Last year I bought myself a Electric Eel Wheel from Dreaming Robots and several months into using it, I felt good enough about my ability to spin consistently to start tackling some color techniques. I quickly came across tutorials on a technique called fractal spinning and decided to test it out with my Paradise Fiber Club packages. This spin is using 3 out of the 4 colors I received in October of 2023.
Fractal spinning basically entails splitting your fiber supply in half, spinning one half in a color pattern you like, and the other half split into smaller repeats of the first half’s color pattern. Plying the two (or more) spools together creates a beautiful effect that, in my opinion, really showcases the chosen color palette in an interesting way. The most broken down repeats of the whole color pattern, the softer the striping effect when knit or crocheted will appear. Here’s a good tutorial on fractal spinning.
For this spin, I did one whole pattern of orange, purple, and blue and three repeats of that pattern in the second half. I had equal amounts of the orange and purple fiber, and a smaller amount of the blue. Here’s what came off the bobbins:
This can be done with a hand dyed braid by manually separating and weighing parts of the fiber based on colors. Here’s a fractal style spin I did from a carded bat where I had to manually separate the colors.
I often hear people bemoan the musky scent of marigolds.
Sometimes when I’m plucking a basketful of their dense, cheerful blooms I can almost understand. Every breath I take feels thick with their earthy perfume and I can feel every particle of pollen adhering to my nasal passages like iron filings to a magnet.
I can’t join the marigold haters club however, because not only have marigolds adorned many of my warm memories of youth, they’re the first flower I ever used to naturally dye wool.
Feeling deliciously witchy on a hot summer afternoon, I brewed that first vat of dyestuff from a basket of bedraggled blossoms. As I lowered a hank of handspun wool into the amber-colored water, the world of gardening opened up again, revealing another layer of this connection to plants that I have felt since I was a child.
With every skill I learn, every book I read, and every new plant I meet, the excitement renews. I’m a kid again, squatting in front of my mother’s marigolds without a care in the world.
I will never get tired of this, I think.
How to Prepare and Dye Wool with Marigolds
To dye wool with marigolds (or coreopsis, or dyer’s chamomile- which I often blended together) you’ll need at least a pint of blooms. You can pluck them as they’re passing their prime and either steep them into dye immediately or freeze them for later. I even had good results after leaving that first basket of flowers to languish on the porch for a day before steeping them.
Before the mordanting, washing wool with wool wash is a good idea to strip any remaining “grease” (lanolin) that could prevent the dye from adhering to the fiber. I used a few drops of dish soap here, but it’s better to use a soap made for wool like Unicorn Power Scour.
Wool (as well as silk) are readied for dye in a process called mordanting. The word mordant comes from the Latin word “modere” which means “to bite”. Essentially you’re using a mordant to rough up the fibers and give them some “bite” to grab onto the pigment. An easy mordant to start with is alum combined with cream of tartar.
Silk uses the same mordant, but in smaller amounts. Cotton can be dyed without mordant, but is usually pre washed with washing soda to prepare the fibers to take up pigment better.
From there, the mordanted wool can either be rinsed and dried for later dyeing or put straight into a prepared dye bath where it’s heated to a simmer and then left to cool in the pot. It’s important to never stir or rapidly warm/cool wool during these processes, as it is prone to felting. Drop it in the pot, then leave it be!
My first three attempts at both hand spinning and dyeing wool
Making dye baths would become a weekly activity after that first pot, and I quickly dyed my way through all of my shoddily spun hanks of yarn, working from the worst to my more skilled attempts. By the end of fall, my cheerful marigolds had mildewed and my freezer was stuffed with frozen blooms for a future midwinter dye pot. I made a knitted basket out of that first hank which I still beam at every day. If you’re not a spinner, you can buy undyed yarn very affordably here.
Growing a Dyer’s Garden at Home
This year’s dye garden will be more robust with options and I have been accumulating supplies to try other methods of using flower and plant pigments. Here’s a list of seeds I intend to plant for the 2024 season:
Marigold
Dyer’s Coreopsis
Tango Cosmos
Dahlia
Zinnia
Greenthread
Blue Butterfly Pea
Black Knight Scabiosa
Hollyhock (biennial)
Hopi Black Dye Sunflower
Purple basil (great for flower pounding)
Indigo
Japanese Indigo
Madder
Woad
Dyer’s Chamomile functions like marigolds and has the added ease of being a perennial plant in my zone 6/7 garden.
My favorite seed company for easy dye plant shopping and information is Grand Prismatic Seeds, but you can find many of these seeds elsewhere if they’re out of stock.
(This post contains some affiliate links for your convenience, these provide me with a small commission if you choose to purchase through them at no additional cost to you.)
At least, according to my Ravelry project notes, I started this pair of Monkey Socks by Cookie A. in 2017. However I’m pretty sure that I actually cast these on during a 2009 Ravelry challenge, and only added the project page during a tidying session in 2017.
That first sock is a hot mess. It very much embodies who I was in 2009. Overstretched, a bit tortured, full of noticeable mistakes, but still colorful and somewhat functional.
The 2023 sock is tidy, fits like a glove, and there isn’t a color pool to be found. There are less noticeable mistakes. I’m really proud of the 2023 sock.
Holding the two up to each other, and certainly while trying them on, it’s hard to imagine holding onto this lumpy, sad legacy sock. I thought it wouldn’t bother me to wear them, mismatched as they are.
I thought maybe I’d find it charming and special.
And perhaps it wouldn’t have bothered 2009 me, but I will tell you gentle reader, it bothers the shit out of 2023 me.
2009 sock sags with the memory of that girl, who settled for good enough, whatever checked the DONE box. I’m not picking on her, she did a great job getting from there to here…
But I will be frogging that 2009 sock, because I think that girl, and this one, deserve a matching pair of socks.
I didn’t see anything particularly inspiring, I didn’t feel any guilt about the totes of lovingly combed and dyed fiber sitting in my chilly back hallway. In fact, I forgot I had most of it!
Perhaps you, dear reader, also live with ADHD and it’s its very expensive comorbidity: hobby cycling. For me, I never really get off the cycle, some hobbies just have a Jupiteresque orbit. Apparently spinning yarn on a drop spindle needed to marinate in my noodle for a decade or so.
As you might imagine, it started out a bit rough, but I was happy to see not nearly as rough as those early efforts that clearly weren’t pleasurable enough to hold my interest.
The ghost of lanolin scent that puffed out of the first bag I opened must have gotten a hold on me this time, because those old spirals of brushed fleece have tangled me in their web, pun very much intended.
Here’s a photographic record of my first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth go at the 1lb bag of Blue-Faced Leister fleece I must have picked up at Rhinebeck around 2007/8.
New special interest just dropped, watch this space!
#1, #2, and #3#4 and #5The 6th hank, I felt pretty good about this one!
