This Week in the Dye Studio: Mermaid

Posted by Kristine Vejar on January 18, 2013 2 Comments

I've had the glory of spending a lot of time in the dye studio this week. I am under a deadline for an upcoming show which has given me the perfect excuse to ignore tidbits like bookkeeping. 

One colorway that is particularly hard to make is Mermaid. It takes concentration and time. Those 2 ingredients have been hard to come by in the last couple years - thus, the reason why this colorway has not graced the shelves of Verb very often. This week, I decided to buckle down and focus on Mermaid.



This first photo is of one of our sinks in the dye studio. Here I am painting the skeins of yarn with two dye solutions; one made of logwood and acacia. The other made of fustic and acacia. Now the trick of dyeing this, is that both colors, in this state look nearly the same. Though, as you will see in a moment, with the addition of heat and time, one of these two browns will turn into green. Well, it will as long as I have mixed it properly. There are days, that is doesn't. That means no Mermaid.

So once I painted this skein, I placed the yarn in a large pot and heated it for an hour. As the yarn and dye heats, voila, the color changed as I hoped from brown to green. I take the yarn from the heat and let it cool and rest for a day or so, and then I dipped into the indigo vat, adding the blue color.

Here is a photo of the yarn resting in a bucket, where it will be for the next week or so before it is finally washed, dried, and then labelled for the shop.

Till next week
-Kristine 

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