Natural Dyeing Day

A bunch of us from my guild got together today at a member's home and spent the afternoon dyeing with natural dyes -- indigo (blue), cochineal (red), madder (orange) and osage (yellow). It was a gorgeous day to be outside dyeing and we had a lot of fun.

These are the skeins I dyed -- from left to right: 20/2 silk noil yarn dip dyed with madder and cochineal; 20/2 silk noil yarn dip dyed with indigo and cochineal; 20/2 silk noil yarn immersed in madder, then indigo, then osage; and the skein on the right was handspun tussah top that I had dyed before spinning a while back, in a kind of drab rust color, and today I overdyed it with indigo.

Anybody remember that experiment I did a couple months ago, dyeing tencel and bamboo with acid dyes, and the dye washed out of the handspun yarn? Well, these three skeins above, left of the indigo overdyed silk, are those very skeins of tencel, bamboo, and tencel and bamboo plied together. I dyed them today with cochineal and indigo.