Wednesday, October 24, 2007

All new Coffee Yarn

The majority of the yarn I was dyeing was superwash merino. I also threw in a few little samples of a few other yarns. The one on the left is tencel, the second one is rayon chenille, and the rest in this picture are various kinds of cotton. None of these were very receptive to this dye process, which I knew about the cotton and had suspected about the tencel. I didn't have any samples around of coffee on these in my dye notebook, so wanted to make a few for that, even though I was pretty sure how they would turn out. If I had done it at about 500% WOG, it would have been darker, but it isn't as wash and light fast as wool.
These three samples are a cotton/viscous blend, a cotton /rayon slub blend, and a cotton silk blend. The silk took it fairly well, but not as dark as the wool did. I am looking forward to the silk wool blend I am dyeing next week. I strongly recommend you click on each of these pictures to get a larger view. I want to try dyeing some bamboo and other "vegan" yarns with coffee. Just because I am into the "learning about stuff" thing.

So here you have a view of coffee dyed merino. Much prettier than cotton. You will notice the slightly darker spot on the twisted skein. That is why I refer to this as a "mostly solid" colorway.
Coffee Yarn in action. Who knew frogs liked to nest in yarn? I thought they just liked to dig holes in the garden or hang out in the garage.
Or that frogs drink out of cups?

8 comments:

  1. Do the yarns smell as amazing as they look?

    Yummy!

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  2. That looks gorgeous! Such a pretty combination of brown. I had no idea that coffee could produce such a rich color!

    BTW, I love the frogs. ;-)

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  3. That is the most incredibly beautiful colorway I've ever seen...I absolutely love the color tones!! Thank you so much for sharing your amazing dying process with us - it really was neat to be able to "see" it through your photos. I still want to buy some of that lovely yarn from you ;) And I LOVE that you used the yarn in the cup as your photo on your blogger profile!!! It is adorable! I love the way that skein goes from a dark coffee color to a light "latte" shade....beautiful!! You are such a talented lady!

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  4. GREAT color!
    I'm not even a coffee fan, but I may just try dying my own yarn if I could get results like that...

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  5. "Vegan" yarns will come out a lot like cotton & linen. They're all cellulose, just of different micro- structures. So the chemistry is the same. But a different mordant (acid probably) might make coffee work. Or actually boiling, rather than not quite simmering.
    [Arthur]

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  6. yummmeh! It's beautiful--can I fondle it? :D

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  7. Beautiful yarn! I've never dyed before, but I signed up to do some natural dyeing as part of the Harry Potter Knitting & Crochet Cup on Ravelry. I think I'm going to use your method. Thanks for the tutorial! :-)

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  8. hey! i found this post via google, and now i'm going to try dying some yarn with coffee. i'm a student and i'm studying apparel design. thanks!

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