Happy New Year!

After a rough couple of years I'm finally getting back to knitting and spinning. Wishing all of you a creative 2012.

Sewing

I am currently taking a break from spinning and knitting to participate in the "Couture Doll Design Contest, which is like Project Runway for the 12 - 22" set. I am one of 32 designers chosen from a field of 50. The designs for the first challange can be viewed at the link above.

Tea Dyeing Ingeo

Tea-dyed ingeo at top
Natural white ingeo bottom

Awhile back I bought a small amount of ingeo to incorporate into a new fiber sample that included soy silk and a third fiber. I wanted all of them to be the same color and had no idea that ingeo was difficult to dye. The soy silk was it's natural caramel color and I decided that tea would be the dye of choice. Somehow it worked. I didn't give it another thought until I tried dyeing ingeo other colors to no avail. Thought this would be the end of it but I listed the skein left over from my project on etsy and got a custom order for more.

So I set about trying to re-create the tea-dyed skein more scientifically this time.

I did a test first of one cup of water and 2 Lipton tea bags. The first time I used either Lipton or something similar that comes in large quantity. I boiled the water added the tea let it steep for about 5 minutes and added my sample. Tried different timings and washed each sample afterward. Leaving the ingeo sitting in the tea for 6 hours worked best.

Today I dyed the big batch - 4 skeins

I used 60 cups of water and 45 tea bags (I probably could have just used 30, but went with what was left in the box minus one that developed a hole).

Brought the water to a rolling boil and as before let the tea steep and added the yarn - I did not remove the tea bags.

Note: I had planned to leave the tags hanging over the pot edge in bunches but they got inot a snarled mess so I removed the tags and just let them float/sink

I let the skeins set in the cooling "dye" for six hours then washed rinsed and hung them to dry.

Ta Da-
Still wet but no longer white