Playing in the Dye Pots

This past September I purchased a wonderful fat quarter of hand dyed wool from Kris Miller.  My intentions were to immediately come home and try to dye some using that color as my standard.  Well, life got in the way and it is now 6 months since purchasing that pretty yellow-green wool.

What lit the fire under my dye pot was my hooker friend Shari who said she was making more of a yellow-green for a rug she was working on.  So she inspired me to dust off my dye pots and finally try to duplicate the green before I weakened and used the piece up in a project.

So with about 1/3 yard of two different pieces of wool I used 1/16 t. bronze, 1/16 t. olive green and 1/32 nugget gold dye in 1 cup boiling water.  This is the pot shortly after submersing the wool.

I simmered the pot for maybe an hour until most of the dye had been absorbed and put in a heaping teaspoon of citric acid.  Then, letting the pot of water cool down on it's own for a while the wool was rinsed, spun dry and dried in low heat until dry.  While I am pleased with the final results it doesn't really match the same wonderful color of wool I purchased from Kris.

Then I realized that about 2 years ago I had pulled some wools to hook a Karen Kahle rug and just might have another variation of a similar green..... upstairs I went and pulled the basket off the shelf which has the pattern and wools selected to hook the pattern.  So while my dye job today wasn't successful in duplicating the exact same color, you can see that the wool I had coveted and was holding for a special Karen Kahle design is closer.  And thankfully when I did that dye job a few years ago I put a tag on it which tells me how I can reproduce this one again.. YIPPEE.  It is Emma Lou's #50 Brick Gold ~ I think.  har har har....... just under my note of #50 Brick Gold I have 3 question marks.  So guess I won't know what those question marks mean until I try Emma Lou's recipe once again.  But I've plenty of yellow-green to last me for a while.