It happens in three's

This was a lovely 3-day weekend, which showed the conclusion of a 3-session class, and the success in dyeing 3 acid-dyed batches of fiber (4th one might not have gone so well - should have stopped at three!).

First, let's look at the photos from the third and final session of the Intro to Natural Dyeing with Kristine of A Verb For Keeping Warm. This class was on how to wash out your dyed fibers properly - a subject that is often glossed over in books. Kristine focused us on how to do this with a minimal of water usage (yay!) and with a minimal of back-ache (double-yay!).
Over the course of the class, we dyed with pomegranate, quebracho red, madder, madder with Cream of Tartar, madder with Soda Ash, cutch, logwood, and logwood grey. We washed, and we hung stuff out to dry. You know you're in a bad way when you start seriously coveting a person's drying racks.

Here is our stuff, waiting to be washed. Some of it looked rather, well, vile in the jars. I thought the pomegranate looked kind of like slime mold, all muddy yellow and slimy looking. Iew. Thank goodness it washed out better than it looked in the jar!

Some of my stuff is on the table as well. I brought in the stuff I dyed with madder and quebracho green as a show-n-tell. It was just fascinating to see how my madder-dyed wool turned out so very, very different from the ones we dyed in class. See what different water will do for (or more to the point, to) you?

That's Nannysknits of Snicklefritz hanging up some of our stuff.
And sixineverycolor (ravelry ID) examining what we did
Isn't that purple just amazing? The purple is logwood. Also on the rack is quebracho red (that pinkish color on the very top row), pomegranate (the palest color you see in the upper left-hand corner), cutch (next to the pomegranate and just slightly darker), and madder with cream of tartar and soda ash (much to our surprise, we couldn't tell the difference betwen the ones that included cream of tarter and the ones that included the soda ash - those are the darkish brown ones to the right of the photos)
And throughout it all, we had excellent supervision.
Sorry for the bluriness of that last photo. Getting Cleo to stay still is tricky! All in all, much fun was had by all, and I am anxious to get more fibers mordanted so I can play with some of the dyes I brought home.

Natural dyeing is fun, but I want to explore the world of acid dyes as well. While there may be fewer steps to acid dyeing, I am actually finding it more difficult to get the colors I intend at the end of the day. For example, this ball of roving, while quite pretty, was supposed to be one color. Just one. Not two. One.
I talked it over with some folks who were chemistry majors in college and we're thinking that the different dyes are attaching to the wool at different temperatures. The pot is heating and cooling too quickly for all the colors to attach at their preferred temperatures. I've got some plans on how to fiddle with that, and we'll see how it goes. I tried reheating that 4th batch and it got to a rolling boil, so I'm afraid it may be a total loss. I've got it drying on the rack now, and the roving strips all came apart just fine so perhaps it is ok. I'll know when it dries, and I do hope it worked out ok 'cause it came out the most amazing kelly green! Granted, it was supposed to be more of a rich blue-purple...