Woolly Woolly

When my husband's brother & family moved to Seattle, I felt a responsibility to show them the sites, and took my sister-in-law to the Northwest's mecca of fiber, The Weaving Works in Seattle's U District. I haven't darkened their door in many years, but am so happy they are there.

I like to spin, but preparing fiber holds no thrill. I find raw wool rather icky. At the Weaving Works, I love the balls and balls of combed top, all clean and free of sticky lanolin, ready to slip right through my fingers into yarn. (I'm like that with bread too: I don't get off on the whole kneading thing, but I love risen dough.)

On this visit I made a new discovery: super-wash wool is available ready to spin! A washable handspun sweater? Could that be possible? It comes only in white, so I'd have to dye it…am I up for that? Since the last move (a decade ago) and having a kiddo, I haven't been near the spinning wheel. But among the many challenges of parenting is to bring back what got shelved during the diaper years.

At home, I dragged out my trusty old Ashford wheel, happy to find was that it was in pretty good shape. I got a quick tune-up from the wonderfully knowledgeable people at Northwest Handspun Yarns here in Bellingham. Another fine surprise was that my old fiber was in good shape, unmolested by moths and other forces of destruction. I spun my test bit of super-wash, and this and that from the old box. It felt nice to spin again, and to knit the new yarn into a hat.


My Portland sister-in-law makes marvelous sculptures from washed fleece and recycled sweaters and would like more colors, so I'd already been considering dyeing wool for her. After getting all my fiber reactive dyes & supplies, I wasn't wild about investing in a full set of acid dyes (dye for wool). Jacquard sells itty-bitty jars of dye, which are pricey per ounce, or big jars which are just plain pricey. Between craigslist and follow-up emails I found Nina at Rockport Rogue Island Farm (Rockportsheep@copper.net) who would sell me 1-ounce jars of dye, for $4/ounce. Perfect!

I was tired and grumpy the day the dye arrived. Next day was much the same, but maybe some art therapy would help? It did!

Lacking a quantity of the superwash top, I tried out what fiber I had, including some smooth butterscotch-colored top. Could I dye it without felting it into unspinnability?

The short answer is…YES!

My first step was to look for my old friend Hands-on Dyeing by Betsy Blumenthal and Kathy Kreider. It was nowhere to be found! I think I must have used the library's copy 18 years ago. Well thank you Bellingham Public Library, because they still have it. (I did find my copy of Hands-on Spinning by Lee Raven. It's of the same vintage, same series, and also outstanding.)

For my first dye run, I used an assortment of wool: some plain washed wool, some locks, some yarn, and some combed top. I soaked 50g of fiber in 400ml water, 100ml vinegar, and 2T salt. More solution would have been better. I was impatient, and this is only a test, so I didn't really wet it out for long enough.

I set up my old steamer with crumpled paper in the bottom of the steamer insert. That might not be necessary, but the holes in the pot look a little rusty.


I pasted up some Marine Blue, Sky Blue, Black, and Pink (Jacquard's color names), using a very approximate 1/8 teaspoon of dye and 25 ml of warm water. I lay the drained fiber on a rack and squirted dye solution from syringes. I mixed colors a bit, diluted now and then, and generally tried to get assorted shades of blue. On the fluffs of downy wool, the dye went on in litle spots, leaving lots of white. Is that the nature of that wool, or was it not really wet? It was easy to saturate the top.


I was impatient with the steaming too. I had to get Sparky to his art class, so I just turned off the burner after 35 minutes and let it sit while I was gone. Once I got home and rinsed the fiber, I was pleased that so very, very little dye rinsed off. Compared to the fiber-reactive dye, this stuff was stuck on with superglue. [Well not really. See below.]

Waiting for it to dry was so hard! I really wanted to know if the top would remain spinnable. I kept kind of poking and turning it, and trying to tell myself that this wasn't a smart thing to do with wet wool. Before bed I set it near a heater, protected from the cats.



Once dry, the top felt pretty good. I really really really wanted to spin it! Unfortunately, one of Sparky's friends recently got too friendly with the spinning wheel and snapped the rubber connector between the treadle and the footman. I called NW Handspun, who can get the part but don't have it in stock.

I placated myself by knitting up the dyed yarn, but that only whetted my desire. So I examined the situation and did a very funky temporary fix on the wheel. I've got a pin stuck into the dangling rubber and many wraps of thread back and forth between the rubber & pin and the screw on the treadle bar. It worked!


The top spun BEAUTIFULLY. It was just as smooth and fluffy as the un-dyed stuff. One thing I noticed is that the color on the top gets more evened out after that gentle pulling one does to fluff the fiber before spinning. Over all, the spun yarn has more consistent color than I was going for, but now I have a benchmark. The yarn looks like blue jeans: just that hue, and varying from dark to faded.

My goal is yarn which has color variation, but doesn't knit up stripey. Narrow diagonal stripes of color on the top might work. I like 3-ply yarn, which homogenizes the color as well.

(Note to me: a yard of that top is about 9g, from which I got 8 yards of 3-ply, approximately worsted weight.)

And here is the yarn all knit up. On the left, dyed yarn, and on the right yarn spun from dyed top.


And about that dye sticking like superglue...I was fooled. Once that dyed top became a knitted sample, look how it ran!


Maybe the dye didn't run before because there wasn't much agitation? I dunno. In the second and third rinses the water was clear. The sample made from dyed yarn didn't run like this.

P.S. I was delayed in posting this because random words started typing themselves on the screen, such as That will When Dwight and what was The are all that only neo. What is this? Some strange virus? Who is Dwight? We ran the full 3-hour virus scan, and all was well. We then noticed a leetle teeny window on the screen, and realized that somehow speech recognition had gotten switched on!