Dyeing Wool with Procion Dye -- Kilt Greem, Sky Blue, Rosewood, Leaf Green

Kilt Green (Procion dye -- looks dark gray) 

Wilton's Copper and Kelly Green

Dharma offers some good instructions on how to dye wool with Procion fiber-reactive dye.  Normally you'd use acid-dyes on wool because it's a protein fiber, but the soda ash required for fiber-reactive (Procion dye) is destructive to the wool fiber.

The trick is to use salt, white vinegar, and heat in place of the soda ash, which can severely damage wool.  I did a 2-pound batch in a large pot used for canning.  I also simmered it for 2 hours, instead of the recommended 20 -30 minutes.  Then it sat in the pot overnight to cool down.  Then I spent the next few day soaking and rinsing out the excess dye, salt and vinegar, rinsing the water several times until it ran clear.

In my first experiment, I used an old jar of Kilt Green on gray-ish merino salvage strips from Pendleton 9at the bottom of the photo above).    In the dye pot, it looked blue black-- like a Raven.  Not green at all.  When the wool was washed and rinsed, it came out to be a dark gray.  Obviously much darker than the original light gray strips, but nothing I imagined to be Kilt Green.

Won't this look lovely with a few Granny Smith apple green strips as accents?
Or maybe a clasped-weft with bight on one side and dark on the other?

The second time, I used up a jar of 10-year old Sky Blue.  7 teaspoons seemed about right for 2 pounds of wool strips.  When the pot had cooled, the water was just a pale blue, very nearly clear -- I've never ever seen fiber reactive dye exhaust like acid dyes do--until today.  Even the rinsing was easy.  And the color appears to be staying on the fiber. 

Then I tried some old pre-mixed colors-- Rosewood (above) and Leaf Green (below).

The Leaf Green has a bluish cast to it.  Very nice!  I did one pot of the woolly worms, and one pot with a large skein of yarn for wool warp.  This cone of rug warp appears to have some sizing on it -- I should have scoured it ahead of time.  I let it pre-soak in the dye pot as it was warming up.  But it was giving off an odd smell, and the water clearly had something else in it -- the starch/sizing -- before I put in the salt, vinegar and dye stock.  I kept it going, despite that additive.  It did not seem to hinder the yarn from absorbing the dye.

It's such a nice color, I wanted to try it on the woolly worms, too, to see what kind of contrasting colors I'd get.    Very nice!

This method is working out very well for imparting color to Pendleton merino wool strips, woolly worms, and wool rug warp.   I can vouch that Dharma's method here works out pretty well--even with old dye.