I know, I know. I promised so long ago that I'd get all the yarns I dyed last spring and summer up and for sale, sometime around last November, wasn't it? Obviously, I never did.
A handful of thoughts, questions, and excuses that have been preventing me from doing so before now:
Will I be able to photograph and represent the colors properly? Do I need a light box? Don't I need professional labels like seemingly everyone else has? How much will shipping costs be? I still don't have the "right kind" of scale so how can I properly weigh out the yarn? How can I charge what I need to and not feel like it is too much? Sure I love the process of using natural dyes, but I can't give the yarn or my time and efforts away. What if my yarns don't live up to people's expectations?.....well, and just good old-fashioned procrastination, that's what.
After ignoring all of these and more questions and concerns all winter, it's high time to just dive in and address them, no? Here's the scoop:
Each skein of yarn is individually dyed which takes considerable time, attention, and care. Yarn is weighed and skeined and then premordanted with alum (potassium aluminum sulfate), considered the safest of mordants. Dyestuffs are mostly gathered or grown personally, although some will be purchased, especially if I'm going to continue to dye during the late fall, winter, and early spring months. Dyestuffs are then prepared and then the dye extracted through simmering of the dyestuffs in water. Each skein is then individually dyed, simmering for a minimum of one hour, sometimes overdyed in a secondary dyebath to achieve a particular or richer color, and then rinsed repeatedly before washing, drying, labelling, photographing, and listing.
As for the scale, yes, I use the kind of kitchen scale with a dial on the front but with the ones that I skeined up from bigger cones (those that weren't purchased as pre-weighed skeins) I've overshot the weight by enough to make sure they're over the 100 grams stated.
Dye materials are gathered or harvested with the utmost care and consideration. In the wild, I gather no more than what I need and do so sparsely and selectively, only where a particular plant is abundant and not endangered, making what I feel to be very little impact. Tree barks are gathered only from already fallen and dead trees. Lichens are gathered only from places where they are abundant and only from fallen branches or from our firewood pile. Some plants are grown and harvested either in our own garden or those of friends or family. I also like to try and use plants that are considered noxious weeds in our area and hope to do more so in the future.
I know that people often have questions about natural dyes and their washfastness and lightfastness and, although I will not sell any yarns that are not reasonably so, if not very much so, I cannot guarantee absolute fastness to light and washing.
It seems increasingly common to run across disclaimers such as this one, which I've been hanging on to for quite some time now for scanning, just for this purpose:
Found on, if I remember right, a pair of C's Carhartt canvas work pants, of all things. You can practically watch Carhartt's fade with each and every wash, like a good pair of blue jeans.
I also remember noticing a tag on a pair of deeply dyed jeans at Anthropologie a couple of years ago that warned against sitting on lightly colored pieces of upholstered furniture while wearing them. The garment industry, even, cannot, and WILL not, guarantee washfastness.
I won't mention the name of the yarn, but last summer I accidentally left a ball of acid-dyed yarn out in direct sunlight for a few days and was surprised at how dramatically it faded on the side facing the sun in that short amount of time.
Even with superwash yarns I recommend hand washing in cool water and drying out of direct sunlight with a mild cleanser such as Eucalan or Soak. Most regular detergents today are formulated to remove things such as grass stains. What is a plant dye if not, essentially, a "grass stain"? (Although I have washed some of my own plant dyed socks, some regularly and repeatedly, in the washer with common laundry detergents and noticed little to no color change. Still, I wouldn't recommend it.)
I repeatedly rinse the dyed yarns until the water runs clear or nearly so, with a final soak in Eucalan. Still, some yarns are dyed with powders or are dyed directly in the dyepot with the plant material or dyestuff and so may still have minimal amounts of plant or dye material adhered to the yarn and that may continue to wash out for a few washings or so, but which should not noticeably affect the color of the yarn. If I believe this is the case with a particular yarn, I will indicate so in the listing. I think I've now found a strainer that will eliminate any residues, for the most part, in the future. Who hasn't seen a store bought garment at one point or another release some of its dye in the first washing or two?
I can only photograph each skein as closely as possible to its actual color and, whenever possible, for reference, will show each skein in relation to other skeins dyed around the same time. Besides, doesn't nearly every website out there have a disclaimer, too, about how color can vary from monitor to monitor?
As of yet, I haven't come up with any clever or cute packaging or nice labels, but that just doesn't seem reason enough to prevent me from finally offering last spring and summer's worth of yarns up for sale at this time.
Besides, I can't knit all this stuff up myself, now, can I? And, now that things are finally greening up and growing again around here, I'm itching to pull out the dyepots and I can hardly justify dyeing anymore yarn without letting the rest go.
In some ways, I'm glad to still have had all these yarns here together in one place so that they could all be spread out and photographed. All together, they make for some awfully pretty pictures, if I do say so myself.
I'd love to hear any feedback you may have to share and, although I cannot take orders for particular colors, at least not at this time, I'd also like to hear about your color preferences and what you'd like to see here. This is where more of my past dyeing adventures are blogged. I'm hoping to try some new plants and purchased dyestuffs in the coming seasons, including Indigo, in particular.
So. Here we go. The shop is open. Enjoy poking around there and I hope you see or find something there that you like!
I've been adding yarns since yesterday and will continue adding them today until they're all listed.
And then it's back to the dyepot!