As you may remember I was tinkering with thickening the dye to reduce the spottiness when handpainting and help the dye adhere to the fiber so the color would take more evenly.  After some experimentation I have come up with my results.

The short answer is that 1 gram of sodium alginate dissolved for every 200 grams of water gives you a mixture that is viscous enough to stay put but flows enough the penetrate the skein.  Too thin and you get runniness and the spotty results, but too much alginate and you have a really globby mixture that just coats the fiber but doesn't allow the dye to *flow*.  And you do want a little flow, just not so much that you get mud.

For some applications the ratio of 1 gram to 100 grams water (double the previous recipe) would be great, but I found that for dyeing this is simply too thick.  It takes many extra rinses to get the thickener off the fiber and ESPECIALLY with roving the more rinses you add in the more likely you are to have real problems with felting/fulling the fiber.  With cold pour dyeing you need thinner, more concentrated dye as a rule, than with hot pour/kettle dyeing.

So yeah - when handpainting your roving or yarn, a 1:200 gram mixture of alginate to water is the ticket.  It gives the dye just enough body, without causing real difficulty with removal.

I also experimented with my techniques for handpainting.  My current custom order (which I am a few days late on thanks to backordered fiber, so that customer is getting 30% off her next custom order with me in apologies for the lateness!) calls for some very concentrated, blocky colors without much variegation, and handpainting, as a rule, creates strongly variegated colorways.  In addition to the slighly thickened dye I found that pressing the dye through with JUST the foam brush wasn't cutting it, I still wasn't getting good color penetration down to the lower levels.

So I tried the 'pour and soak' method of application, with some modifications.  Basically you pour your thickened dye down the length of the roving, parallel to the alignment of the fibers, and allow the dye to wick through the roving to saturate it and get strong color.  With unthickened dye this always leads me to a drippy mess, but I found the key to making this work for me.  Once the dye has been poured generously I THEN take my foam brush and press it through the roving, spreading it more outward than downward.  And if I pour in the valley between the two strands of roving I get a lot of wicking under the fiber, which is exactly what I need.

I basically saturate each color section with the thickened dye and make SURE it is coated through and through, leaving a 1 inch gap between colors so that the mingling is minimal, and let it sit for half an hour.  Once that half hour is up and it has cured a bit I then took paper towels and mopped up/expelled some of the dye so it wouldn't be swimming in the pot, THEN I wrapped and steamed it.

The results were strong, even solid colors with great depth (but depth with the shade, not with white spots!) and minimal bleeding between the two, which was the best of both worlds for a project like this.

The only way I can think around mopping up the dye (which sadly is wasteful, but I can't get even color distribution to my standards any other way) is to lay the roving out on a tray when I pour and then squeeze the dye out of the sections as I move it to the cellophane to be steamed.  But either method requires quite a bit of dye loss, however the results are worth it and it's maybe a few cents of waste per skein, which I can live with!

The one on the left is the "Grass Stain" colorway, which has been my most populat to date and is definitely part of one of the lines.  The one on the right is Fritz Cove, which is a Teal, Black, and Cool Red (that is much less pink in real life, the flash did funky things to it but it is a strong, true red on the cooler side of the spectrum).  Both are solid, NO white, and were handpainted with the cold pour/pour and soak/foam brush hybrid method, which I think is my new favorite.  The thickened dye did its job.

I steamed these two colorways twice to get the most adhesion of the dye I could.  One of the colors had tons of turquoise and I mentioned, previously, how much that color loves to bleed no matter what you do, so it was imperative I got it to stick as strongly as possible.

They are in the process of being rinsed, will dry later tonight, and hopefully will be off to their new home by Friday.   Oh, and the Phat Fiber samples are out the door and in the mail as of yesterday, I need to get off my busy (lazy) bum and send my banner, button, and shop blurb to Jessie for a writeup and advertising.  It's completed, I just haven't had a moment to spare to compose the email of late.  In that package and on this site I am offering 15% off any custom colorway order from February 1 - March 14.  I will be revising my front page to include links to the yarn and roving I can acquire, a field entry form to fill out instead of trying to compose an email with the requests, and hopefully an online color wheel that can be selected so that I know EXACTLY what colors you want, visually, without having additional descriptions beyond the placement.  I know monitor colors vary but I think it would be helpful to everyone if there was a standard palette we could all work with, and I would do my very best to match those shades.

So lots of exciting stuff on the horizon that I will blog about in more depth later on.  Callie is tearing apart the living room so I must take my leave! Oh, and on that note:

"I haven't touched your merino roving, mommy, why would you think that?"