At last, I have finished spinning the five pounds of yarn I will need for my next blanket project! This time, it will be plenty long, because I measured the bed and allowed for shrinkage and tucking in. It will be woven double-width, so the width of the loom limits the width of the blanket to about 82 inches after washing/fulling. Good thing we have a double bed.
I’ll be using some black yarn from Judy’s Black Welsh Mountain sheep, some gray yarn from our Rufus blended with a purchased merino cross light gray fleece, and some white yarns that will be dyed with acid dyes. Yesterday, I gathered up my courage and dyed the yarns. There were 12 skeins to be dyed turquoise (Aussie Landscapes dye called “Ice”) and 7 to be dyed a light tan (Judith Mackenzie’s “worker brown”. I even tested the dyes on small skeins I’ll use to weave a sample on the table loom. Things went ok, except that the brown was a bit dark and I was not sure why. I decided to make the dye bath about 1/4 strength to keep the final dye light. But the math wasn’t easy, and things did not look right. I was getting nervous, wondering if I have forgotten how to do basic arithmetic. Finally I understood the problem: one set of dyes work on a 10% basis, meaning dye powder is weighed out at 10% of the fiber weight. The other set are weighed at 1%. So yes, I had missed a decimal point, but it was because the dyes are different.
Here are the results:
