Experiments dying with Procion

Experiments dying with Procion

I brought three Procion dyes and Citric Acid fixer from DT Crafts @ the Knitting & Stitching show in Harrogate in November. The colours that I purchased were my favourite autumn colours: -

• Dark Brown


• Orange Scarlet


• Lemon Yellow

Using the instructions that cane with the dyes and the book – “Hand-dyed Yarn Craft Projects” by Debbie Tomkies (who turned out to be the proprietor of DT Crafts!) I put the following instructions together.

I used the Jacob’s Ram fleece that Pat from the spinners Guild gave me. It was previously scouted to remove the grease and was a beautiful snow white.

Pre soak in fixer

Measure the following

25g salt
25g citric acid crystals
3litres of hot water

Put the water in a plastic bowl (I used the old baby bottle steamer) and add the salt and citric acid. Mix until the salt and Citric acid have dissolved.

Weigh 100g of fleece. Tease it out to form rough rovings, coil and add to the fixer solution. Gently push the rovings under the fixer solution. Cover and leave for 1 hour.

Preparing the dye solutions

Measure out 1g of each dye into plastic pots (I used the milk pots I used for Lily’s milk as they have good fitting lids and are clear) – my scales could not measure 1g, so I used the smallest measure spoon and used a level measure of dye. Add 100ml of water, slowly to allow mixing. Label each pot clearly with the dye colour and the date in case they are stored.
Once the fleece had soaked for an hour, it was squeezed gently to remove the excess fixer. Cling film was laid out and fleece was spread out evenly. Taking the tablespoon measuring spoon, the dye was spooned out onto the roving, each colour in turn. Once the three colours had been added the roving further was wrapped further in cling film and rolled it up to encourage the dye to spread evenly amongst the fleece. Other rovings were put in plastic bags, dye solution added and closed ejecting all the air. Once all of the dye was used the resulting packages were put in the plastic bowl (baby bottle steriliser) and microwaved for 6 minutes in 1-minute intervals.

Once cooled back to room temperature the packages were open in a sink of water and the fleece carefully rinsed. Finally there were hung up to dry.