Merino/Angora/Alpaca blend yarn is 60% merino (extremely soft wool), 20% angora (bunny rabbits - they're shorn, like sheep are), and 20% alpaca. It is commercially spun,
so I receive it as 8 oz. skeins, usually white, but now I also have
had a batch of light grey spun, which made the blues, greens and
grey color combination possible. I wash, mordant (that's what makes
the dye color fast) and then dye it, using the same natural dyes
I've always gotten such wonderful colors from. Many of the colors
I ply together, changing one color at a time, putting in different
amounts of color, so the stripes will be different widths. The other
way I put the colors together, is to keep one color the same for
the whole skein and just keep changing the second color, this makes
the stripes more subtle. Either way, you still have a choice of
the brighter shades, or the quieter colors. Also the amount of contrast
between each 2 color combination will make a lot of difference in
the overall brightness/quietness of the yarn. For yarn with the
full rainbow, the amounts and shades of red and yellow are also
a major factor of the overall bright or quiet look.
Dyes:
cochineal = rose red/pink
cochineal with a bit of madder = red/coral
osage orange/cochineal = orange
osage orange sawdust = yellow
onion skins/indigo = dark green
osage orange/indigo = light green
indigo = blue
logwood with a bit of cochineal and indigo = purple
Alum and
Tartaric Acid Mordant:
Since natural dye molecules are too large to penetrate the wool
fiber and become a permanent part of the yarn, the color must be
fixed in another way. The mordant sticks to the fibers and combines
with the dye molecules, making a permanent bond with the yarn. I
also get different colors by dyeing grey yarn, in addition to the
white yarn.
All fiber grown and processed in the U.S.
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