clean the spoon in a bag of kosher salt. Then I further clean it with a cotton swab. The bag of salt never got changed and just continued to take on the various colors. As his salt grew dirtier and dirtier, Gene was tempted to discard it. But instead, he dyed with it.

I thought: hey! I can do that, too. And I did. I used some white wool cloth that had very little texture. I scrunched the soaked wool in a casserole pan and just shook the salt mixture over it. Then I cooked it in the microwave. This is the result. I kind of like the birch tree look it has but of course that might be lost in hooking. It's also very earthy. Who knows what it's next life will be? It was fun playing, though.
Now I have to wait until I get another bag full of dirty salt. Could take a while.

Dyed

Here's the wool yarn that was dyed the other day. My intent was to get a turquoise color for the over-dyed wool fabrics that I was doing. This was just a 'throw it in the pot because there's room' kind of thing and I didn't have any particular color need.
When I mixed up the dye solution it seemed way too green so I threw in a bit of blue. (Like most recipes, I only use them as a basis for my own experiments.) This is the result and the photo color is pretty true. I've rewound and weighed - there's 172 g in this skein. I hope that's enough for the mitts I have in mind.
Stay tuned.

Oh, yeah, in the end I didn't use the wool fabric that I had dyed. One was too plain and the other had too much orange in the tweed which didn't seem to change much when over-dyed. It'll go somewhere else but not these quilt blocks.

One down

And one to go. Or maybe a couple more squares. There's so many blocks to choose from and I dream about others as I hooked this one. Since they're not very time-consuming, I'm thinking that maybe a bigger rug would be fun. I have to join the squares up anyway so it's just a little more work at the end.

I've been renaming this square. Since the moon looks a little pizza-ish I thought it should be "That's Amore" LOL The fabric is a pale yellow fairisle sweater with oranges, reds, greens and grays in the pattern. I thought it worked really well with the brights in the other blocks.

And I do like the night sky. I spot dyed a white wool scarf with a deep blue and a dark fuschia. It was layered and the dyes spooned over the top layer so they soaked through. This gives me a continuum of shading to choose from when filling in the background. Quite a bit left so I'm sure it'll turn up somewhere else. It's so nice to hook this fabric, too.

Next!

Woolly find

Look what we found at the thrift store! This is all wool and there's 2200 grams of it. Each of the 'balls' is quite elongated - about 15 inches - and wound with a center pull. I've never seen yarn wound like this before. I did have to do a wool content test because the yarn seemed a bit hard and I just wasn't sure what it was. And there are several different shades of white here. Some are kind of off the white scale altogether.

Because I'm getting out the dye pots today for some rug wool, I thought I'd see how this yarn takes dye and whether that process will soften the yarn a bit. So I skeined one of the balls - about 100 yards - and I can play with it to see what it does. If it softens up significantly, then I'll probably make some fingerless mitts as a gift. Here's hoping for change.

The other thing I'll be testing, soon, is how well it felts. I sure wish my hands could produce things as fast as my mind. I have a number of felted projects sitting in the back of my imagination. Along with all the rug designs, a few quilt ideas and not so many, sewing projects. Oh, well, one step at a time.