My name is Inigo Montoya...

Prepare to dye. :p

Remember that lovely soft shiny white bamboo yarn I made a while ago? Now it is lovely and soft and shiny and has a COLOR.

The basic procedure goes something like this:
*(optional) Wash the yarn/fiber you're going to dye. We did this by simmering it for about ten minutes on the stove with a teaspoon of Synthrapol (it's a detergent that's supposedly good for pre-washing, although I've heard you can really use any detergent. What it's really good at is getting the dye out at the end - I can vouch for its awesomeness there.)

*Soak the yarn in a bath of salt (...lots of salt) and (optionally) something to soften the water. I used this stuff called Metaphos.

*After it's been in there for a while, mix up the dye and dump it in. So now you have an actual dyebath. Let it sit in that for a while (well, stir it too).

*Take the yarn out, dump in the soda ash (fixative), and stir it into the dyebath. Put the yarn back in.

*Stir stir stir. And then wait.

*Rinse.

*Dry.

That's about it! Well, for this particular kind of dye; I used the Procion MX reactive dyes. Other dyes have different procedures.

Really, pictures say it all.

The raw materials!


And the undyed yarn.



Another shot of the undyed yarn.



All the random chemicals and pots of dye



Washing the yarn



Washing the fiber



Yarn after pre-dye wash






Stirring around the fiber while it's getting washed. This was the trickiest part - I didn't want it to all come apart leaving me with a giant wad of fiber. It mostly held together, though.



Rinsing out the fiber after its pre-dying wash



Putting the salt in the pre-dying soak



Measuring out the Metaphos (I keep wanting to say Mephistopheles. Argh.)



Stirring the yarn/fiber in the pre-dye soak.



Dye powder still in the bottle. Surprisingly unimpressive.



Measuring out the dye



Powdered dye in the cup



Mixing up the dye solution



Fiber and yarn in the dyebath, soaking it up before we put in the fixative.



Soda ash (fixative) solution in the cup, ready to pour in


Lifting the yarn out of the dye bath so we can pour the fixative solution in and swish it around




Screw it, I have gloves on, if I'm supposed to "stir continously" for five minutes I might as well do it by hand.



After we added the soda ash, the color of the dye bath changed like whoa. That's almost blue. Woohoo, chemistry.



Fixative has been added; now we wait.



the Moment of Truth! and you can really see the color change in there.



Rinsing out the fiber


Rinsing the yarn



Rinsed.


Rinsing the roving



Note my high-technology drying setup. Yes, I am drying the roving on my doorknob.



Wet yarn hung up to dry. Yup, there's my spinning wheel in the background.

Yarn straight off the drying hook. It's kinda snarly still.



Yarn after re-winding into a fresh skein. The color didn't come out quite right in this picture, sadly.



Finished yarn. This is the only picture that comes even close to capturing the color - it's this gorgeous glowing deep amethyst.



Finished roving (the color came out better on this one)

Another of the finished roving. I had to sort of tease it out to get it to be smooth enough for easy spinning.