Dying wool roving was something I've wanted to try, since I just got a new needle felting machine for Mothers Day. I visited Peru last Christmas and bought some dyes in a market, and thought this would be a great time to experiment with them.
It was so easy! Here's what I did:
- I used a pound of merino wool that I ordered online from Alpaca Direct, and cut it into 1 oz. lengths (somehow, I must have gotten the measurements a little wrong, since I ended up with 18 "1 oz." sections from a 16 oz. ball of wool.....).
- For the mordant, I soaked the wool in a 10% alum solution. A small jar of alum from the grocery store was 1.9 oz..... close enough to the weight of the wool that I was dying, so I emptied the jar into a bucket of warm water and soaked my 1 oz. bundles for an hour.
- For each 1 oz. bundle, I put 2/32 of a tsp. dye into a jar, and then added 1/2 c. warm water and a scant 1/4 c. white vinegar, plus the wool. I stirred it around with a chopstick, then placed 6 jars at a time into a baking tin filled about half way with water (like a bain marie), and put it into a 275 degree oven for 45 minutes.
1 comment:
Wish I had some of those dyes, too.
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