My God Given Mission Field

Yarn Process pt. 2

by ALI on OCTOBER 12, 2011

The next step in making a one of a kind yarn, is carding and dyeing. For years I had a pair of hand carders. Hand carders are fun to use, but it takes quite a bit of time to get enough rolags made to actually spin up a good amount of yarn. Now I use a Louet Jr. drum carder. Boy does that make a difference!

Now that I have my mini batts, it is time to get the dye pots going. With this particular suffolk yarn, I used a natural dye process. This time around I used Marigolds and Turmeric. Since we had an abundance of marigolds blooming this year, it was the perfect time to make yellow yarn. I had my kids go through our garden area and front yard, and pick as many marigolds as they could.

Next we picked the flowers apart and removed as much of the green stems as possible. The flowers were then put into a pot with enough water to cover the flowers. Marigold stew!

After I had our beautiful Marigold stew ready to cook, I turned on the stove and let the flowers simmer until the water was a nice yellow color. Then I strained the liquid from the flowers and placed the yellow dye water into canning jars. Next I added about a tablespoon of salt to each jar. Then it was time to squish all of that lovely wool roving into the jars.

After stuffing the wool in, I filled the jars about two inches from the top with hot tap water. Then put in a couple of glugs of vinegar, filling it to the necks of the jars. I gave it a good stir making sure that the vinegar was dispersed through out the jar, and then placed the jars into a big pot filled with water. The jars were then placed inside the pot of water, and the whole thing was boiled for an hour. Just like you would water bath can.

After an hour, the wool is pulled out, rinsed, wrung in a dry towel, and laid out flat to dry. The end results are amazing! (the red in the picture is not red from the marigolds. I actually squirted a few squirts of food coloring in with the marigold dye and got the red orange effect.)

When the wool is dry, the fun part begins! The dry wool was ran through the drum carder again, and then spun up on my Ashford spinning wheel. After the yarn was spun, and twist was set, my beautiful yarn was finished!

Roving ready to be spun

Finished yarn “sunburst”

There are lots of beautiful yarns for sale on Etsy, and there are also many stores that sell fiber ready to be spun into your own yarn. You can even see our small selection of hand spun yarns in our etsy store.