Natural Dye Workshop 4
Posted 6/19/2008 4:44pm by Eugene Wyatt.
Dyes, utensils & resources
The Catskill Merino Natural Dye Syllabus describes how, using natural colors, we dye yarn on the farm. The history of natural dyeing is fascinating and I will make reference to it occasionally, but our focus here is to show you how we dye yarn so you can begin dyeing it too.
Osage Heather
This is a 2 oz. skein of heather merino yarn over dyed with Osage Orange. This dye is available from Earthues, a supplier of natural dyes, and they also offer a booklet that I highly recommend called the Earthues Natural Dye Instruction Book by Michele Wipplinger, the founder of Earthues. 
Pictured above on our dye table are a balance and dye extracts weighed out on coffee filters.
You will need an accurate method to weigh the dye extracts to 0.1 gram. We use a triple beam balance like this one available from Scales-n-Tools
You will need stainless steel pots. A good place to find them is a local used restaurant equipment dealer. We got several good used 20 qt. ss pots locally at a reasonable price.
But we needed larger pots too, and those were hard to come by used; I found a 100 qt. ss pot (20” in diameter & 20” high) online at Kitchen Fantasy. To heat a 100 quart pot (weighing 208 lbs when full + the weight of the pot) you need a sturdy propane burner and that I found online at Louisiana Lagniappe designed to be used for big crawfish cookouts.
The Catskill Merino dye studio is as big as all outdoors, and as colorful. Here is a Kitchen Fantasy 100 qt. ss pot on a Louisiana Lagniappe 105,000 btu burner. Note the garment rack (sans wheels) over the pot to hang the dyed yarn when it is pulled from the dye bath.
To dye one or two skeins on your stove top you won’t need equipment like this; but you should use non-reactive pots, either stainless steel or enamel and never use pots of iron or aluminum as these metals influence the colors. You can get around buying a triple beam balance by using measuring spoon weight equivalents (charted by color and intensity) specified in the Earthues Natural Dye Instruction Book.
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