At the Dye Pot

I got the dye pot fired up yesterday, after several weeks of inactivity. We had a prolonged lambing season and somehow I managed to get myself signed up for 6 different craft venues in 7 days last week. Argh.

My dye pot is actually a 20 gallon soup pot:

I would prefer a pot with a spigot for easy draining, but the restaurant supply places I visited said these are no longer being made as they were prone to leaks and to contamination.

So I make do. You can see a hose on the left side of the picture and I use that to fill the pot. Just outside the range of the picture on the left is a laundry tub. I use a pail to get the pot almost empty, then tip the pot into the laundry tub. It's a heavy pot, but manageable.

I dye 8 four ounce skeins at a time. The pot would hold more, but eight allows each skein to have its own lateral space which generally gives me a more even result.

Here's the batch of Prochem Raspberry Sorbet I did at half strength). I'll do another batch at full strength and a third batch at about 1/8 strength.

I dinked with the photo colour a little and its still not true on my monitor. It's less 'Barbie' than this.

Before getting this 20 gallon pot I used 20 quart pickle canning pots. You can see one sitting on the floor to the right of the dye stove. I got a bunch of these pots cheap but you get what you pay for. A dozen or so batches of yarn and the pot starts to pit and eventually leak.

I like my dyed yarn or fibre to cool in its own dye bath. One advantage of the smaller pots was that I could lift the pot off the stove and start another batch in a different pot. The big pot is too heavy so I must wait for it to cool. So - I can do one larger batch a day, or three smaller batches.

What I really love about the big pot is I that a dye lot of 8 skeins is plenty for a sweater, while with the pickle pots it was always a challenge to get two batches even enough and close enough to be one lot.

The stove I use is a propane fired stock pot stove. It can do 125000 BTU which is a whack of heat. You can't see, but I have a ventilation hood over the stove (high enough up that I don't bash my head on it) and also a fresh air inlet (barely visible at the top right of the second pic). The inlet looks like a dryer vent but it has a little damper-gate in it and the switch for the damper is linked to the switch on the fan. So as soon as I turn the fan on this little gate opens and admits air from outside. The inlet is about a foot from the stove.

You can see a fireproof cement wallboard, painted black, behind the stove. This is so the plastic drain pipes don't melt!

No Sock Sunday

I didn't get any socks made on Sunday ;o(

I did get the new Lorna's wound into to balls ready for knitting, and dug through my stash for something else to match with Firefly.

My sheep are ready to moved to a new pasture which I will do post blogging this morning - always a little tricky with young lambs at foot. After that...... more sock making!