DYE JOURNAL - CELEBRATING MY FIBERSHED
Spinning up the NC hemp/cotton blend!
Welcome back to another entry in my natural dye journal! This past week has been a little up and down. I had many “womp, womp” moments and very few wins. It’s all about learning though, so if we’re judging the week’s accomplishments by that measure then the week was a success!
I’ll start with a quick rundown of the failures first: hibiscus dye— still can’t get it to work for my cotton fibers. Black bean water that only soaked for a few hours instead of overnight— basically all washed out of my fibers. Experiments with clippings from a willow tree in my yard— nothing, nada. Sad face all around…
Now onto the wins: I had some fun, new yarn discoveries and a small dye pot success. For yarn, I was kindly given a bag of roving from my farmer friend (thanks, Tyler!) that’s made of NC organic cotton and hemp. It is sooooo soft. I tried my hand at spinning it up into a one-ply weight that I use in my artwork and throwing it in some of my dye pots. I’m getting pretty excited about how things are looking thus far!
Original roving on the left, my spun fiber on the right.
The yarn takes dye pretty well and washes up okay. This yarn is making me very hopeful about a solid fiber supply chain within our fibershed. How dreamy to think of using yarns in my work that were grown, milled and dyed in NC with our local materials! I can’t even handle!
My small, natural dye success came in the form of a logwood dye pot made with some extract I found in my stash. Logwood is a type of tree and the dye comes from its heartwood. It’s not a local tree and this extract didn’t come from my local ecology, but I just needed a natural dye win, okay! I threw a bunch of yarn into the pot including one skein of the handspun cotton/hemp yarn and I’m lovin’ it! Those purples, yes please!
Cotton yarns up top, handspun yarn on bottom. All dyed with logwood.
For the rest of this week, I’ll be spinning up more of that yummy NC fiber as well as finally trying my hand at dyeing with some of the dandelions from my yard. Wish me luck!
Until next week,
— KB
