Sunday 20 January 2019

New Year, new plans

With the decorations down and the year nicely establishing itself into a comfortable routine, I sat down, as I usually do, to consider my plans for this year.  I'm not one for making 'new year resolutions', I've found that whatever good intentions I might have, the 'stop-doing' 'cut-back' 'do without' 'give-up' list rarely survives the first half of the month. So around this time I like to think about the things I want to start doing.  This year I plan to try out more crafts. Admittedly I had this same plan last year, and I did quite well - I learned to crochet, I tried Ruskin Lace and Hardanger, felt-work and felting and knitted and crocheted a whole range of things I've not made before.  What I have discovered about myself is that, these days, I am better at learning if I attend a workshop and receive tuition than if I try to teach myself!

With that in mind I booked two workshops for January.  The first, 'Yarn Dyeing with acid dyes' was held at the For the Love of Yarn studio in East Kilbride on the 12th January.  The workshop was led by Lisa Harland, the creative genius behind this hand-dyed yarn company and I was joined by six other 'Yarnigans' who follow Lisa on her Facebook page and had traveled from various corners of Scotland to attend.

Before getting our hands dirty, Lisa gave us a set of dye notes and ran through the theory and practice of dyeing.  Then it was in at the deep end.

Lisa handed us our chosen yarn, wet from being soaked in a citrus acid solution (the 'acid' of the acid dyes) and on tables wreathed in plastic and covered with appropriately illustrated plastic tableclothes we laid out our skeins of 'Platinum' sock wool.

When Lisa had explained that she was only going to give us three colours and black to play with, I detected a slight sigh of disappointment amongst the novice dyers.  But when I looked at the colours provided - yellow, pink and turquoise - I was immediately reminded of that combination 'yellow, magenta, cyan' that every inkjet printer is provided with.  We had the powder dissolved in water in cups and squeezey bottles and provided dry to sprinkle.  We set to work.

There is something wonderfully companionable about a group of women focused on similar tasks working with rapt attention. Apart from occasional requests to 'pass the blue' and enquiries from Lisa on how we were doing, the work progressed in almost silence.  Initially we all reached for the pink and blue, but the yellow began to make an appearance on some of the skeins as we remembered our childhood experiences with mixing paints.  Eventually we were all happy with our skeins and they were wrapped in cling film to preserve their colours and were placed in the bain maries to 'cook' and set the colour.
We retired to the showroom to add to our notes, grill Lisa on colour and design related issues and work our way through a pot of coffee and not a little cake.

Lisa explained that different dyes and 'mordant' agents are used for animal and plant fibres so the yarn we were using was 75% super wash wool and 25% nylon, but yarn spinners such as Chester Wool have blends of un-dyed yarns available with everything from alpaca to yak, bamboo and cotton. Despite our limited palette we produced very individual results.


We were sent away with our wet yarn in plastic bags under strict instructions to hang them to dry next to, not on a radiator.  Mine took about 24 hours to dry fully, hung on a coat hanger.  It was surprisingly satisfying to put it on the swift the next day and wind it into a cake, and even more satisfying to turn it very speedily into a pair of socks!

I found myself during this process wondering how I would dye different colours using just these three bases and how I would achieve different effects.  I also spend a reasonable amount of time searching the web for un-dyed spun wool and dyestuffs.  I have a sneaking suspicion that this could be the start of a whole new hobby.


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