The Twilight Cone
How to turn a cone into multiple skeins for dyeing
Grey Cone of 1-lb Doom
I was walking passed a yarn shop and failed my savings throw. Currently we’re still in a pandemic so while there were not exactly many customers in the shop, the last customer before me had just returned this one grey cone and I thought… I can do something with this. It comes from the Custom Woolen Mills Ltd in Alberta and is in their Prairie Sea Fusion line, developed in partnership with Salish Fusion Woolworks. It’s a bulky weight, designed with the Coast Salish knitting community in mind.
Goal: Create four roughly equal skeins to dye with.
Links to learn more about the wool used for this project:
Prairie Sea Fusion 100% Wool Yarn - Sheep Shade Cones (customwoolenmills.com)
In this case, my goal was also two-fold. For the weaving project, I wanted to keep some of the grey starting colour but I also wanted to make three additional colours. So total: four skeins. I decided to make them all equal is size which makes the later mordant and dye calculations so much easier and means I don’t need to track each specific skeins through the individual dyeing process.
Aside: I also knew I wanted to set myself the challenge of dyeing three different colours using only onion skins. See the Onion Skin Glory post for the results.
Step 1: Weigh the Cone
The cone came out to roughly 470 grams. I figured the cardboard cone itself weighs about 30 grams. So the wool was likely about 440 grams. Each skein therefore needs to be about 110 grams (440 / 4 = 110 grams).
Step 2: Taylor your Swift
I set up my swift, put the cone on the scale and wound on until the scale got down to about 330 grams. If you don’t have a swift, you can use the back of a chair, turn a chair upside down and use the legs, I’ve also used a cupboard door, etc. Anything sturdy you can wind the yarn around that won’t crumple and you can pull the skein off afterwards.
Step 3: Tie off each skein for dyeing
Each skein was then tied loosely in a figure eight at each quarter (i.e., at 3,6,9 and 12 o’clock). This reduces tangling and makes the whole process more straight forward.
Step 4: Repeat proceed for each skein
I followed the same process for the next three skeins.
Step 5: Last skein
Finally with the last skein is wound off the cone. Then the kids proceed to use the cone as a spyglass and fight over it tooth and nail until it disappears into the recycling box.
There we go! The advantage of creating equal skeins is that you don’t have to keep track of the weights of individual skeins as you move forward with the dyeing. You know the weight of each, which tells you the weight of each mordant to use and the dyes as well. Dyeing rations are all based on the amount of fiber you’re using. Maybe a topic for a future blog post.
