Testing the tea (dye).

Since I am going to Dallas (briefly) I thought I'd try some dyeing and take the samples to leave for next month's class.  I hoped to have a pile of knitted blanks to leave, but have had issues with tensioning the loom.  I've also decided to give people half-skein blanks, about 98-100 yards of yarn, instead of a full one, because it might take too long for people to paint a full-sized one.

Speaking of blanks, one of my sample dyes is a blank and a hank, dyed the same (half in one shade of green and half in another), to show how differently the resulting yarn will work:

However, the main plan was to refresh my ability with tea-dyeing.  In theory it is simple: make a BIG pot of tea, add yarn, and simmer.

I managed to goof it up in the beginning by (1) putting in too many skeins, crowding the slow-cooker I am using, and (2) adding the tea bags and yarn at the same time.

The result was VERY spotty, so I pulled out the yarn, drained much of the water back into the pot, added some fresh tea bags with the spent ones, and allowed it to become tea before returning the yarn.  The end result was still a bit streaky, but not as badly:

The above photo has a hank of the original colour under and to the left of each dyed hank.  The blue and tan came out much closer in colour than I expected.  Even though they are not perfect, it's a learning experiment, and I took notes, and that's also part of what I am teaching the students.

I was able to get a couple more slow cookers, so opened to the waiting list but with an absolute cap of eighteen.  When I last year, there are seventeen registered for the class.  Wow!!