Can't think of a clever title

As promised, more details on hand-painting.

To keep the fiber from getting all scraggly, I tried enclosing it in pantyhose for the duration. This ended up failing, because I couldn't get the dye through the way I wanted, so I ended up switching to a length of netting tube from a bath poof thing. To keep the fiber stretched out along the length of the tube, I tied scrap yarn around the fiber in several places and then tied that through the holes in the netting.


After you get your fiber into some sort of protective casing (this is quite possibly unnecessary for other fibers - bamboo is just tricky that way), put it in the salt and soda ash soak.


Get your dye area set up. Lay down some plastic wrap to work on; make sure it's big enough for the whole thing, because you'll be wrapping the fiber up in it when you're done. Mix your dye and urea into squirt bottles.



Start squirting the dye on! Keep applying it until you see it puddling on the plastic - if there's no dye coming out of the fiber, it hasn't absorbed everything it can yet.

Keep going... and once you've got this side nicely saturated, flip it over and do the other side. See the places where it didn't soak all the way through?



All done. Now roll it up in the plastic wrap like a burrito! It's worth putting another layer or two of plastic wrap on while you're at it, as well.


For added security, throw it all in a plastic baggie before leaving it someplace warm to cure. I left mine for about 24 hours.


Time to rinse! Dump it out in the sink...

take the plastic wrap off...


and rinse off whatever you can by hand.


Unfortunately, these fiber reactive dyes are incredibly irritating when it comes time to get them off the thing you're dyeing. This picture is from four rinses in, simmered on the stove with Synthropol. Argh.

Eventually I gave up rinsing and just hung it outside to dry.

Here it is! The colors weren't as deep as I wanted; it's fairly clear that I didn't get the dye all the way to the center of the bundles. Either I should make a point of saturating the fiber way beyond what I think it can possibly hold, or make the bundles thinner. Also, the purple came out way too red, but that's probably just a mixing error.

Even so, it's still pretty.