Painted Roving

I got a book from the library about colors and spinning, and in it was a tutorial for painting rovings!  I had some lying around and I saw a beautiful yarn on etsy, but it was a bit too expensive, and there wasn't enough of it (I need 400 yards to make much of anything really on the loom).  I save a photo of it and decided to try and make my own kind of like it!

I ordered RIT powder dye from joanns.com, they have a good price at $2.29 a box, and there was a coupon for free shipping, so I got a bunch of them for like $15.

There are a ton of tutorials for painting rovings online, it's super easy!  It takes a little time, but you don't even really need any special equipment.

I used three colors.  Fuschia, rose and tan.  Rose and tan were both 'tints' instead of dyes, so they were less concentrated anyways.  It made less work for me, but if you want to get your money's worth out of the dyes you could just buy the actual dyes and water them down.  But when they're only $2.29 a box it's hardly worth it anyways.

This is four ounces of fiber, and I used a little bit less than half of each packet of powdered dye to dye this much.


You can kind of see that mine ended up a liiiiitle bit felted.  It happened when I was washing the dye out.  I really need to invest in a bag that I can wash fibers in, since it was a little bit too much agitation when having to change the water a lot to get the dye out.  In the end I left it with a liiiitle bit of dye still, and I'll just wash it more once it's been made into yarn.  I'll just have to deal with it dyeing my fingers a little bit when I spin it!