At the Burrow DyeTable #Four: Forbidden

I have to apologize for my oversights, my rushing.  I like to suss things out.  To dig in up to my elbows for a bit, and then stand back and think on things before I jump back in the middle again.  But this requires time, and life has other ideas about what I’m supposed to be doing.   I rarely find the long, meandering swaths of hours that it requires for me to fully go deep into the Fetch and dance with my creative mojo.  Instead I have to steal minutes here and there and I end up hurrying through steps I’d rather linger over.  I forget my camera.  I forget my notebook.   I lose the flowing narrative and instead piece together fragments and partial thoughts and hope for poetry.

So it was when I dyed with forbidden rice.

This bag of black rice had been sitting in my pantry for months waiting for me.  I finally stole a moment for it.  Haphazard.  Slapdash.  Hardly the way one should treat something forbidden.  But that’s how it happened, and that’s what I must own.

Dye Notes:

Dyestuff:  Forbidden rice

Part used:  The grains of rice

Sourec:  Whole Foods bulk bin

Ratio of dyestuff to fiber:  412g of rice to 38g of fiber; just under 11:1 ratio.

Yarn:  Catnip Yarns Kona Superwash Worsted   38g, mordanted with 8% aluminum potassium sulfate and 7% cream of tartar.  I’m not usually a big fan of superwash, because the processes used to make yarn superwash are typically not terribly sustainable, and they frequently over-process the wool and make it lose its character.  This yarn, however, is absolutely scrummy.  It is super, super, super soft and has a beautiful sheen.  Absolutely lovely.  I don’t know how they did it, but next time I need superwash, it will be Kona for sure.

Extraction:  I soaked the rice in tapwater overnight (about 10-12 hours).  Pretty much just like I’d do black beans.  Didn’t measure pH.  Gasp!

Dyebath:  I strained out all the rice through a colander and reserved the liquid.  It didn’t seem to have as much particulate in it as black bean juice does, so I did not bother with ladling the liquid off the top of the bowl and instead used all of it.  I put the dyebath and yarn in a stainless steel bucket and left it outside.

After roughly 40 hours, I rinsed the skein in plain water and hung it to dry.

The results?  A colour I like to call Sickly Lavendar.  Or Lavendar Lite.  Or Maybe One Day I’ll Grow Up and Become A Real Lavendar!

It’s got a couple spots that lean toward blue.  The overal colour is a little mottled, which actually makes the effect more interesting, I think.  After doing this experiment, I went on Ravelry and did a search to see if anyone has played with black rice.  A few people talked about it, but I only saw one actual result, and it was a very pretty deep lavendar-blue.  The difference?  She didn’t treat it like black beans at all—-she simmered hers!  Clever!  I’m thinking about getting more rice and either overdyeing this skein or dyeing a new skein with the hot technique to see the difference.

It’s been fun these last months playing with dyes from foodstuffs.  It makes me look at everything I eat with an eye for the potential dye hidden under the surface…

Live happy, dye happy!